Living Along the Appomattox – Salamanders
May 18 '03
The Bottom Line Wherein The Dragon and her long-suffering Consort don waders to invade dark swamps and capture an elusive mole salamander. securing a County record.
(N.B. Many (well, ok, at least two!) of you have been clamoring to read my column, published weekly in the Appomattox Times-Virginian newspaper. And this despite the fact that most of them consist of large helpings of heartwarming, innocuous fluff. However, to allay further urgings on the part of my fans, I have decided to re-publish selected columns here in the Writers Corner. This is exactly how they look in the paper, sorry about the lack of witty paragraph headings; my editor can't quite master their use....)
It turns out that Appomattox County has a new state critter record. This is pretty exciting to those of us who are interested in frogs and salamanders and has been cause for much jubilant celebration.
The critter in question has been living here all along but he was only dredged up from his cozy home at the bottom of a pond (whose location will not be revealed in this column to protect the innocent) last Wednesday night. Said critter is a mole salamander, alas one of the less gaily colored of the salamander tribe, but interesting nonetheless.
Mole salamanders are not particularly common in Virginia and can only be found in a few locations around the state. Once upon a time there may have been lots of them, back when dinosaurs roamed the piedmont, but today we are lucky if we find one amongst a mob of the more common spotteds.
Mr. Mole was caught in a minnow trap baited with a green glo-stick by a small group of herp-lovers under the supervision of Mike Hayslett of the Holiday Lake 4H Educational Center. Mike plans to make this an annual event but this year was the first meeting of the Spring Pools Institute and Bill and I were two of the guinea pigs lucky enough to participate in the inaugural outings.
Ten herp-lovers from all over Virginia gathered at Holiday Lake on the morning of March 12 to don waders and prepare to collect frogs, salamanders, toads, and other species dependent on the presence of so-called vernal pools (also known as seasonal wetlands or ephemeral ponds or wicked big puddles). Farmers in the county are familiar with these upland swamps that mysteriously appear on their land in late winter but may not be aware of the diverse number of animals that depend on them to breed and raise their young.
We traveled to numerous sites in Appomattox, Amherst, Nelson, and Buckingham counties, both during the day and at night. There is nothing quite like the thrill of wading into a pool of water in a still forest in the dead of night. While we were concentrating on finding spotted salamander and wood frog egg masses it was hard not to notice the bats and night birds that were all around us in the dark. These big puddles take on an entirely different aspect when viewed with a headlamp after dark, some might find it a bit sinister, even creepy.
However, the truth is, there is not much out there to worry about. We did not lose a single naturalist to hungry alligators and no one suffered overmuch from tussling with the dense growths of greenbrier…nothing that a little Neosporin and a few stitches could not fix, at any rate.
The three-day workshop was considered by all to be a smashing success and we are all looking forward to the next one. Who knows where else we might find the elusive moles now that we know they are in Appomattox County, with luck, we can soon add Prince Edward and Buckingham to the state list.
Comments or questions? Email me at pamela@thedragonweyr.com.
This column originally appeared in the March 19, 2003 issue of the Appomattox County, Virginia, Times-Virginian.
© 2003 Pamela Matlack Klein
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