New Hampshire town goes all out to help frogs, salamanders make it to breeding pools
By Margaret Hetherman May 11 at 2:00 PM Wood frogs lie frozen in suspended animation. Salamanders wait below the frost line for the signal to return where they were born. A trifecta of thawing ground, favorable temperature and rain cues them to emerge and migrate to vernal pools for nights of communal courtship and explosive breeding.
Thelen obsessively monitors weather and keeps a Five-Day Salamander Forecast on the center’s website. This year’s first big amphibian migration probably took place in the wee hours of April 8 while folks were slumbering. Fortunately, migrations happen over multiple nights, and on April 12, after some nail-biters, conditions finally looked promising for action during human waking hours.
Since 2007, volunteers trained by the Harris Center have shepherded about 43,000 creatures across roads in the Monadnock Region of southwestern New Hampshire. Other programs exist across the country, some in warmer locales that swung into action earlier than Keene. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area shuts down River Road to protect breeding amphibians; East Brunswick, N.J., has the Beekman Road crossing; and outside Philadelphia is the Schuylkill Center’s Toad Detour program.
But a $347,000 price tag didn’t stop the townspeople of Monkton, Vt. After considering mortality data at one high-density crossing site, Monkton made the leap from brigades to infrastructure to assist unusual species, such as the blue-spotted salamander. Vermont was covered in ice until about 13,500 years ago, retired Vermont state naturalist Charles W. Johnson says, and the Champlain Sea covered much of the Lowlands until about 9,000 years back, adds Ray Coish, emeritus professor of Geosciences at Middlebury College. Then, allow a thousand years for a small creature to work its way up the Hudson River Valley to Monkton.
When the “Big Night” arrives in Keene, a child’s cry marks the first yellow-spotted salamander sighting of the season. “I see one, I see one.” Volunteers take photos for tracking, and Thelen thinks she recognizes one by the unique pattern of spots on its back.
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