I recently went out of town and found myself driving back to Holderness from Boston on Sunday night, after dark. It had been pretty warm and sunny during the day, but as I drove up 93, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees, and it started to rain a little. I didn’t really give the rain a second thought beyond driving a little more carefully because driving on an otherwise calm, rainy spring night doesn’t seem that big of a deal. And it wasn’t, until I saw the first frog in the middle of the highway and remembered that it’s amphibian migration season, and I was about to commit so many atrocities with my vehicle. The first couple miles of Route 3 coming out of Ashland were covered in frogs, big and small, dead and possibly alive. I had to restrain myself from swerving all over the road, trying not to crush them.
Peep this spring peeper
In the spring, many amphibian species will migrate to seasonal vernal pools to lay eggs in a fish-free environment. Because these migration routes have been used for generations, they often predate human roads. The amphibians will cross those roads to return to their vernal pools, resulting in significant mortality rates.¹ Organizations like the Harris Center, whose Salamander Crossing Brigade SLA’s LRCC attended, have organized volunteer programs to mitigate population loss via roadkill. A couple of weeks ago, we donned our reflective vests, headlamps, and rain gear, and headed out to a couple of likely migration areas.
A spotted salamander
The idea here is pretty simple. You find a location that will probably have a lot of amphibians crossing the road, and that is also safe enough for you to not get hit by a car. You wait for a rainy night above 40 degrees, and you head out to the site. You see an amphibian on the road, and you carry it across the road to where it’s trying to go. You record your observations of both living and dead frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts. You repeat this until you’re too cold and tired to continue. On this particular night, we were out moving amphibians from about 8 to 11pm. The site I was at wasn’t particularly high traffic, but the location on the east side of the lake moved nearly 200 amphibians across the road.
A different spotted salamander (you can identify them by their unique spot patterns!)
I don’t have a background in wildlife biology and had never done fieldwork like this before, so it was very exciting for me to be involved. I was surprised at how un-intimidating and straightforward the whole process was (walking around in the rain and dark and picking up frogs is less daunting than knocking on strangers’ doors and asking them if they feel like they can afford to buy groceries, as it turns out!²). And of course that’s kind of the point of participatory science projects like this–making science more inclusive and collaborative to engage the average person, and in doing so both increasing capacity for monitoring and data collecting, and helping people cultivate a positive, personal relationship with nature.
¹ Trevor Beebe writes in an article in Conservation Biology that “road mortality is a widely recognized but rarely quantified threat to the viability of amphibian populations.” Maine Big Night, another volunteer amphibian crossing program, has reported 20-30% mortality rates between 2019 and 2023.
² Not to knock community food assessments, which I would participate in again….
Maria is serving at the Squam Lakes Association as a Trails and Access Assistant. Her favorite sweet treat is basbousa, a syrup-soaked semolina cake. Learn more about Maria here!