Field Notes
Politics
White House Watch
Wildlife
Chapter Spotlight
Dispatches

Chapter Spotlight
Escort Service
The temperature was hovering at about 40 degrees, and it was raining so hard that Vermont was under a flood watch. So I began to prepare: rain pants, headlamp, flashlight. I had a very special group of clients. The escort service called—a job tonight. Otter Creek Audubon chapter board member Warren King had left the excited phone message: “The salamanders are going to move tonight!” For the past four springs volunteers have been escorting migrating salamanders and frogs across a road. Participants may get a little damp, but they save a lot of amphibians from becoming two-dimensional.

Escorting amphibians is a spring ritual for many Vermonters. Amphibians usually start emerging from their wintering forest habitats on the season’s first warm, rainy night and begin crawling toward vernal pools, where they will mate. But increasingly, roads and developments are intersecting these migration routes.

Our rendezvous spot is a dirt road in Salisbury separating upland forest from lowland swamps. Armed with flashlights, 25 volunteers scan the ground, patrolling about 200 yards of road. “People travel from many miles to help get the amphibians across,” says Jim Andrews, the Middlebury College herpetologist who first alerted the chapter to the site. As the volunteers arrive, Andrews gives each a quick identification lesson from the back of his truck.

King says there are two unusual features about the site: that more than a thousand amphibians cross on some nights, and the “remarkable species diversity”—including wood frogs, spring peepers, and American toads. Andrews says this is the only site in Vermont, maybe the Northeast, with such a large movement of four-toed salamanders, a state species of special concern.

When we pick up the animals, they’re cool and moist in our hands. “It’s kind of like picking strawberries,” says a woman. A blue-spotted salamander, another state species of special concern, climbs a crust of snow. For about seven months he and his fellow travelers have been mostly dormant. He moves deliberately. I scoop him up, walk across the road, and set him in a pile of leaves. In just three hours, the tally is impressive: 1,461 blue spotted, one four-toed, 74 spotted, 29 wood frogs, 15 spring peepers. It’s a record for blue-spotted salamanders, notes Andrews, though he adds that “there are still many amphibians yet to move.”

Besides saving amphibians, King says the project is educational. Many participants bring their children, he notes. “This is a great place to raise the profile and awareness of these species. It’s amphibian heaven.”—Gretel H. Schueller