When my children and I moved to this residential village south of Manila in 1990—the year before the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo—the flora and fauna were almost bucolic.
The village had been developed in the 1980s on 600 hectares of a former mango orchard. There were so many trees that if a tree had grown in the middle of a lot, the lot buyer was required to build around it, not cut it down.
The southern gate of the village is about six kilometers from our house, and our street is a small side street parallel to one of the main avenues.
Our house is located along the rear perimeter of the village, behind which, at that time, was an expanse of open land covered with trimmed cogon grass.
Silence
Every morning, from the window of one of the two bedrooms facing the rear, we could see a carabao grazing in the land behind our house, and some meters away to the right, a tethered goat would be bleating now and then.
Aside from the bleats of the goat, the occasional barking of neighbors’ dogs and the rumbling of a few cars passing by on the street in front of our house, there was silence.
But if rain fell after dusk, the silence would be broken by a chorus of frogs noisily celebrating the downpour.
Frogs were a major part of the village’s fauna, so much so that when driving home at night, I would sometimes see a frog facing my headlights on the street.
A neighbor told me that she once found a big frog in her bathroom.
I myself have been surprised by a little frog on my window sill before it hopped away to I don’t know where. My third daughter, who likes to read about flora and fauna, informed me that it must have been a tree frog that likes to go up where other species of frogs dare not go.
Snakes, too
Frogs were not the only fauna in our village. One Sunday afternoon, a snake slithered onto the backyard lawn from the plant box, frightening my first daughter, who was visiting us with my son-in-law.
Our mixed breed dog Arlo caught the snake in his mouth and shook it in an attempt to break its neck. (Do snakes have necks?)
Then Arlo dropped the snake at my first daughter’s feet, scaring her further.
Anyway, the snake incident happened so long ago that I don’t remember what happened next. My son-in-law most probably got rid of the reptile—without harming it, I hope.
What I do remember is the gardener telling me some years ago that he discovered a long piece of snake skin in the plant box of the back fence. Since snakes shed their skin periodically, we wondered whether we had a resident snake in the backyard. But no more snake skin was found after that.
All these animal appearances happened many years ago, when the village had less houses and less people, and the air was purer.
Even before houses were built on the land behind our back fence, we no longer saw the grazing carabao and the bleating goat. They had been removed to make way for new houses for human beings.
But what I miss most of all is the chorus of frogs voicing in unison their enjoyment of water coming down from heaven.
Where have all the frogs gone?
As everywhere else in the world, the indigenous flora and fauna of this former mango orchard have gone, and the fragile balance of the ecosystem is gone, too. —CONTRIBUTED