The first salamander rain came on the 11th of April, a week after the
first spotted turtles were up from hibernation to sun themselves in
the Great Alder Carr (v. my previous posting: First Turtle…). As
noted before (and in my books) spotted turtles select overwintering
sites that are the first niches – often relatively small – to open up
in wetlands at thaw, when in typical years larger stillwater wetlands
are yet locked in ice and forested uplands still under 2′-4′ of snow,
prohibiting amphibian migrations. This spring I have happily agreed to
serve as project director for a young friend’s senior project at
Proctor Academy. Colin Nevins will be mapping and doing an ecological
survey on hie parents’ 35 acre woodland beginning the 5th of May and
continuing for three weeks. His approach will be modeled after maps I
have drawn for my books (as in the endpapers of FOLLOWING THE WATER),
combining field work; plant and animal inventories; field-naturalist
observations; creative writing; art; and photography. His project
property abuts our own 14 acres that consist mostly of forested upland
laced with to seasonal streams and featuring a large vernal pool
habitat; as well as two sections of field and shrub totaling about
three and a half acres. So this project will be an extension for me
of the habitats on my own land whcih, after 37 years’ residency, I
have never investigated as thoroughly as I would like, since most of
my time is spent in turtle places not far away.

April has progressed with customary gradualism; I was quite sure that
at last on the 11th conditions were right for the first amphibian
migrations and this proved to be true. Colin and I decided to do some
early exploring, as by the official project date the vernal pool
breeding would have long been concluded – the mating and egg-
deposition, that is to say. We met at 8PM (my kind of commute: half a
mile or so from my fireplace wood stove) to find wood frogs already
chorusing in some number in a vernal pool in the small pasture sector
of his parents’ land. Colin then found a spotted salamander en route
to a pool, crossing the dirt road he lives on. No frog or salamander
had yet entered a pool in woodland habitat across the dirt road. We re-
visited this one the following night and saw spotted salamanders that
had evidently moved in over the course of the rainy night. Males had
already deposited sperm packets in several places. For some reason
this small pool brought thoughts of fairy shrimp to mind – something
of a premonition. I have never found them in upland pools in this
area, only in vernal pool habitats in the floodplain of the nearby
Warner River, and quite commonly in floodplain pools along the Lamprey
River in southeastern NH during my field work with turtles there from
1993-2003, in league with the “wild and scenic river” designation
studies of that river. But soon after wading into this small pool I
sighted some fairy shrimp, an early highlight of the season for me and
auspicious beginning to Colin’s project.

A survey by a logger friend the previous autumn, with an eye to some
possible selective timber cutting (the Nevins are dedicated to not
doing anything that might negatively impact the ecology of their land)
revealed, if I recall correctly – something in the neighborhood of 30
vernal pool basins. The terrain is markedly uneven, with very step
ascents and descents, a veritable boulder yard generously studded with
glacial erratics, quite different from the customary turtle habitats I
keep to and evidently well-suited to salamanders. Colin told me that
this pool never dried out, and that intrigued me. This all the more so
when I noticed a small circular pool, lined with stones, perhaps three
feet in diameter, just a few feet off to one side of the vernal pool.
The precision of the circle and the arrangement of the stones would
certainly seem to be the work not of glaciers, but of human hands. It
is not a flowing spring – neither it nor the adjacent pool has any
inlet or outlet – but some hydrologic feature may keep it filled with
water throughout the year, and it seems it may have provided a source
of water for some purpose.

Over the next week I surveyed another much larger and deeper vernal
pool on the eastern end of the property that my grandsons Michael and
Ricky Couture had told me about (their property abuts the Nevins’
woods on that side). I had intended for several years to visit this
pool but never had found the time (or made the effort) to do so during
the vernal season, when my focus is overwhelmingly with the turtles. I
placed four minnow traps in this pool, in which several spotted
salamander egg masses were already in place, and some wood frogs were
calling. Traps yielded two spotted salamanders the first night. The
second night brought only one salamander, but it was a Jefferson
salamander. I had felt certain that this species was also present,
although I have rarely found it in the area. And I saw two egg masses
that I am 90% certain were those of blue-spotted salamanders. This
pool bears watching, but breeding activity seemed quite limited, and
appeared to have been concluded for the season. I then went to two
pools downslope, and here I found what I am certain are Jefferson
salamander egg masses. One area of deposition was remarkable: a sunken
branch tangle that had been a center for communal egg-laying, every
facet of the branches lined with linear egg deposits, long clear jelly
accretions (some on the order of a foot and a half long) with eggs
plainly visible within. The aggregation looked something like a coral
reef formation. Minnow traps deployed over the next two nights
captured no salamanders – I was too late here. Colin’s project will be
essentially an independent study, but as I check in from time to time
one thing I will have in mind is attempting to net larval salamanders
in this pool once they have reached an identifiable stage of
development.

On the 14th of April I returned to the beaver-flooded wood turtle
area, and immediately upon descending the yet snow-covered shoulder of
the hayfield slope above the inundated alder zone I sighted one
basking in a sheltered spot that featured some fallen branch and
bramble cover. She was a long-familiar adult, one I have seen only at
intervals spaced widely over the years. She is one of the most
secretive members of this colony, and seems to be one of the oldest:
her plastron is worn ultra-smooth; it was that way the first time I
found her some eighteen (twenty?) years ago. As I suspected, the wood
turtles who formerly made use of the alder thickets during their
terrestrial times are restricted to this slope, a rather narrow band
situated between the the extended hayfield and the beaver impoundment,
running parallel to the stream. My laser temperature recorder read
92.5 degrees on the dry leaf-pack next to the turtle and her carapace
gave a reading of 97.4 – this on an afternoon with an air temperature
of 58 f and brisk, chill winds. A water temperature of 45.5 was
indicated in the main current of the brook. Further upstream I found a
familiar sixteen year old male, one of few, following the winter of
great otter predation five or six years ago (more? – its in my notes),
who is perfect to the tip of his tail. A very slight notch on his
twelfth right marginal suggests that he may be one I marked as a
hatchling. He has attained a size that would seem to make him a
breeding member of his colony. He was sequestered in limited cover in
a manner very much like the female previously discovered. These
turtles are clearly stuck “between the devil and the deep blue sea” in
terms of terrestrial habitat availability. I carried my search on
upstream to the end of their resident reach of this brook, with no
further sightings. As a result of the canopy of second-growth trees,
mostly red maple and then ascending to beech as the streambank rises
to upland woods, the dense low cover that wood turtles require is
almost entirely absent. The area is now primarily open forest floor
with some zones of cinnamon fern that do not provide the complex
layering and thick mattings of fallen vegetation that wood turtles
need. This is strikingly evident at a deep-bend meander in the brook
at the upper terminus of their home range here, a site much favored
for overwintering in past years (during my observations from 1986 to
approximately 1996). With a complete absence of cover for some extent
beyond this part of the stream now – none of that bankside cover
essential for first basking after emergence from hibernation and
beyond – it appears that the turtles no longer come here for their
overwintering. There is no other suitable riparian wood turtle habitat
for perhaps a mile upstream, and that is a limited compartment. There
are better options for them downstream, toward a river floodplain a
mile or so distant. Over the course of the season I will attempt to
see if I can gain insights into any movements they may make in
response to these habitat factors. There is much to think about here.
(So often I feel something akin to a headache as I walk and wade this
wood turtle terrain and try to fathom the ongoing ecological processes
and the turtles’ responses to them.) A suite of factors, human-based
and natural, conspires to alter the habitat over time, and in a
landscape increasingly marginalized and disrupted by an array of human
activities options for migration, re-location, which had been in place
for millennia, species like the wood turtle are driven to local and
broader disappearances. I will discuss this further in later postings
(it is lready a feature of my published writings and unpublished
reports). Regrettably the places of wood, spotted, and Blanding’s
turtles that I have known over the past three decades have become a
paradigm for this well-known, oft-discussed and lamented, but all but
entirely unaddressed phenomenon.