Night of the spotted salamanders - Clippings

American Forests, Spring, 2003 by Mary Woodsen

In Vermont, they call it "Big Night." Usually it comes just before income tax day, on the first rainy night when the temperature stays well above 40 degrees. That's when the spotted salamanders of northern New England put on their annual nocturnal show. By the thousands, these 8-inch-long black and yellow amphibians emerge from their wintering-over places and crawl along ancient forest paths to the vernal pools that are their ancestral spawning grounds. It's a dark, wet, slimy mass migration.

And a dangerous one. As the salamanders cross roads, many are flattened by night traffic. Others become sick or die from exposure to oil and salt on the pavement, easily absorbed through their moist skin.

Which is why each spring, Patti Smith of the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, organizes crews of volunteer salamander crossing guards. Like Minutemen equipped with flashlights instead of flintlocks, Smith's volunteers must be ready for action at short notice. At the first sign of a warm, rainy night, they wait by the phones for their marching orders to known crossing sites.

Their job: As soon as any salamander crawls onto the road, they pick it up and gingerly carry it to the other side. No hand lotion please; salamanders' skin drinks that right up. Each year, as many as 15 teams cover different locations in southern Vermont. At the more heavily traveled crossings, teams have carded as many as 600 of the wriggling little creatures in a single night. Once they make it to their destinations, the salamanders start their underwater mating dance: a roiling, wriggling, reproductive melee just below the surface.

The salamander migrations are not unique to Vermont, of course, and the Bonnyvale center (www.beec.org) is preparing a handbook on setting up crossing guard programs.

It will include training information for the salamander handlers. For example, every once in a while, crossing guards see a salamander apparently headed in the wrong direction.

"Whichever way they're pointing, we move them," said Hollis Burbank-Hammarlund, director of the Bonnyvale center and a frequent salamander crossing guard. "Generally, the salamander knows best. Maybe he's already mated and is heading back home."

The cad.--Sam Hooper Samuels