I tell the kids to listen. We are walking along the blacktop path to our resort, passing by a murky pond about the size of a hockey rink. Thousands of frogs are singing, in chorus.
It is something they never hear in Yukon. The frogs roll through patterns, overlapping beats and rhythms. The sound is almost deafening. I stop the kids for a few seconds just to listen. I want them to remember this for their grandkids, I tell them. In a few decades all the amphibians may be gone on the planet.
They are bored, of course, and we move on. But I hope I planted a seed, a memory.
The frogs may be gone faster than that on Koh Lipe. The frogs live in a swamp area that had been illegally filled in by a developer. He had levelled a small gravel hillock and pushed many cubic yards of earth into the low-lying area to fill it last summer.
Nature had other plans. The rainy season hung on this year. The low area simply filled up again. And the frogs, likely decimated but still in uncountable thousands, made a comeback to sing another year. I like to imagine it is a chorus of 'Screw You' to the developer.
But he will be back too, no doubt. And then the island will be silent.
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