The Mast-Head: Into the Woods

One of the big surprises about the woods on the East End is that they are full of nearly invisible life among the leaf litter despite so much development and other changes. The deer have opened up the understory vegetation, sending certain birds species elsewhere, but the amphibians persist. 

Andy Sabin, who founded the South Fork Natural History Museum, is considered the king of salamander hunters here. He is leading a series of nighttime walks this month for museum guests during which encounters with these secretive creatures are all but certain. I tagged along on one such outing some years back; they are quite something and not to be missed.

Guests assemble at the museum to be led to a location kept on the down low for fear of poachers. Yes, apparently, there are people who want to collect rare and endangered amphibians and might pay to obtain them. On the night I went on the walk, we parked at a cul-de-sac in a hilly section of woods and embarked, headlamps and flashlights lit, into the gloom.

The salamanders specific to the Northeast have evolved a particularly innovative breeding strategy. As snowmelt and winter rains fill low places with water, they emerge from hibernation to lay eggs in so-called vernal pools (a lovely phrase or earthly drag-queen name, perhaps). Once the eggs hatch, young salamanders creep off into the woods to forage on their own, grow, and get ready to return to the pools years later in winter’s ebb to mate.

Andy has chased their seasonal rounds for decades. During the exploration I attended, he pulled on hip boots and, with a dip net, waded into a thigh-deep pond to ladle a few tiger salamanders into a white plastic bucket. They were large, larger than I thought they would be, draping their black and yellow-blotched forms well over Andy’s cupped hands as he showed them to the roughly 15 of us taking part. 

Andy will lead three more salamander searches this year. Information about how to join him is available from the museum.