April 2013: Spring Cold -- Spotted Salamander and Wood Frogs

Spring here can have a very cold beginning and this year most of the Third Pond was ice covered on April 1, but a spotted salamander made the most of it. I last saw salamanders here as the pool dried under the hot July sun.

The salamander hatchlings outlined the adult better than the pollywogs, but wading raccoons ate them all. Many grew fast enough between April and July to walk away from certain death. Proved not by my seeing them but by the April return to the vernal pool of that seven inch beast yellow spots and all.

Salamanders spend the winter under the leaf and bark litter in the woods and then when the snow melts they head for vernal pools to lay eggs, and mate too I suppose, not that I’ve ever seen that. That temperature of that water the salamander swims in is just above the freezing point. Perhaps those many suns on its skin propel it through the cold spring. It hardly looks like it’s swimming. In the video the salamander lumbers and disappears under the ice looking more dutiful than love-seeking as if obeying a Biblical injunction to return to the pool of its birth, though it was heading to the edge of the ice where we saw another salamander lurking.

One July I saw an adult spotted salamander in the woods, quite dormant despite the heat,

and also got a close-up photo of its small forelimbs.

Its forelegs looked incompetent to even raise that big head. I poked it with a stick to see if it was alive. No reaction. Not until I took it on a stick to a nearby beaver pond did it, in a leisurely 10 seconds, expand alive and hide in the wet detritus at the edge of the pond. A final note, at the suggestion of our son Ottoleo who first saw the salamanders this spring, the Third Pond will now be call Spotted Salamander Pond.

Is it spotted like a clown? It takes a sense of humor to survive the cold of spring. The other amphibian we see jumping right in despite the chill is the wood frog. Of course amphibians don’t have a sense of humor but wood frogs can strike a mock heroic pose that makes me think they do.

In the video below an enterprising water bug is a beacon of action as the wood frog floats along.

Of course the frog was reacting to me. Before I hiked up to the vernal pool we call the Turtle Bog, I could hear the croaking of a half dozen wood frogs.

Wood frogs can be in the water before the ice melts. I discovered that when I went down to Boundary Pond. Before beavers dammed the valley in 2008, there was a vernal pool here. I never heard wood frogs there in the spring but I rarely gave a listen and wood frogs only court and croak for a couple weeks. I did watch the beaver pond that formed behind the dam every day in the early spring and never heard wood frogs. But the beavers now have been gone two years and there is only a small pool of water behind the leaking dam. As I walked down the valley on April 9, I heard wood frogs. Since there was still ice in one corner of the shallow pool, I didn’t have much trouble finding that part of the pool where the wood frogs were croaking and jumping.

When I got too close they stopped, but they didn’t get out of the cold water. Here is what that section of pool looked like on April 2, a week before I heard the wood frogs.

There was hardly any water under that snow. The wood frogs made a marriage bed out of snow melt. On March 24, 2010, I got a photo of a wood frog just outside a cold vernal pool high on the ridge east of Boundary Pond

Here is a beast with an "unfolded character" (a phrase I picked up from an appreciation of Robert Burns written by Thomas Carlyle) durable and always ready with its rough song during those brief cold months of early spring.