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1 VERNAL POOLS
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stone, and good in every thing.
— William Shakespeare

The Reedgrass Pool
September 24, first full day of autumn, 4:47 p.m. Reed canary grass
rustles momentarily on a slight dance of evening air that quickly dies
away. High above, long trails of cloud race eastward on the winds
streaming over the near-breathless layer of air close to earth. Not a
single blade of the long dry curls of grass stirs now. The steady pulse
and drill of insects becomes an evening raga. Light has begun to fade
from the alder thickets behind me, though it lingers in the open,
grassy, shrub-scattered hollow before me, a topographical depression
set among rounded knolls to the west and north and a high, steeply
ascending ridge to the east. Slipping through a screen of reed canary
grass on the low ridge of the hollow's southern rim, I step down into
it.
From time to time, unseen sparrows punctuate the intensifying insect
drone with their final furtive soundings of the day. There is something
outward-bound about their shadowy movements, their brief, almost
whispered calls. Swamp and song sparrows arrive in spring, animated in
flight and exuberant in song, and settle in around and above the water
that fills this basin in the earth to overflowing at that season, as
though they have come to stay forever. But, like the water, they are
seasonal. Most years they depart just before the water starts to return
to the pool. But the water and birds are perennial as well as seasonal:
in the course of the year they always come back. Theywill continue to
do so every year unless the landscape and the cycles of its water are
disrupted.
The open hollow I have stepped into looks like an unmown pasture. The
footing is firm and dry, the earth strewn with the straw of the past
years' growth. The matted floor-weavings of stems and blades form
artful arrangements: over the seasons the tall grasses die, dry, and
lie down under their own weight, or are toppled by wind and rain,
pressed by snow and ice and the weight of standing water. Scanning the
drapings and carpetings of reed canary grass, I see a more deliberately
designed structure, a carefully wrought casing nearly an inch and a
half long, built from the same grassy materials in which it lies. This
is not the work of the elements or a form created by plant growth but
the construct of an animal, a small insect larva. This house made of
straw, fashioned from cut pieces of reed canary grass and sedge,
adhered to an interior tube of spun silk, served as protection for a
caddis fly larva. Until its metamorphosis into mothlike, winged adult,
the larva had lived an entirely aquatic life, molting through a series
of five encasings like this, making a larger one each time as it grew.
In what now seems to be a grassy upland field in which meadow
grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids sing and feed, an insect larva
that can live only in water completed the subadult phases of its life.
Lifting a decaying section of alder stem that has become partially
embedded in the turf of the basin floor, I find an even more readily
recognizable indication of an aquatic environment, the shells of half a
dozen tiny fingernail clams, ranging in size from an eighth to three-
eighths of an inch. The shells are huddled where the last of the
season's water collected as summer came on. Fingernail clams inhabit a
wide variety of permanent wetland habitats, but they are also able to
live in pools that dry up every year. Adults and young burrow into the
substrate during the dry season and emerge when their pools refill.
The casing of the larval caddis fly and the shells of the fingernail
clams lie close to the base of a tussock of grasslike growth. A number
of symmetrical mounds of inflated sedge have colonized a deeper pocket
of the two-acre basin. They look like a village of straw huts settled
into a small clearing in a forest of grass four feet tall. The reed
canary grass, growing on rises a foot or so above the pits in which the
sedge grows, towers all the higher. Slight differences in elevation in
a wetland can affect the depth of the water and its duration at any
given site; those factors in turn dictate what plants are able to grow
there.
Inflated sedge can grow only in wetlands. Like the caddis fly casing
and fingernail clamshells, it indicates an environment that is, over
the long term, ruled by water. Reed canary grass is also virtually
confined to wetlands. Its luxuriant growth dominates this seasonally
ponded hollow, which I call the Reedgrass Pool. On the sloping rim of
the basin, swordlike leaves of blue flag iris thrust from sedgy
tangles. Beyond these grow brushy stands of sweet gale, thickets of
taller winterberry holly, and alders. The native iris and sweet gale
are obligate wetland plants, and winterberry and speckled alder rarely
grow outside of wet-lands. Even if I had never been here before, never
seen this pool at the height of its flood season in spring, the plants
and the signs of aquatic animal life would tell me that this currently
waterless, grassy place is in fact a wetland, more specifically a
vernal pool, which every year alternates between being flooded and
drying up.
Earlier in the year, at spring thaw, this pool is filled to
overflowing, and even before its central block of ice and the
surrounding snowbanks have completely melted, a tumultuous evocation of
the changing season begins. First comes the ructious cacophony of wood
frogs, quickly followed and joined by the shrill piping of spring
peepers. In a week or two, after breeding in the water, the wood frogs
depart to a terrestrial life of silence in surrounding upland woods.
The peepers pipe on and are joined in time by the high-pitched, drawn-
out, sweetly descending trills of American toads, and then by the
echoing trills of gray treefrogs, punctuated at times by the clamorous
twangs of green frogs.
I come wading here during the season of water, from thaw in early April
until the drying up that occurs sometime between the summer solstice
and the end of July, depending on the year's rainfall. This is the time
of mosquito, mayfly, and caddis fly larvae, early-breeding wood frogs,
spring peepers, and spotted salamanders. These are followed by insect-
hunting green frogs and bullfrogs, who breed in more permanent waters,
and later-breeding gray treefrogs and American toads, who come to trill
and mate. It is the time of other annual migrants: spotted turtles,
young Blanding's turtles, occasional wood and painted turtles, juvenile
snapping turtles, and northern water snakes, all drawn to the rich
foraging waters where so many amphibians and insects breed. These
reptilian predators are accompanied by wading hunters who wing in and
out while the water is here — American bittern, spotted sandpiper,
sora, Virginia rail — and the furred hunters of the night, raccoon and
mink. Swamp sparrows come early in spring to work the water lines,
deftly snaring mosquito larvae and other aquatic insects and at times
tadpoles, I think, from the pool. These dark, musically trilling
sparrows stay on to nest and, as the pool dries up to become a field
again, hunt crickets and grasshoppers where spotted turtles swam in
pursuit of tadpoles.
Although vernal pools are not permanent wetlands like swamps, marshes,
and peatlands, the only plants that can persist in them are those
adapted for life in water or in soils that are periodically flooded or
saturated and thus deprived of oxygen into the rooting zone through all
or much of the growing season. Such plants are called hydrophytes —
literally, water plants. All of the plants around me, the reed canary
grass, sedges, blue flag, alder, and winterberry, are hydrophytes.
During cycles of drought, some wetlands may be dry for several seasons,
even years. If water does not stand on the surface or if the water
table — the upper level of water in the ground — does not rise into the
rooting zone during the growing season, seeds of upland plants will
germinate. Soil areas formerly deprived of oxygen through flooding or
the persistence of water become aerated. Oxygen filters into spaces in
the soil, and burrowing animals go to work. Upland annuals move in and
may live their full cycle, from germination to seeding. Upland
perennials, from grasses to trees, begin to infiltrate and replace
entrenched wetland vegetation. But unless a major transformation occurs
in the topography, by way of natural causes or human engineering, or a
profound shift in climate takes place, the water will return,
saturating the root zone and drowning out upland plants, all of which
require well-drained, oxygenated soil. Then wetland plants will return.
Two dead pine trees, standing in reed canary grass behind a hedge of
winterberry, are testament to such a cycle in this vernal pool basin.
During a succession of drier years, the white pines, upland trees that
can tolerate some degree of wet footing, germinated on a shelf of land
abutting the trough in which the winterberry grows. Though struggling
in the seasonally soggy environment, the pines grew to a height of
fifteen feet or so, until years of more abundant rainfall restored the
hydrology of the pool. They stand skeletal now, surrounded by northern
arrowwood, maleberry, silky willow, and the ubiquitous alders. In
death, the pines provide hunting perches for eastern kingbirds,
seasonal birds who take insects over the seasonal waters here, as well
as nesting and hunting places for year-round chickadees, who seem able
to find food in the dead branches and beneath the last shinglings of
sloughing bark during every season.
As dusk nears, the cadence of crickets grows louder. Light lingers
here, as it does in many wetlands, after the surrounding upland forests
have darkened beneath their dense canopies. Wetlands, with the
exception of low-light cedar, spruce, and hemlock swamps or shadowy
forested wetlands crowned with red maples in leaf, lie open to the sky.
Even when this hollow holds no sky-reflecting pool, it remains an arena
of light in the twilight landscape. It may be the light, as well as the
water, that draws me to wetlands.
I thread my way among the tussocks of inflated sedge. Not far from
where I found the casing of the caddis fly larva, I come upon rabbit
droppings under arching blades of sedge: the husk of a completely
aquatic life adjacent to the droppings of an animal as terrestrial as
I. I think back three and a half months or so, when I waded here as
thousands of wood frog tadpoles swam through the grasses and sedges
that snowshoe hares nibble now without so much as getting their
namesake feet wet. Where hares dine, foxes hunt. From late summer into
winter, and at times on winter's frozen water, foxes track hares here;
from early spring to early summer, the hunters are bitterns stalking
frogs.
Being dry for most of the year, vernal pools are uninhabitable by fish
and are critical breeding places for a small group of invertebrates and
amphibians: fairy shrimp, wood frogs, and spotted, Jefferson, blue-
spotted, and marbled salamanders. While many other animals make
significant use of vernal pools, the life cycles of these six species
make them dependent upon seasonal wetlands. They are considered
indicator species; the presence of any one of them in a seasonal
wetland identifies it as a vernal pool habitat.
The specialized wetlands known as vernal pools are extremely variable,
ranging from broad, heavily vegetated lowland depressions of over two
acres in extent, like the Reedgrass Pool, to unvegetated, water-filled
clefts a few feet in diameter in hemlock-shrouded ledges of mountain
forests. Although typically associated with wooded areas, vernal pools
can be situated in open meadows, sandy washouts, and river flood-
plains. Some feature rank growth of grass and sedge, some are crowded
with emerald-mossed islands of highbush blueberry and swamp azalea,
encircled by a high canopy of red maple; many are bowls of dark water
with sunken black-leaf floorings in which no plants grow, ringed by a
narrow band of wetland trees like swamp white oak and black gum, or
surrounded by upland trees like pignut hickory and white oak. They may
be set within an extensive wetlands complex or, more typically,
entirely isolated from other wetlands in an upland forest setting.
Within this bewildering array of physiographic settings and plant
associations, vernal pool habitats are defined by a common key set of
ecological parameters: they lie within confined depressions that lack a
permanent outlet stream; have seasonal, impermanent flood periods that
generally last from two to five months; dry out completely most years,
usually by late summer; are free of fish; and, most significantly,
support the life cycles of animals that are utterly dependent upon this
habitat for the perpetuation of their species. The pools define these
animals, and these animals in turn define the pools.
Although the term vernal pools comes from the Latin vernus, "belonging
to spring," most of these pools refill over the course of autumn's
transition to winter and could be thought of as autumnal pools. But it
is at snowmelt and ice-out, the last sleets, first rains, and earliest
warming breaths of spring that they beckon wood frogs, salamanders, and
spring peepers from surrounding upland woods, where they have passed
the winter in rotted-out tree roots, under layers of bark and litter,
in small mammal tunnels and other hibernacula in the earth. The vernal
pools summon spotted and Blanding's turtles from wetlands near and far
and birds from thousands of miles away.
6:23 p.m. Strange, unsettling cries break the deep silence surrounding
the low swishing sound I make as I brush my way through difficult
meadowsweet thickets at the north end of the Reedgrass Pool. Two eerie
calls, silence, then two more calls. The pattern continues. The
repeated drawn-out cries sound like the downscaled bleating of a lamb.
I have never heard anything like them, but they seem to express the
epitome of distress. I cannot even decide whether the animal who cries
out is a bird or a mammal; I can only determine that it is not very
big. I begin to track the sounds around a high shrub-and-sweetfern
knoll, drawn to them yet at the same time put on edge, touched by a
feeling that I would just as soon not see what they are all about. My
naturalist's curiosity is compelling, but there are some fates I would
as soon not witness. The cycle of two long, drawn-out calls followed by
an interval of silence continues. I trace their source to heavy
sweetfern cover at the base of the knoll. The cries become even more
penetrating. I search the brush hesitantly, knowing that I am virtually
on top of whatever utters them. I still cannot guess what kind of
animal I am hearing. I sweep aside the low sweetfern with my walking
stick, allowing enough twilight to enter and reveal the scene: a wood
frog, caught in the teeth of a young garter snake, cries out. Of all
the possibilities that went through my mind as I searched for the
source of these wails, I never imagined a frog. The snake has one of
the frog's hind legs in his mouth, and, winding backward, is dragging
him up the slope. This maneuvering takes considerable effort. The snake
is not much bigger around than my little finger. I do not see how he
could have captured a full-grown frog in the first place, but he has
managed to latch on to the frog's foot and steadily work his grip to
midthigh, having no more to work with than his jaws and teeth. The frog
continues to cry out. The snake coils and uncoils, flexing his belly
plates, resolutely seeking traction in soft, plush haircap moss. He has
twisted his tail around a sweetfern stem to gain more leverage.
I am not given to interfering with nature, but I find myself unable to
walk away from this scene. Snakes have legendary capacity for
swallowing prey that seems impossibly large, but the wood frog is in
fact well beyond swallowable size for jaws that are already almost
completely unhinged in the effort to encompass one hind leg. My human
perception that no good can come of this for prey or predator moves me
to gently tap the garter snake with my walking stick. The tenacious
young hunter lets go of the frog's hind leg at once. He curls back into
the sweetfern and is gone. It surprises me to see the snake disengage
so quickly. I had expected the release of such an engulfing hold from a
mouth full of recurved teeth to be arduous, an additional struggle for
both parties, perhaps not even possible. The wood frog pulls his
bleeding leg back under himself and settles into a familiar crouching
position, completely still. He may well fear that any move he makes
will have the teeth of an unseen predator fastened upon him again.
I continue on my way. Snake and frog will soon be entering their
separate hibernacula in the uplands around the vernal pool basin to
wait out the long winter. The male wood frog, certainly one of last
spring's chorusing revelers, is silent now that he has been released
from his distress. (I could not tell if the young snake was a male or a
female; it is hard for me to refer to any animal as "it," so I resort
to the convention of using the masculine pronoun except where I know
the animal to be a female.) He will not give voice again until he
emerges in the spring and migrates back to the Reedgrass Pool, the site
of his metamorphosis from a pool-swimming tadpole to a land-dwelling
frog. Wood frogs are silent throughout their approximately three-year
lifespans, except for the eruptive vocalizations of breeding males.
These are confined to their mating season in vernal pools, which
generally lasts no more than two weeks. Following this, they return to
land and live in the forest in silence.
Some frog species have distress calls, but other than the prolonged,
loud, almost childlike wailings of a struggling bullfrog, they are
seldom heard. It is thought that such cries may startle a predator and
facilitate an escape. I have captured and observed many wood frogs in
their upland haunts, and I have never heard one of them make a sound.
The terror, or whatever response the frog felt, of being caught in the
teeth of a snake brought forth a rare utterance. The wood frog's nerve-
jarring expressions of distress fell on literal and figurative deaf
ears in the case of the young garter snake. His was truly a voice
crying out in the wilderness. The frog's calls, like the rest of his
history, go back hundreds of millions of years farther than the history
of my own species. How could such a primordial crying-out ever imagine
ears and a sensibility that might interpret it as an appeal for
intervention? Neither protest nor imploration would seem to have a
place in the natural world, yet their embodied evocations can be sensed
in such dramatic existential voicings as the wood frog's distress call.
It is hard for a human perception, with its own evolution of cries, to
ignore such an expression, even from the non-human world. One could
well wonder about the possibility of plea and protest, and how far
back they might go in the history of living forms. I have seen birds
wing to a scene of distress in response to piercing alarm calls of
their own kind. No band of wood frogs rushed in here. None ever will.
And yet, in the face of an unfathomable unhearing, life cries out at
times.
Salamander Rains
April 4, 8 p.m. I set out in darkness on a salamander run to the
Hemlock Pool. I celebrate the vernal equinox, but it is ice turning
into water that signals the most profound change in the season for me,
the end of hibernation and the beginning of the great opening up of the
wetlands. My first excursions at thaw come by day, in warming sunlight,
to a shrub swamp in which the earliest ice-out takes place and in which
spotted turtles begin to move in the first open water of the wetlands
year. This irreversible yielding of winter usually comes between March
26 and April 6 in the region of my home wetlands. My second sequence of
searches takes place in darkest night, with the earliest rains that
hold the promise of setting salamanders on the move in their annual
pilgrimages to the breeding waters of vernal pools. Most years, the
salamander rains come a week or so after the first stirrings of the
spotted turtles, although in seasons with sudden early thaws, these
signal turnings of spring can arrive in close succession.
Having already kept my first appointment of the season eight days ago,
with a spotted turtle just up from overwintering in the Shrub Swamp, I
continue my quest for my traditional second appointment: this with the
first salamander in the midst of migration or, suddenly, startlingly,
already settled in place in the pellucid meltwater of a vernal pool.
Tonight I return to an intermittent stream and its nearby hemlock-
shrouded pool in a high forest expanse, wetland traces that are all but
lost among the wooded ridges above the Reedgrass Pool and its
neighboring vernal pools, permanent stream, and great wetland complex.
Even where the earth's restless shiftings and the inexorable work of
the glaciers have shaped high and steep terrain, piling up mountainous
jumbles of unsorted rock fragments and baring bedrock in places, there
are scorings in the topography where water can run and isolated gouges
where it collects and stands for a time.
I rushed the season even more five days ago, coming here on a mild
night of heavy, snow-eating mist and ice-eroding showers. It was my
first time here since the Hemlock Pool dried up last summer. The
intermittent stream, a running thread of water that, like the Hemlock
Pool, has its essential season at thaw and spring rains and then dries
up, was still motionless, a silent vein of ice in deep woods. The
forest floor was rock-hard beneath sodden leaves. The drisk and drizzle
of that dark night, with clouds of fog curling from receding snowbanks
and a steady, metronomic dripping from the hemlocks, did not prove to
be the salamander rain I had been waiting for. Nor is it likely that
tonight's chill rain, which has turned to quickly accumulating wet
snow, will draw out the salamanders. Large flakes of snow cling to all
the bare branches and bend the hemlock boughs, closing the forest in
all the more, so that I have to stoop to follow the thread of water
that has been set to flowing, indicating at least some progress in the
season since the other night, and has begun to run through the ice and
frozen earth. This plastering of snow a few days into spring is all
water to the waiting wetlands and the abundant life about to awaken
within them or to return from winter's waiting places. My lantern beam
finds its way through snow tunnels in the transformed, unrecognizable
woods. I must follow the intermittent stream now; without its readable
pathway, I'd soon become disoriented. As I struggle through white-
coated branches and boughs, snow cascades to my neck and wrists, and
melts. Encased in snow, the night quiet seems even more silent. In the
silence upon silence, I can hear my heart beating. Only the water
trickling over ice here and there in the quickening brooklet has an
occasional voice.
Although I have twice seen my first salamander of the year on nights
much like this, when I arrive at the Hemlock Pool, I see that I am
clearly too early for my appointment this season. The pool is an ice
shape under a contour-following mantle of fresh, wet snow. While
shivering through this onion-snow, I had in mind catching sight of an
eager, season-pressing male spotted or Jefferson salamander carrying
snow on his back, nosing along the edge of an ice sheet, seeking a
meltwater entrance into the pool. But tonight the only being shouldered
with snow, looking for water along rims of ice, is me.
April 5, 8:17 p.m. Still seeking the first salamander, I take to the
lowlands bordering the upper run of Alder Brook, a strikingly different
setting from last night's. Seasonal ponds here are set in depressions
in sand and gravel deposits, in basins scoured out by shiftings of
glacial ice, or in hollows left in mounded alluvial deposits by the
melting of chunks of glacial ice. These vernal pools have become
fringed with wetland growth. Red maple and speckled alder encircle
their high-water marks. Emergent shrubs — winterberry, black
chokeberry, and sweet gale — ring the shorelines out to depths of about
a foot and a half. There are also dense, brushy stands of meadowsweet,
a shrub that can be at home in flooded wetlands as well as in dry
pastures and woodland clearings. Snowmelt comes earlier here than it
does in the hills. On the northern sides of the pools, warming sun from
the south has melted back some snow cover on sparser shores to reveal
edgings of sphagnum moss in wetter hollows and haircap moss on drier
mounds. Both of these perennial greens are laced with maroon-leaved
vines of large cranberry, some still bearing their crimson fruits of
last fall.
My shadow from the three-quarter moon is sharply etched before me as I
crunch across the glowing blue-white sheets of crusted end-of-winter
snow. The deep, clear sky is made milky by moonlight, but Orion is
visible well to the west. The Pleiades have set. Bud swell is
noticeable, especially in the red maple branches silhouetted against
the moonlit sky. It is a little below freezing, but salamanders would
not move on a clear, moonlit night like this even if it were well above
freezing. I have come to see if any might have already moved in these
less snowy lowlands, which are quicker to warm than the hemlock- and
pine-cloaked ridges, and entered the water while I was looking in on
the Hemlock Pool last night. Ice has begun to recede from the margins
of the three vernal pools set in a chain along the floodplain of the
permanent stream. With sweeps of my lantern, I search the narrow band
of clear water between shore and the great ice sheet of the largest
pool. Nothing stirs. I wade into the 40-degree water, press my
neoprened knees against the ice float and give it a thrust, so that it
glides back another two feet or so. Still I see nothing. The water that
seems so expectant, and will soon embrace so much vernal life, is
empty, waiting.
I walk down an old logging road to the Reedgrass Pool, about five
hundred yards away. There is only stillness here as well, save the
wintry crunching of my footsteps and the faint tinkling of thin ice
breaking as I wade into the pool. I find some open water in the beds of
fallen reed canary grass and, shining my flashlight into it, I see the
first life moving in the meltwater — hovering clouds of mosquito larvae
and hundreds of lumbering caddis fly larvae carrying their straw cases
as they work their way through submarine mazes of grass and sedge.
Amphipods and isopods, their bioenergetics geared to icewater, zip in
and out of leaf layers in the willow and alder shallows at the edge of
the pool. There are myriad invertebrates here that cannot be seen
without a microscope. Vernal pool habitats hold a galaxy of small
things that come to life the instant ice and snow turn back into water.
Spring-fed pools, and those that are deep enough not to freeze to the
bottom, may have something astir even in the heart of winter, alive
beneath the ice, ready to move on and proliferate at the first warming
touch of April's sun.
I shut off my light and wade back to the dark screen of the alders. I
don't mind being too early for the salamanders. I do not grow impatient
with the reluctance of winter to release its hold. Soon enough the
season will break, and not long afterward will take up the quickening
rush that makes me feel, until ice and snow return to quiet things down
again, that I cannot keep up with any part of it. Reflected stars glow
softly on ice so thin it flexes with the gentle undulations in the wake
of my wading. The Reedgrass Pool may well freeze over from shore to
shore again tonight, but its waters will reopen in April sun tomorrow.
Even the denser, glacial strongholds of the ice float and the enduring
snowbanks on the north side of white pine stands will be further
eroded. I feel certain the next night rains will be salamander rains.
April 9, 7:43 p.m. As soon as it is dark I go out into the rain, which
started as midday drizzle, became a downpour in the late afternoon,
then leveled off to steady, light rain as day gave way to night. I walk
a sodden world as I near the Reedgrass Pool and turn along the alder
thickets of its flooded margins at the base of the high eastern hill.
It is 47 degrees, a night rain on the verge of mildness. I have every
expectation that I will meet a salamander tonight. I manage to take on
the patience of the season as I walk and sweep my light for an hour and
a half, seeing nothing but wet, black earth, glistening leaf litter,
and gray-white lingering snowpack. Now and again, peripheral glimpses
of rain-black twigs with specklings of white lenticels or pale patterns
of lichen, and dark curls of old white-pine cones, their scales tipped
with light-reflecting pitch, have me do sudden double-takes and take a
closer look with my light, for they mimic my salamander search-image.
Perhaps the mode I settle into, as inevitable chill moves in and rain
runs off my poncho, is more one of endurance than of patience. But I
have learned from my years of swampwalking that spring is spring; it is
ice sheets and snowbanks, sleet storms, biting winds, and icy water,
late snow and killing frosts, as well as the spotted turtles emerging
to bask on sun-warmed tussock sedge, the first salamander migrations,
wood frog calls, budbreak, unfurling ferns, and the return of migratory
birds. For life, spring is in good measure a time of waiting within a
constant, incremental advance. With our tendency to think that the
world turns for us, or at least revolves in the direction of our wishes
and aims, we humans easily become impatient with its turnings; but of
course the earth simply spins and tilts toward the sun, away from the
sun, with utterly impartial, cyclical wheelings, to which life on earth
has become so well attuned. It is hard to see, as melted pools freeze
over again, that the turning in time and space, the planetary
inclination toward light and warmth, is as inexorable as the coming of
winter.
Suddenly (or, after nearly three hours, is it at last?), I am startled
by the very thing I have been looking for, surprised somehow by
discovering the living embodiment of a search-image I carry from spring
to spring: a glistening, impressively sturdy jet-black salamander over
eight inches long, brilliantly decorated with two slightly staggered
rows of stunning yellow spots. As in the past, the meeting of my
expectant search-image with reality is a striking revelation,
undiminished by remembrance or repetition. To see these living things
anew is to know them anew. With each spring's rebirth there comes a
necessary reacquainting.
The salamander does not move. He is stunned, not by chill earth or
remnant snow he has crossed but by the sudden intrusion of bright light
into his nocturnal world, a brilliant island of light in a sea of
darkness. Like the first spotted turtle, he is spring incarnate. In
meeting these animals, I meet ice and water, earth, air, and sunlight;
the day and the night and the season itself. There is a deep
reassurance for me in these meetings. Am I somehow unsure of the
seasons, of their landscapes, cyclings, and life? Do I hold some deeply
buried apprehension that a time will come when there will be some other
progression, when spring will not follow winter? I will not outlive the
seasons. They will outlast, by an incalculable measure, my own final
turning in planetary time. I know that some of my uncertainty, set
aside for now by my finding these signal animals of mine once again
making their seasonal rounds in their intact world, stems from the fact
that I have outlived too many wetlands, and all of the life and meaning
they held.
The spotted salamander faces downslope toward his destination. I am
struck by the confidence of his stance, shoulders raised, legs set,
neck erect, his head angled sharply parallel with the earth. His
mission and manifestation give him a Carboniferous bearing, as though
he were one of his immensely larger — three to fifteen feet long —
amphibian ancestors. I think of the conflicting forces of waiting and
eagerness (equally compelling, no less than obligatory), worked out
over great time, that reside within this salamander and his vernal pool
kin. They cannot move too soon; they must not move too late. Their
individual lives and the reason they exist, the continuance of their
kind, are timed to the duration of water in their seasonal breeding
pools. His progeny's race against the drying up of the Reedgrass Pool
begins with this migration. The chill, edge-of-spring night with
abundant rain, final snowmelt, saturated earth, and an overflowing
vernal pool is measured against the inevitable day of blazing sun,
great heat, and desiccating winds in July or August, when the last film
of water in the deepest pool depression becomes transformed into
windborne vapor. If the pool has not lasted long enough to allow the
metamorphosis of the aquatic, gill-breathing young into terrestrial
salamanders, those that come to breed here will have lost their progeny
for the entire year.
The salamander and I are on the very edge of the amphibian season. If
the day had been warmer, or if this were the second night of a warmer
rain, with temperatures in the mid-fifties or better, I'd have
encountered scores of salamanders by now, perhaps hundreds of mingled
salamanders, wood frogs, and spring peepers. Such explosive movement
may occur on the next rainy night. Some years a succession of warm days
and rainy nights triggers mass migrations of vernal pool amphibians.
The soil's thermal profile reverses, with the earth becoming warmer at
its surface than at a depth of a foot or so, and this reversal
amplifies the movements. Streams of frogs and salamanders can be seen
crossing rain-slick roads. But with the northern spring's tendency to
make small advances, then retreat, hold in place for days, and even
turn back toward winter, it is more common for these amphibians to move
in successive waves or pulses, rather than en masse. Whatever the
numbers, the migration routes of these amphibians have been traced out
far back in time, predating by thousands of years the ever-expanding,
landscape-fragmenting grid of roadways and chemicaled wastelands of
lawns and parking lots that has been superimposed upon their once-
unhindered world. These seasonal migrations subject frogs and
salamanders to enormous roadkill and, in some situations, chemical
death.
April 5, 8:30 p.m. A second night of salamander rains. I return to the
Hemlock Pool in the hills. Even on the hemlock ridges, where the active
season commonly arrives a week or more later than it does in the low-
lands, the warm mist and drizzling rain of this 56-degree night must
have the first salamanders on the move. In many years, islands of wood
frog eggs and the first spotted salamander egg masses have appeared in
the Reedgrass Pool before the first arrivals have made their way to the
Hemlock Pool. There have even been seasons when, on the same night the
first wood frogs and salamanders moved in silence among the lingering
snow mounds on their way to this pool, deafening choruses of spring
peepers already filled the air over the great wetland mosaic of the
Reedgrass Pool, only five miles away. But in springs like the current
one, delayed thaw followed by a bursting forth of sudden warmth can
even out the progression from lower to higher elevations and from more
exposed to conifer-shaded pools, so there is little time lapse in the
amphibians' initial migrations.
The intermittent stream has a louder voice than it had my last time
here. Warm, wet nights have loosened its tongue. But all along its
course there is still more ice than water. The quickened little current
slides over smooth, silvery ice, cuts a race beneath it, bores tunnels
through it. Awakening water retraces its ancient streambed in earth and
stone.
The hemlocks keep some snow yet, within the deep-shaded enclosures
their dense, drooping branches form. The mild mist and rain take on a
chill in these evergreen winterholds. Set almost entirely in stone, the
Hemlock Pool is, at twenty by thirty yards, only a fraction of the size
of the Reedgrass Pool. This vernal pool is no bowl of light but a
deeply shaded black-water pocket even on the brightest spring day. No
vegetation grows within the depression even when the water is gone. Its
plant shelter, and the source of its food chain, is provided by fallen
leaves and hemlock needles, occasional branches and twigs, bits of bark
and finer plant material, such as spent tree flowers, bud scales, and
pollen. The larvae of one species of caddis fly in this seasonal forest
catchment construct their cases from hemlock needles; another species
employs bits of twig and bark. This pool, which could seem some
woodland spirit's watering trough, serves as the cradle for the
developing young of wood frogs, spotted salamanders, and Jefferson
salamanders. These are the forest spirits who come to this bowl of
water, not to drink but to procreate.
I go to the deepest pocket in the pool, where Jefferson salamanders
congregate. They are found in only a few of the vernal pools where the
related spotted salamanders breed, and in far fewer numbers. The
Jefferson salamanders tend to breed on a slope that descends to the
pool's deepest hollow, where the water is about thirty-four inches deep
now. Spotted salamanders and wood frogs share a breeding niche in a
shallow extension at the far end of the pool, where water lies eight to
ten inches deep at thaw. My first sweep of light in the meltwater moat
surrounding the thick, persevering central ice float catches the dusky
brown shape of a Jefferson salamander at rest on a submarine ice shelf.
Hoping to get a closer look, I attempt to net this one, but with sudden
serpentine thrusts he is off his ice perch and out of sight in the deep
leaf pack on the pool bottom. As he disappears, another emerges from
the same cover. A little quicker this time, I catch the salamander. He
is large for his species, a little over seven inches long, deep maroon
brown, generously flecked with tiny blue-white spots along his lower
sides and legs.
Throughout much of its range, including the glaciated Northeast, the
Jefferson salamander hybridizes with the closely related blue-spotted
salamander, producing individuals that are sometimes difficult to
assign precisely to either species. Hybrids are often referred to as
the "blue-spotted group." The distinct blue-spotted salamander, a more
northern species that ranges well into Canada, is smaller, at four to
five and a half inches, with considerably more elaborate patterning,
spotted and flecked with sharp white and dazzling blue on a blue-black
ground. In coloring, these salamanders bear a striking resemblance to
old-fashioned enamelware. The spring-breeding spotted, Jefferson, and
blue-spotted salamanders, along with the late-summer-to-autumn-breeding
marbled salamander, belong to a group referred to as mole salamanders,
because of their subterranean lives. Except in their aquatic larval
period and during their brief annual mating rites in vernal pools, they
are completely terrestrial, inhabitants of upland woods. These
fossorial amphibians dig and tunnel beneath fallen trees and forest
litter, burrow deep into decaying logs, snake their way into the earth
along networks of rotted-out tree roots, and follow endless mineshaft
mazes created by burrowing mammals such as moles and voles. But in the
icy waters of dark-night vernal pools, they become elegant swimmers. If
I did not know the life history of the animal I have netted, I could
easily take him to be thoroughly aquatic, more akin to a fish than a
mole, with his moist, glistening skin and, when I set him free, his
adept eellike glide as he disappears in the leaf litter. Several
Jefferson salamanders perform their routine of trick mirrors and
sliding glass doors in my beam of light, alternately appearing and
disappearing, in and out of sunken leaves.
I don't know of another vernal pool nearby; I have circled around for
perhaps half a mile in all directions without having found one.
Jefferson salamanders have been discovered as far as a mile from any
temporary or permanent wetland habitat. Any of the vernal pool–breeding
amphibians may travel eight hundred to a thousand yards on their
migrations to breeding sites. Vernal pools, which are typically wetland
oases set in terrestrial landscapes, enhance the diversity and
abundance of species in an area. In addition to their critical role as
breeding sites, these unique habitats serve as watering and foraging
places and, in some cases, refuges for resident upland as well as
wandering wetland species. Some give wetland plants a place in the
forest. In many of the landscapes shaped by the last glaciers, chains
of vernal pools provide vital corridors for animals moving through
upland terrain. Temporary in terms of water-holding capacity, they are
enduring habitats over the years, archipelagos in reverse, wetland
islands in a sea of land.
Vernal pools are particularly vulnerable to eradication through the
wholesale fragmentation and development characteristic of the modern
landscape; enormous numbers of them are lost every year. The amphibians
who depend on these pools simply cannot persist in highly fragmented
habitats; many colonies or populations have been extirpated within the
past three decades or so. Recent efforts to identify and even certify
vernal pool habitats, while commendable in intent, fail to protect them
as viable, persistent habitats integrated into their larger systems.
"No-build, no-touch" buffer zones of twenty-five to forty feet along
streams and around wetlands fail to protect vernal pools. Even the
absolute protection of the natural vegetation and the hydrology — the
movement and distribution of water — in a one-hundred-foot swath around
these pools, a rarely implemented preservation standard, would not
assure success over time. Roughly one half of the salamanders who breed
in a vernal pool shift to woodland habitats that are over five hundred
feet from the pool for the remainder of the year. Even if the Reedgrass
Pool and the Hemlock Pool had an enforced buffer zone of one hundred
feet (something on the order of thirty-three paces), encircled by
roads, driveways, lawns, parking lots, and the like, they would still
be doomed to ecological extinction. Yet even this modest buffering
measure would be considered unthinkable by most development interests.
Faced with the inevitable prospects of lawsuits, it is a rare
regulatory body or community that will stand firm on even this
inadequate degree of protection. More dramatically than many habitats,
vernal pools become lost when they are cut off from their larger
systems. Where filling, draining, and pollution are regulated, the
seasonal ponds may still be present, and the water quality may possibly
be reasonably high, but they cease to exist as habitats. Their animal
life dies out with the death of their ecological integrity. Leaving a
narrow band of buffering vegetation around an encircled vernal pool has
been likened to protecting a bird's nest and the tree it is in, while
eliminating the surrounding field and forest habitat required by those
who fledge from the nest. Where are a vernal pool's transformed
tadpoles and salamander larvae to go after they have become land
dwellers?
Our economy demands that we maximize human use of the land. In
particular, the heavy dependence on new housing starts and the
automobile, with their attendant road building, consumes the natural
environment. These factors are compounded by cultural, economic, and
legal traditions that one has the right to do whatever one pleases with
one's land. We appear to believe that this right is incontrovertible,
even God-given, however large or small the parcel, however it came into
our hands, whatever impact that use may have on the natural landscape.
Overshadowing these impacts are the pressures of devastating increases
in global population. Against these overwhelming forces, the remaining
vernal pool salamanders advance at each winter's end with evolutionary
confidence and guidance. They will move to their pools even when the
migration has become a death march.

Liebesspiel

April 8, 9:17 p.m. The rain had the surface of the Reedgrass Pool
fairly boiling for a time, then slackened to a confusion of ripplings
that continued to prevent my looking in. Now it has abated enough that
I can begin to see into the water spaces, sunken grass tangles, and
sedge mounds. During the time I was unable to see, I searched for
later-arriving salamanders in the difficult meadowsweet thickets and
the more open cranberry edging of the northwest corner of the pool. I
found only a solitary female. At just over nine inches long, egg-laden
and looking quite swollen, she is one of this population's matriarchs
and no doubt the mother of many salamanders over her lifetime, which
could span twenty years or more. She was just about to slip into the
pool among the cranberry vines, which now lie under about a foot of
water. Evidently most of the spotted salamanders are in the pool by
now. When the critical factors of precipitation and temperature, which
decide whether migratory amphibians advance or hold in place, line up
favorably, there is no time for lingering. The interconnected abiotic
and biotic events of the breeding season are tightly compressed,
commonly with two weeks or less for mating and two or three months for
metamorphosis of the young.
This compression in time and space is embodied in a stunning scene
revealed by my sweep of light into a sedge pocket where abundant
spotted salamander egg masses are deposited each year. It seems that
all of the salamanders I have been looking for this spring are here,
and have all become one, in a mesmerizing black mass of interweaving
sun-yellow spots. On many occasions over the years I have seen dozens
of artfully posed and intermittently moving spotted salamanders crowded
together into a small section of a pool bottom, some touching,
occasionally clasping, in premating aggregations known as congresses.
But I have never before witnessed this liebesspiel, as it is called,
this loveplay, a great communal congress of salamanders continually
weaving among themselves in a dense, nearly spherical mass. It is a
dizzying, fluid flow. Limbs tucked against their sides, one main stream
of salamanders slips from one pole of the rough globe to the other,
while others slide around in all directions. The integrated mass seems
solid salamander, with no spaces anywhere. Now and then individuals
emerge from the whole without leaving a space, swim eellike to the
surface to take a gulp of air, then dive to reimmerse themselves in the
liebesspiel. The entire swiftly flowing company turns its collective
outer curves in an undecipherable doubling back that is pure
legerdemain. I watch, transfixed, unable to make out any one salamander
or discern how they wheel back toward the center. Adding to the magic,
the perpetuum mobile of the entire living orb remains stationary in the
water.
Oblivious to the spotlight that has come to illuminate their theater-
in-the-dark, the salamanders weave on and on. A congress generally
starts out with all males, as few as four or five at first, their
numbers swelling as others join in. Even a full-fledged liebesspiel
commonly begins with all males, in time joined by females. A vernal
pool may host two or more congresses in separate niches. As females
join the waiting males, a communal congress of the dimensions of this
one, numbering a hundred or more, may form. Shifting my beam of light
from the hypnotic swarm, I find that several pairs and threesomes have
separated out, or perhaps never joined in. The purpose of the communal
loveplay is evidently to stimulate the later stages of the courtship
and finally mating. One of the separate pairs is engaged in a courtship
dance, circling around each other and nudging heads under each other's
bodies, each paying particular attention to the base of the other's
tail. The male rides up over the female and rubs his chin along her
back. My searchlight also reveals a bed of spermatophores clustered on
the grass-strewn bottom and lined along some shafts of the sedge. The
males may begin to deposit spermatophores several days before mating
and egg-laying. The tiny, bluish white, irregularly shaped stalks of
gelatinous material resemble spits of pine pitch. They are crowned with
tinier packets of sperm.
After a courtship that may include a closeness of the magnitude of the
liebesspiel, the actual transferral of sperm to receptive females is a
curiously distanced transaction. Following bouts of the courtship
dance, the male walks in front of his intended female slowly, wriggling
his tail, signaling an invitation to another dance, one that takes on
the air of a procession. The courting male endeavors to lead his
prospective mate to where he has placed his spermatophores. If all of
the group and individual preliminaries, as well as the timing and the
ambient aquatic conditions, have been stimulating enough to render the
female receptive, she will follow him and finally straddle one of the
spermatophores. With her cloaca, she will take up the male's sperm
packet, which will fertilize her eggs internally. This is generally the
culmination of the mating ritual for the female, who will show little
or no further interest in her mate or any other male, although she may
take up sperm packets from more than one suitor. The male may move on
to another congress and find another mate.
Within a day or two I will find egg masses here. Unlike female wood
frogs, who lay their eggs while in the tight embrace of mates who have
mounted their backs, a union known as amplexus, female salamanders move
off alone to deposit their eggs. They may do this directly on the pool
bottom, be it leaf pack, peat, or mud; but more commonly they ascend
grass or sedge stems or fallen branches in the water, take a grip with
their hind feet, and extrude and affix their eggs near the surface,
sometimes with the upper dome of the mass showing above the water.
Salamander eggs, like those of wood frogs, are tightly compacted when
first laid but swell greatly as their jellylike matrix expands. The
average number of eggs is 100 to 125, but older, larger spotted
salamanders may lay 250 or more, sometimes in a single clutch,
sometimes in two. Younger females tend to lay their eggs in several
clusters of a few dozen each. Depending on water temperatures, the eggs
take one to two months to hatch. The globular egg masses from which the
larvae emerge may persist for weeks beyond that, providing highly
visible proof that a vernal pool supports breeding by spotted
salamanders.
Before wading out of the Reedgrass Pool, I shine my light on the
liebesspiel again. The ceremony looks as if it could go on all night.
Although it takes place under water and is the dance of voiceless
animals, I find the total silence of this unceasing choreography
somehow baffling. With all this resurgent life, all this energetic
movement and consummate grace, I feel I should be hearing some
accompanying music, or at least some rhythmic beat, calls, or steps. A
flock of birds wheeling in air without calls at least makes the sound
of wingbeats. But this magnificent primordial ceremony of boldly
patterned amphibians takes place in total darkness and utter silence.
It is a dance unseen and unheard by the dancers themselves, but the
touching and feeling, so prolonged and ever in motion, and perhaps
amplified by ambient darkness and silence, must be profoundly felt by
these sensitive-skinned ones. After their few nights of loveplay are
over and mating consummated, they will leave the pool and separate out
widely over the upland landscape to become solitary, subterranean
animals for the rest of their active season.

Fairy Shrimp

April 12, 7:53 p.m. As the day's light fades, I set out to locate a
vernal pool, new to me, that I was alerted to by a rollicking chorus of
wood frogs in the afternoon. I heard the frogs calling upslope, to the
west, as I explored a stream running through a red maple swamp. Their
vocalizations do not carry nearly as far as those of spring peepers,
who can be heard from half a mile away. When I detect the ducklike
calls of wood frogs, I know I am within two hundred yards or so of
their pool. These vociferous frogs have led me to the breeding places
of the silent salamanders, who never betray their presence with sound
and can be seen only by night.
The day is giving way to a clear, cold night, with winds astir. I make
my way along the upland border of the red maple swamp to a trailing of
surveyor's tape I tied to a branch to mark the point where I should
turn uphill to get to the pool. Most vernal pools are relatively minute
in relation to the acres of forested terrain in which they are set.
Finding one's way to such a pool on a darker night can be a challenge,
especially in mist or rain.
I ascend an oak-studded slope to its high, narrow crest, brushy with an
understory of low-growing black huckleberry. As is common in places not
traveled by people, a well-worn trail, etched into the land by
centuries of passing deer, runs along the spine of this huckleberry
ridge. Looking down, I see the pool, a broad oval of diminishing
silvery sky light lying in a deep, dark hollow. Descending and pacing
it off, I find it to be relatively large, about forty by twenty-five
yards. By lantern light it seems to be mostly open water at this point
in the season, with several red maple islands and highbush blueberry
mounds. The stars are brighter now. Entering the dark water, I wade
among their reflections, heading toward the Big Dipper. There is no
sound but the wind, lulling away. The temperature has fallen sharply,
to about 40 degrees, too cold for wood frogs to be calling.
The first line of light I cast into black water catches the glimmerings
of ghostly, iridescent crustaceans, barely an inch long. I watch
several of the fairy shrimp move through the water with their singular
grace, fluorescent in the slant of my lantern light, just as I have
seen them appear in shafts of sunlight penetrating the wine and black
waters of deeply shaded forest pools. Swimming on their backs, slowly
drifting, they dart occasionally, spasmodic tail-flicks giving them
surprising bursts of speed. They hover and glide with rhythmic,
wavelike pulses of their legs, ascending and descending as if by magic
in the water column. Subtle neon creatures in the night, pale blue-
white, tipped at times with bronze, with a brilliant slash of red,
their own bright blood, toward their conspicuously forked blue-white,
green-white tails, they have a quality of starlight about them. Their
watery dancing turns my lantern beam into a fairy wand. Their eleven
pairs of gill-feet, broad, leaflike appendages, not only propel them
but serve as gills and help manipulate their food, microscopic
protozoans, floating diatoms, and other algae that abound in vernal
pools. Delicate, ephemeral, elusive animals, somehow they are at once
dark and transparent. Fairy shrimp may appear in a pool for years, then
fail to show up for a number of years, then reappear. When their pools
dry up in the summer, the adults die and their eggs lie dormant before
hatching out in icy midwinter waters. If the pools do not become
recharged, the eggs can remain viable through waterless periods of a
decade or more.
Fairy shrimp go beyond being edge-of-winter animals, appearing in the
very heart of winter to drift and dart beneath the ice cover. By
hatching, growing, mating, and laying their eggs during the time of
coldest water, fairy shrimp avoid the more intense predation that comes
with the warming of the pool. But there is no time of complete
sanctuary. My shifting lance of light reveals another aquatic animal
who swims on his back, an insect known as a backswimmer, who has
captured a fairy shrimp almost twice his size. This predator strokes
about the pool with great difficulty, his prey in tow. With their long,
oarlike back feet and keeled backs that slice through the water, these
predatory water bugs could be models for racing shells. Backswimmers
belong to one of several aquatic insect families that can inflict
painful, often long-lasting, fiery stings. They are among the reasons I
no longer wade, as I did as a boy, barefoot and bare-legged. These
skilled swimmers can also fly and, like predacious diving beetles and
giant water bugs (more reasons not to wade barefoot), are able to
locate isolated vernal pools from the air.
Although salamanders must have come to this pool by now, I don't find
any. Nor do I see any egg masses. A thin crescent moon has risen and,
with the stars, it brightens the water enough to keep the salamanders
under the black leaf pack on the pool bottom.
In the still night, I hear mammals moving in dry litter in the
surrounding uplands. I recognize the stepping of a deer. There are
scurryings and pawings I cannot identify, though one shuffling digger
is probably a skunk. Along the margins of the pool, shrews, mice,
moles, and voles are no doubt at work. All the sounds I hear are
terrestrial. Evidently I am the only night wader out here.
I come upon a bed of spermatophores just off a tangle of dead branches,
and, in sedgy shallows on the north end of the pool, the first wood
frog egg masses of what will probably become a large communal island of
them, judging from the magnitude of the chorus I heard in the
afternoon. I then discover a pair of wood frogs in amplexus, immobile
on the leaf flooring. Their embrace will last the night, with fairy
shrimp gliding all about them. My rippling departure from the pool and
my heavy, booted footsteps in dry leaves as I ascend the huckleberry
ridge and descend to the border of the red maple swamp cause all the
other night walkers to be silent for a time.

Wood Frogs

April 15, 11:27 a.m. The occasional clear, piercing cries of a broad-
winged hawk and the clamor of red-winged blackbirds along the flooded
brook margins are barely audible over the guttural calling of male wood
frogs from their favored breeding niches in the Reedgrass Pool. People
hearing these calls for the first time frequently mistake them for the
quacking of ducks, unseen ducks in the middle of the woods. Wood frogs
generally beat spring peepers to their breeding pools by one or several
days and give the season its first frog chorus. They may number in the
hundreds, yet when they sense danger, they are of a single mind and but
one voice, cutting off their urgent calling at once. Somehow, in the
midst of a mating frenzy, they keep an eye out. They dive to cover, and
the urgency of the mating season is subjugated , for the moment, to the
demands of self-preservation. But these revelers can wait only so long
to get on with the business that drew them to the vernal pool. In time
an anxious male calls out. His first few cautiously spaced utterances
may go unanswered, or unchallenged, but soon a second will voice his
own ardor, a third will join in, and the irresistible tumult will burst
forth anew.
The wild and heart-gladdening chorus I heard as I walked toward the
Reedgrass Pool dropped off before I was in sight of it, causing me to
wonder if the frogs had sensed some other potential menace. As I come
up over the crest of a long sandy knoll, a kame left by the glaciers,
above the wetland basin, a broad-winged hawk lifts up, rising from an
area of tussock sedge mounds and stunted red maple saplings. His wide
wings, brown above and strikingly white, tipped with black, below,
carry him off to the high, wooded ridge to the east. The appearance of
this winged hunter, who counts frogs among his prey, was undoubtedly
what silenced the chorus. I do not see a ripple nor hear a single call
as I wade into the Reedgrass Pool. The warmth and rain that brought the
wood frogs here have nearly completed their work on the ice. One thin
float remains, on the north side of a dense screen of alder and
winterberry. It is dull and gray, pitted by rain, eroded by wind. The
new season eats away at this last remnant of winter past, transforming
its frigid pewter into water as clear as glass.
I wade to where the hawk took flight and discover, low on a mound of
tussock sedge, at the water's edge, a freshly killed frog lying
bleeding. The skin has been peeled away from his back and legs. He
looks disturbingly like a person who has been flayed. Wood frog
tadpoles are highly palatable, attracting many predators. As those who
survive approach metamorphosis, their skins become increasingly toxic,
adding a measure of protection to their heightened wariness and greater
speed at escaping. The hawk was evidently dressing, or undressing, his
catch to avoid the noxious effects of the frog's skin when I came along
to interrupt his lunch. Evidently because of their toxic skins, the
last wriggling tadpoles of wood frogs and American toads in drying
ponds often go uneaten. They die not by predation but by desiccation,
their massed bodies providing something of a breeding pool for flies.
The skinned frog had made it through his long overwintering until
spring summoned him from within the dark, protective earth to this
place of sun and bright water. Intent on mating, he failed to detect a
swift-moving shadow in the sky, and his song today was the last of his
life. Here is one of those meetings in time and place among living
things and seasons that are difficult to fully comprehend. A great
raptor, with a wingspan of three feet, has traveled far, perhaps four
thousand or five thousand miles, on updrafts and wind currents high
above the earth, to wintering grounds in South America and back again,
to drop from the sky and seize a two-and-a-half-inch frog who spent the
winter only a few inches in the earth, probably no more than a hundred
yards from the spring pool in which he was captured. It is no great
exaggeration to say that, by virtue of the broad-winged hawk and the
wood frog, this vernal pool, set among kames and boulder ridges in the
northeastern United States, has a link with the high mountains of
northern Peru.
With a hawk sweeping down from the sky and me wading the pool like an
enormously oversize heron, the frogs understandably keep out of sight.
I withdraw to one of the Reedgrass Pool's deepest areas, by the only
large rock in this sandy basin, a glacial erratic somehow separated
from the boulder-crowded ridge. Spotted turtles may bask on its lichen-
covered shoulders a week or two from now. I lean against it and look
out on the pool, well hidden by a screen of winterberry, a wetland
shrub so intricately branched it provides cover even in its leafless
state. This is one of my favorite watching places, and I try to keep as
still as possible, as long as possible, when I am here. This is not
easy during plague times of black flies, mosquitoes, or deer flies —
sometimes all of them at once.
From this lookout I have seen spotted turtles basking on mats of sedge
or grass, pursuing insect larvae and tadpoles, racing about in wild
courtship chases. Several times over my thirteen years of coming here I
have seen the froglike heads of young Blanding's turtles, among the
most elusive of the elusive, with their bright yellow chins just above
the water. Swamp sparrows are always busy along the water lines,
warblers and kinglets continually flit among branches just above my
head. I have heard unseen bitterns call at my shoulder when the reed
canary grass has grown to fill in all of the space above the water,
providing bird and man alike a virtual invisibility that allows an
uncommon closeness. On one occasion I watched a bittern suddenly emerge
at a channel-edge opening, seize a green frog, lift his head and neck
for a gulping swallow, then vanish in a screen of green and straw gold.
It was as if the reed canary grass had transformed itself into a
silent, stalking heron and then back into whispering grass. From this
same watery thicket I have observed mating water snakes intertwine and
developing spotted salamander larvae twitch in their eggs, deep within
the turgid jelly of their egg masses. I have seen predacious diving
beetles and caddis fly larvae bore into that same protective gelatinous
coating to eat eggs and larvae. On later-season visits, when the water
is only a little over ankle deep, I have looked on as tiny tandem
damselflies have dipped into the lingering shallows, depositing their
eggs, while metamorphosing wood frogs, still with tails, took their
first hops on soggy mattings of grass.
Had I been here a little earlier today, I'd have witnessed the broad-
winged hawk dropping from the sky and catching a wood frog. I am
curious as to how this worked. I assume the hawk must have behaved like
an osprey diving for fish and, with a precise strike of his talons,
taken the frog from the surface of the pool or just beneath it. These
frogs of forest floors are entirely aquatic when they are in vernal
pools. They do not haul themselves up on logs or sedge mats the way the
later-arriving green frogs and bullfrogs often do but keep low in the
water. They have no interest in feeding now; their sole aim is to
breed. At 46 degrees, the water is still numbingly cold, but these
frogs are quick-moving and at peak activity, causing me to marvel all
the more at the hawk's hunting agility. It is perhaps easier to
envision such an abundance of frogs in a steamy swamp, but wood frogs
are boreal animals, inhabiting much of Canada and a good part of
Alaska. Their range extends north of the Arctic Circle. They are at
home, and exceedingly lively, in icewater.
In time the frogs come back to the surface. Nn-nyerck repeated, then r-
r-r-,yurrk,yur-ruck,one or two bold or impatient males call,
advertising themselves to females. Soon the calls are repeated by
others, joining and overlapping, until a multitude of frogs is calling
at the same time, in a relentless chorus. How many frogs does it take
to make such a skull-impacting sound? And roughly half of those in the
pool are silent females. First the air comes boisterously alive with
sound, then the water with movement. Ripples everywhere, rushes at the
surface; these voices have bodies after all, long-legged bodies surging
through the water.
Each season a great band of wood frogs mates in reed canary grass
shallows at the edge of the deep cut just off the boulder. Another
numerous contingent takes to a deeper hollow about forty yards from
this site, in a broader spread of water with hummocks of inflated
sedge, surrounded by reed canary grass and bordered along its shoreward
margin by tussock sedge and a boglike shelf of sphagnum moss and
cranberry. When their mating rituals have been concluded, there will be
islands of eggs, on the order of five feet in diameter, worked into
weavings of grass and sedge just beneath the surface at each breeding
niche. Those who entrust their future generations to the temporary
habitat of a vernal pool evidently know where it will dry up last.
Within a few days of breaking out of the egg masses, the tadpoles
disperse in all directions, into all depths.
Frogs swim almost at my feet, just beyond the winterberry; chasings,
grapplings, escapings, and couplings resume, accompanied by the
unrelenting guttural implorations of eager males. The chorus, if this
noise can properly be called that, is wildly gladdening even as it
hurts my ears. Within a critical mass of sound, I can pick out at times
the brief, higher-pitched release call of a male who has been latched
on to by another male. In such a crowd, with so many insistent embraces
going on, mistakes can be made. I see that several females, who are
larger than the males and noticeably swollen with eggs, are in the grip
of two or three desirous suitors, none of whom is inclined to let go.
Ardor is such among these frogs that females ensnared by several males
sometimes drown. Aided by rough pads that develop on their thumbs
during the breeding season, males take unyielding holds. They may clasp
a female or hours or even several days. The ephemeral nature of the
season and the pools in which wood frogs reproduce dictates the
ferocious tenacity of the male's embrace.
I once saw a solitary pair in amplexus in a small, isolated pool late
in the breeding season. I saw no egg masses. The manner in which the
male gripped his intended mate suggested to me that he felt he had
found the only female of his kind in the world, and he would never let
her go. Another time I found a young bullfrog caught helplessly in the
clasp of a male wood frog. Intervention seemed appropriate here, and it
was easy to capture the tandem frogs, though the bullfrog made every
effort to evade me. I tried to gently separate the two but the wood
frog was as good as a living time lock. Gentleness getting me nowhere,
I attempted a forceful pulling apart, again to no avail. I then worked
carefully, but still forcefully, on the forearms and intertwined digits
of the wood frog, seized so tightly around the bullfrog that it must
have restricted his breathing. I worried that I might break one of his
arms, but I finally managed to pry the wood frog's front feet apart
(they were much like human hands) and open his forelegs enough to let
the bullfrog slip from his grasp.
It troubles me to interrupt these surging lives on the awakening edge
of spring, charged with and decidedly committed to sustaining their
species. But I am not a wood frog. My feet are numb, my legs approach
immobility, and my body is taking on a shiver, despite the April sun.
Though I know it's not possible, I try to make my departure go
unnoticed. My first slight turning, however, cuts off all sound but the
ripplings of diving frogs. That sound, too, dies off quickly. The
surface of the Reedgrass Pool grows still. An inadvertent magician, I
have made three hundred frogs disappear. Since I have already disturbed
them, I decide to check one of the traditional breeding niches, where
they lay a great communal island of egg masses. This communal nesting
is thought to foster warmer temperatures and more rapid development of
eggs in the center. Or it may help prevent desiccation of the innermost
eggs during drought years, when the pools may dry up before tadpoles
hatch, in case a refill comes in time to rescue the stranded eggs. The
massing may also serve to insulate central clusters from the deep
freeze that may follow breeding in some springs. The density of
communal egg masses may also restrict losses to predators who are able,
in varying degrees, to dig into the protective jellied coating. In any
case, it appears that a very high percentage of eggs escape
desiccation, freezing, and predation, and develop into tadpoles who
make their way out of the coating. It is at the tadpole stage that
predation takes a heavy toll. This reduction in numbers is necessary to
lessen an impossible competition for the vernal pool's rich, but by no
means inexhaustible, food resources.
I see no eggs in place, but find that I am present at the initial
moment. In sunken swirls of canary reed grass just beneath the surface,
I sight a pair of wood frogs in amplexus. Heads down, they face each
other, she holding on to grassy ropings with her front feet, he holding
on to her. The female is in the act of depositing and attaching an egg
mass, her long legs parted and extended around her sphere of eggs. At
extrusion, the mass appears as a rounded, tightly packed black ball of
eggs, like a wad of buckshot. The jelly coating will expand greatly
over the next day or two, to its more commonly seen configuration. Each
female lays from several hundred to two thousand eggs, in one or
several globular clusters; the males, still in amplexus, release their
fertilizing sperm over the eggs as they are deposited. The male's hind
legs are folded forward, his webbed feet set against the globe of eggs.
I cannot make it out clearly, but it looks as though he is helping her
to extrude her egg clutch. The gesture of his clenched forefeet and set
hind feet convey the impression that he is literally wringing the eggs
out of his mate. I have to wonder how this mass of fecundity could have
fit within her body. After deposition is completed, the female sinks to
the bottom, her formerly swollen body sunken in, flaccid. She indeed
looks as though she has been wrung out. The male swims away, indicating
that his mate has laid all of her eggs. He may remain in the pool and
perhaps attempt another mating, but the female, emptied of eggs, will
leave the pool as soon as she has recovered from her exhaustion. Not
wishing to hold up life processes that are from their very inception a
race against time, I wade out of the Reedgrass Pool.

The Forested Pool

April 30, 1:17 p.m. Clear, melodic calls of a northern water thrush
ring out from the stillness of a hemlock-shaded vernal pool. As young
green frogs detect my approach, they hop, screaming and splashing, into
the water from the wooded borders. I stand for a time at the southern
end of this 120-yard-long pool, where an outlet brook dashes down small
rocky spills and flows through a little pool ringed with mossy stones
and profuse with marsh blue violets on its way to join a river a mile
downstream. This is a richly vegetated vernal pool, with several
extensive stands of winterberry holly and dozens of tree-mound islands,
dominated by red maple and eastern hemlock, with occasional yellow
birch, a solitary red spruce, and a shrub understory composed primarily
of winterberry and highbush blueberry. After the water warms some, and
before it dries away, herbaceous water plants arise in sunlit areas
beneath openings in the tree canopy.
By virtue of its high crown of trees, this wetland could be classified
as a swamp, or forested wetland. At the same time, owing to its
topographic features and seasonality, and the fact that wood frogs and
spotted salamanders breed here, it is a vernal pool habitat. Although
it is linked with a river, this high woodland pool with its seasonal
outlet is inaccessible to fish. Wood frogs; Jefferson, blue-spotted,
and marbled salamanders; and fairy shrimp do not breed in waters fish
can enter. It appears that they are unable to withstand the predation
fish would bring to bear on their eggs and young. I have, however,
often found the egg masses of spotted salamanders in waters patrolled
by fish, generally where cloggings of vegetation might act, to some
degree, as fish screens. I once counted eighteen egg masses lying on
the perimeter of an open-bottomed pool, just out from dense sedge
growth where young chain pickerel, six to ten inches long, hid, in
their characteristic lancelike fashion, poised to torpedo after any
passing prey. I have also discovered egg masses in side-water shelvings
just off the main flow of swift streams populous with brook trout,
black-nosed dace, fallfish, and white suckers. It appears that spotted
salamander egg masses have some resistance to fish predation and that
the larval young are unpalatable to fish or capable of avoiding them.
For their part, fish press the margins, even to the point of death, in
seeking prey. As I searched a vernal pool in a hill region one night, I
caught sight of a quickly turning form, brownish, with light spots and
flecks, that spun out of my lantern beam and into sunken leaf drift. I
gently stirred the leaves with the handle of my net, unveiling a
sparkling, richly speckled native brook trout about seven inches long.
The pool had two inlets, one a seep feeding in through level ground
from a sedge and sphagnum source only twenty yards away, the other a
spring-fed rill that tumbled over stones and slipped under boulders and
tree roots. Both sources run dry each year well before the drying of
the vernal pool they flood. No fish could come by way of these feeds.
At full spring flood the pool has an outlet, a slip of water through a
shallow, leaf-clogged channel that descends to the gravelly run of an
intermittent stream. The trout had reached the luxurious vernal pool by
way of this minimal and perilous flood-time fish ladder. In order to
complete the final leg of his journey, I am certain he worked his way
sideways through wet leaves, as I have seen adults and fry do in
vegetation and even among small stones, in low water. He would have a
splendid season in the vernal pool's cold, well-oxygenated, spring-fed
water, with its abundance of insect and amphibian larvae. But it would
be a comparatively brief season, and in all likelihood a terminal one.
Once the water dropped below the level of the lowest lip of the pool,
the trout would be trapped. As groundwater-fed sources diminished, the
eight- to twenty-inch depths of the pool would shrink away, becoming
warm and oxygen-depleted. He might survive this phase, but he could not
survive the summer's drying out. Having found a number of brook trout
stranded in cut-off streambeds and streamside pools, I thought it
doubtful that this one would retreat before it was too late.
I am certain no fish could ever make the ascent from the river to the
Forested Pool. But, like most intermittent streams that have not been
intersected by roads, channelized, culverted, and stripped of their
riparian, or streamside, natural cover, the outlet is a travel corridor
for many animals, from juvenile green frogs to full-grown moose. I
walked this stream course one February day when it was silent, stilled
in ice, and drifted with two feet of snow. Along its narrow slalom run
through leafless trees were sets of running tracks and long slides,
unmistakable signs of a river otter's having used it as the final link
of his passage to the river from a large meadow pond a half mile away.
These networks of little streambeds need not hold running water to
serve as corridors for wildlife.
The Forested Pool is holding at full depth today, a-swim with little
velvety black wood frog tadpoles. Spotted salamander larvae, soon to
hatch, are clearly visible in their egg masses. There is something in
the nature of vernal pools, with their brimful springtime waters and
teeming life, that belies the often harsh reality of their temporality.
Like the amphibians who could not exist without them, vernal pools have
two lives, one aquatic, one terrestrial. Vernal pool habitats are as
varied as they are intricate and complex. Within their defining
commonality, every vernal pool I have come to know has its own
hydrologic and habitat signature, its own timing, its unique bestiary
and botany. This seems to me to be the case with all wetlands.
I wade into the pool from a mossy, hemlock-shaded bank, threading my
way through emergent shrubs, scattering wood frog tadpoles in all
directions as I cross winterberry shallows to an island mound crowned
by a tall, twin-trunked red maple. Its upper third is leafless from
dieback brought on by seasons of prolonged flooding. Hemlock saplings
and highbush blueberry skirt the taller maple trunks. All of these
woody plants are rooted together, forming a stilted mound on what was
once the base of a toppled hemlock. The trunk of this great tree, which
went down decades ago, lies in the pool, providing footings for an
archipelago of smaller shrub and sapling mounds. Deep accretions of
sphagnum moss cover the bases of these brushy islands, as well as the
sodden length of the hemlock log that reaches above water. A water
thrush works her teetering way through the gnarled twistings of aged
blueberry branches, bobbing with every step, repeatedly uttering her
crisp, metallic call note, whit . . . whit . . . whit. A pair nests in
or close by this forested wetland every year.
I have come here to look for other nesters, tiny ones who make no sound
and keep out of sight in the plush overhangs of sphagnum moss, a little
above the water line. Four-toed salamanders come here to breed. As
their name indicates, they have four toes on both front and hind feet,
while most salamanders have four in front and five behind. By this
point in the season females with egg clutches should be here. The water
thrush bobs and weaves her way out of sight and stops calling. I begin
my search, carefully lifting a handful of saturated sphagnum moss from
the thick outreaches and overhangs it has built out from root mounds
and the waterlogged tree trunk, replacing the moss as I work my way
along the water line. The third handful I lift reveals the red-brown
back of a salamander curled up with her eggs. After a moment of stunned
surprise, she slips away into the soaked and pliable inner depths of
the sphagnum. Her eggs are adhered singly, in a loose gathering, to the
pale moss in her nesting cavity. These diminutive salamanders, females
averaging about three inches, the males a little smaller, mate in late
summer and fall. In spring, females migrate to wetland nesting grounds
and deposit their eggs from three to eight inches or so above the water
line. Unlike the mole salamanders, who leave their breeding pools with
the first night rain after they deposit their egg masses, female four-
toed salamanders stay with their egg clutches, attending them until
they hatch, in five to eight weeks. The larval young, upon hatching,
wriggle down through the soggy matrix of their nest, which is commonly
sphagnum moss, but may be other mosses, mattings of grass roots, or
rotted wood, and drop into the water, where they live as aquatic gill-
breathers until their metamorphosis about six weeks later.
I continue along the fallen hemlock. Lifting sphagnum from knuckled
roots of blueberry mound, I uncover a large aggregation of eggs and a
pair of guardian females. One has twisted over onto her back. Her snow-
white underside, finely peppered with black dots, show sharply in the
dark, shadowy moss pocket. This habit of rolling over to flash a white
venter possibly startles would-be predators away from the eggs. Female
four-toed salamanders frequently nest communally, with one or several
staying to guard the entire complement of eggs. A single female's
clutch usually contains less than three dozen eggs; a nest holding more
then forty eggs is likely to be a communal one. The guardian females I
have uncovered hold in place a moment, one upright, the other on her
back. The distinct constriction at the base of the tail of this species
shows clearly on both. When they are seized by a predator, the tails
break off more readily than those of other species. The twitching,
detached tail occupies the predator as the tailless salamander escapes.
In time, a smaller, stubbier tail regenerates. The right-side-up female
soon wriggles swiftly through the moss and drops into the water, to
disappear in a dark hollow under her nesting mound. I quickly replace
the moss covering over the inverted one, who has not left her post. It
is hard to picture such tiny, soft-skinned animals, lacking fangs or
claws, in the role of guardians. Yet they are evidently able to drive
away a variety of predators, from ground beetles to shrews. Egg
clutches that receive maternal protection appear to be considerably
more successful than those left unattended.
Four-toed salamanders do not require vernal pool habitats in order to
breed and so are considered facultative rather than obligate vernal
pool species. I have found them nesting in a number of wetlands where
spotted salamanders and wood frogs breed. But I have also found females
guarding egg clutches in the sphagnaceous marsh and shrub-swamp
backwaters of a large, open pond and in a sphagnum-laden seep with only
an inch or two of standing water, sites that would not support breeding
by obligate vernal pool species.
3:02 p.m. After finding seven nest sites, I conclude my survey of the
Forested Pool. Piercing cries from high in the sky interrupt my
departure. Looking up, I see a pair of broad-winged hawks wheeling in
an open space in the canopy of budding red maples and dark hemlocks.
Suddenly they sweep together and begin a spectacular spiraling free
fall, tumbling over and under each other. They appear to clasp talons
briefly, with one hawk right side up and the other on his or her back.
I have never seen a bird upside down in the air before. They separate
and, without a wingbeat, ascend high again on an updraft, then repeat
their aerial acrobatics before circling high once more and careening
out of sight. Broad-winged hawks have swept just over my shoulder here,
as I've stood hidden on tree mounds in the pool. With shrill,
plaintive, descending hisslike cries they have protested my passing too
close to their nesting tree on my way to the pool. These raptors who
soar the high clear air and haunt the dark woods are not considered
wetland birds, but they hunt the Forested Pool regularly in its season
and nest close by. By way of its water and its wildlife, the Forested
Pool is part