Malabar Gliding Frog, Coorg -
It’s Superfrog! If you’d like to catch the latest blockbuster featuring an amphibious superhero, do book a ticket to the daily evening show at Coorg…where you will be entertained by a regional action flick full of romance, death-defying leaps and action sequences, and the inevitable song and rain-dance routine. Welcome to the world of the Malabar Gliding Frog, a world full of tall trees, deciduous forests and giant leaps of imagination. By day, our hero is someone who sits quietly on the treetops, legs gathered together and forefeet folded, blending into the landscape, and just like the fabled Clark Kent, draws very little attention to himself. By night, however, he becomes a webbed crusader whose trademarked stunt is to jump off the tallest trees and use the extensive webbing between his feet to glide to the next tree, often more than ten meters away. And when the first monsoonal showers arrive, presaging the wet season and whetting his appetite for company, we’re treated to his full-throated repertoire of love songs. This combination of daredevilry and lyrical effusion must be working with the fairer sex, for very soon we see him marching off to a private tryst with his heroine. When we catch up with the couple, we see that their love has borne fruit and the heroine is about to give birth. The hero now shows his bag of tricks is not empty when he manually whips up a ‘foam nest’ in the water for her eggs to incubate. This is when you realize the heroine in this tale has no need to kiss this frog on the nose, for he is her prince charming already. But that, my friends, is another fairy tale, for another day…another show!
Photograph: Amoghavarsha Story: Rajesh Ramaswamy
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