This week in the woods, we headed out on a warm, wet night with headlamps, reflective vests, bucket, and spatula to usher migrating amphibians across Middlebrook Road in West Fairlee, Vermont. Wet-skinned things hopped and walked from the woods to the wetter Middle Brook side of the pavement. In Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground, Ted Levin writes about a neighboring brook and connects the same journeys he observed there to the evolutionary history of humans and other animals: “Frogs lead me back to the steamy Carboniferous period, to the swamps of 300 million years ago, from which adventurous amphibians first crept (with some trepidation, I suspect) out of the water.… The journey of those primitive, frog-like animals out of the organic bath and ultimately into the trees was a grand evolutionary experiment that eventually resulted in reptiles and birds and mammals, then primates, Pithecanthropus and Australopithecus, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.” Frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts have remained a bit more cautious than some of these terrestrial and airborne cousins, returning to ancestral wetlands each spring to breed. We and Ann Little took turns photographing some of their sagas.
The petite spring peeper is our smallest frog, and its males vocalize earlier in the year – and more loudly – than others. In his 2022 Outside Story article, Kenrick Vezina puts into perspective the volume of their 100 decibel output, noting that OSHA recommends hearing protection for anything over 85 decibels. Peepers gather hundreds to a site, and each can put out 3,000–4,000 peeps per hour.
Behind its ears, the American toad has large, oblong parotoid glands filled with toxins to protect it from predators. When ingested by most would-be predators, poison from these organs causes immediate irritation to mouth tissues and can lead to illness and death. Snakes, however, do not respond to these chemicals. As a defense against being swallowed by them, already-corpulent toads can puff themselves up and become even more voluminous.
The athletic-looking, classically “froggy” green frog resembles the American bullfrog but doesn’t grow as large. Bullfrogs also lack green frogs’ dorsolateral ridges, the folds of skin running from behind their eyes and down their backs. The slightly smaller, dark-masked wood frog, which we wrote about two weeks ago, also made an appearance. These ambush hunters use ground moisture and the angle of the sun to determine the ideal hunting locations.
This eastern newt pinwheeled its little arms and legs as it made its way through roadside grass to a pond stocked with trout. While most amphibians breed or reside in fishless waterbodies, their poisonous skin has allowed these newts to cohabitate with such predatory fish. They go through three life stages: the pale, yellow-green, feathery-gilled, nocturnal larva (three months), the lunged, rough-skinned, bright orange, terrestrial red eft (2–7 years), and finally the the underwater, brown-green, sexually mature, flat-finned salamander. As Kenrick Vezina explains in this Outside Story article and as we can see with this land-lubbing newt resembling the aquatic stage, the life cycles can vary dramatically.
The spotted salamander may be large, brightly marked, common, and easy to identify, but its speed and elusiveness make it difficult to spy and photograph. Outside the mating period of a few days, adults spend most of their time hiding and hunting invertebrates beneath rocks and logs in moist deciduous and mixed forests.
In these last weeks of potential nighttime road crossings, numerous ways exist for becoming involved in facilitating safe amphibian crossings in Vermont and New Hampshire and for reporting data. The Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas has nighttime road search rules here, the North Branch Nature Center provides resources for volunteers to adopt crossing sites in Vermont, and the Harris Center for Conservation Education does the same in New Hampshire.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.