A spotted salamander on migration night. (Courtesy of Sunnyside Farm and Conservancy)
I am standing on the edge of a woods, in total darkness, shivering. My Gore-Tex jacket has proved to be no match for the soaking rain, which has now intensified -- as has the nearby thunder. For a moment, I am questioning my decision to drive two hours through rush-hour traffic on Interstate 66 to be here, on a weeknight, slipping in mud on the edge of a murky pond.
But I have come because this is the night the animal world announces the arrival of spring.
"They're over here!" calls the biologist in our group, Jennifer Servis. I walk carefully in the direction of her headlamp, over rocks and tree roots. And then I see them: first one, then another, then dozens of them, crawling out from under the trees and toward the water.
I pick one up and hold it in my hand: Its smooth skin is a purplish gray, and it is covered from head to tail in bright yellow dots, as if painted by a child. It sits calmly in my hand, peering back at me with big, curious eyes, its closed mouth forming a line that looks very much like a grin.
What? You were expecting Punxsutawney Phil?
The famed groundhog, 200 miles to the north, has heralded spring with an accuracy rate of 30 percent -- worse than flipping a coin. If you really want to know when spring arrives, you'll need to ask the spotted salamanders. They've been doing it right for millions of years.
They also happen to be the most adorable animal most people never see. That's because they spend almost their entire lives underground, in burrows or under rocks, emerging only at night to feed. This changes abruptly on the night of the first "warm" rain of spring (the amphibian's idea of warm, about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, is significantly chillier than my own), when spotted salamanders emerge en masse from the ground and migrate toward vernal pools, which are temporary ponds that dry up in summer. Usually it happens in late February. This year, because of the cold winter, it was the first week of March. If the weather is volatile, there might be a number of smaller migrations over time.
But migrate they always do -- and those humans who check the forecast carefully have an annual chance to see these beauties, which look more imaginary (Barney? E.T.?) than real. In fact, they share a genus with a cartoon character. Mexico's Ambystoma mexicanum, the feathery-gilled salamander known as the axolotl, has been popularized by the computer game Minecraft and, though endangered in the wild, is a sought-after pet and plush doll. Happily, its spotted cousin, Ambystoma maculatum, lives in great abundance in its native range across much of the East Coast of the United States. But you have to see them on the night of their spring migration; otherwise, you'll only find them by chance, if one is under a rock you overturn in the forest.
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In these chaotic days in the affairs of humans, there's something soothing about the dependability of the salamander's migration. President Donald Trump is driving us into recession and trade wars. Elon Musk is recklessly sabotaging the federal government. They've both plowed over the constitutional safeguards we thought were in place. But our little spotted friends continue to do what they have done since they first appeared here between 3 million and 5 million years ago: making their annual crawl to the water to procreate. "Migration," like the term "warm," is a relative one with salamanders. Some birds migrate thousands of miles. Spotted salamanders migrate a few hundred feet. They'll stay in the water for a mating season that lasts only a few days, then return to the woods.
But what a few days it is! "It's just a wild party," says Brian Gratwicke, a scientist with the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, and one of the world's top experts on amphibians. Once underwater, the animals congregate in large groups and perform a kind of mating dance, an amphibious orgy dubbed the "liebesspiel" (German for "lovemaking"). Males deposit fluffy white sperm packets, called "spermatophores," on vegetation on the pond bottom, then each competes for a female by nudging her with his snout in an attempt to get her to choose his spermatophore. The female, once she makes her choice, straddles the spermatophore and inserts it into her body.
She eventually deposits large, gelatinous egg masses containing as many as 250 eggs (often fertilized by multiple fathers). These hatch in a month or two, and the larvae, similar to tadpoles, metamorphose in another two to four months and are ready to leave the pool. The vast majority are eaten by predators or die because the pool has dried up. But the survivors can live 20 or more years -- returning to the same pool to breed every year.
Few in the Washington region are aware that we live in what Gratwicke calls "the world's biodiversity hot spot for salamanders." Appalachia is the world's capital of amphibian life, and Virginia is "the capital of the capital." In one Virginia study, Gratwicke found as many as 32,000 redback salamanders per hectare -- which means that there was a greater combined biomass of these tiny critters in the region than of deer or birds. Among the dozens of species here are giant "hellbender" salamanders and Amphiuma salamanders that look like eels. The endangered Shenandoah salamander lives on just a few north-facing peaks in Shenandoah National Park. There are tiger salamanders, Jefferson salamanders, four-toed salamanders -- and, of course, the spotted salamanders.
Like most life on Earth, amphibians are in trouble. The global biodiversity crisis, caused by habitat loss, climate change, pesticides and the like, is causing animal populations to shrink almost across the board, and many species are heading for extinction. A 2013 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found amphibians declining in this country at a nearly 4 percent annual rate -- not as bad as in some parts of the world but still catastrophic over time -- in large part because we've been draining the wetlands where they reproduce. The good news: It's so much easier to reverse the amphibians' decline than it is with most animal populations, and just about everybody can help. Just dig a hole in a spot where water pools.
"In your backyard, you can go with a shovel and dig a hole and suddenly you've got an amphibian factory," Gratwicke recommends. "Any time you create a fishless vernal pool like that, they'll find it and they'll breed in it."
Toads, he says, will probably find your pool the first year it is dug, and over time you might see gray tree frogs, red-spotted newts, spring peepers, upland chorus frogs, wood frogs and spotted salamanders.
I dug a vernal pool on my farm, following Gratwicke's instructions: a circle about 10 feet in diameter and no more than two feet deep. As with most of my first attempts at projects on the farm, it failed. The rainwater quickly drained out of it, a problem that could have been avoided if I had put down a pond liner.
My second attempt looks more promising. A guy with a backhoe helped me restore an old cattle pond on the property, deepening it and repairing the dam. The pond is spring fed and will probably have some water in it year-round, which will invite bullfrogs and green frogs and may deter other amphibians. But it's all good: Just a few nights after we restored the pond, I could already hear the spring peepers.
My friend Nick Lapham is, as usual, way ahead of me. The owner of Sunnyside Farm and Conservancy outside Washington, Virginia (you can subscribe to see his extraordinary wildlife videos), dug out an old cattle watering hole and lined it to make a 25-foot-wide vernal pool in summer of 2023, one of a few on his farm. This was the one I visited, just 18 months later, on the night of the spotted salamander migration. It was exploding with amphibian life.
The high-pitched whistles from the spring peepers (the inch-long critters' vocal sacs inflate to amplify their calls) were so loud that I had to cover my ears at times. In harmony, hundreds of wood frogs were calling, making a lower-pitched sound more like hens clucking or ducks quacking. In the pool, the frogs were chasing, tangling and whirling with each other in various stages of procreation. "This is nuts!" Lapham shouted above the din as he stuck his GoPro camera into the pool.
Then Servis, Sunnyside's conservation director, and her husband, Ed Myers, a herpetologist, found the salamanders. Once I knew where they were coming from, I could watch, with my headlamp, their slow-motion purple parade as they crept from behind rocks and trees and toward the water, which they can apparently smell. Once in the pool, they were far more dexterous, swimming as though they had spent their lives there. They busily circled each other at the bottom of the pond, occasionally swimming to the surface for a quick gulp of air and then returning to their business. In another, less murky pond nearby, we could see the results of their labors: the white spermatophores on the bottom of the pool, and the improbably large egg sacs stretching from branches in the pond.
As I watched these animals nearing the end of their painfully slow migration, I fought the urge to pick each one up and help it over the last few yards and into the pond. They didn't need my help. Lapham had already given them everything they needed, by rebuilding a small piece of the habitat that has sustained the spotted salamander for millions of years. Nature would take care of the rest.