It’s a dark and stormy late-March night. There’s a thick layer of fog over Keene, New Hampshire. Dozens of people walk slowly down a road that curls around the Woodland Cemetery, back and forth, flashlights in hand, eyes trained on the pavement.
Despite the scary movie setting, laughter and soft coos of wonder cut through the still air. Everyone looks right at home, glowing in their reflective vests and juggling clipboards where they’ll keep track of how many amphibians cross this road.
This is what scientists and amphibian enthusiasts call big night: the warm, rainy spring evenings when a huge migration is taking place – millions of frogs, toads and salamanders wiggling out of hibernation and into the world to create new life.
It’s been a yearly routine for New England’s amphibians since glaciers disappeared roughly ten thousand years ago.
But human inventions, like cars, and climate change have made their lives more treacherous. This group of volunteers in Keene is trying to make things right by helping these amphibians get safely across the road to their mating sites.
Brett Thelen, the science director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education, has been helping out on big nights for almost two decades. Now, she organizes a team of volunteers — a salamander crossing brigade.
The brigade doesn’t stop the cars. They’re more like bodyguards, picking up the little critters with clean, wet hands to give them a fast track to the other side of the road.
Thelen recommends a technique called “the claw,” like a claw machine at an arcade. Peepers hop into her fingers, and she closes her hands around them to gently cart them off to dirt at the edge of the pavement.
When she picks up a spotted salamander, it rests in her palm.
“He’s going to go over to the beaver wetland there and eventually deposit some spermatophores,” Thelen explains to the crowd. “Little packets of sperm that look like breadcrumbs. Eventually, hopefully, a female will find them and use them to fertilize her eggs.”
‘Running’ New England’s ecosystems
Usually, amphibians are looking for vernal pools, seasonal bodies of water that fill up with snowmelt and rain in the spring. Those are bad habitats for fish and other predators, which makes them a safe spot for raising babies.
There, the travelers will rear the next generation of frogs, salamanders and newts – key species that provide nutrients for creatures all around New England and sequester carbon in soil.
Amphibians are essentially the engine of New England’s ecosystems, said Greg LeClair, the executive director of Maine Big Night and a biologist with Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
In fact, he says, if one were to put all the Eastern red-backed salamanders – one common salamander species – on one side of a scale, and put all the other birds, mammals and reptiles on the other side, the salamanders would weigh more.
“They’re probably really running these ecosystems,” he said. “We’re talking like, nutrient exchange, energy exchange, all sorts of things.”
But before they can start procreating, amphibians need to survive human infrastructure – the roads we’ve built and the cars that hurtle down them. Roads on big night can be a pretty devastating sight, Thelen said.
“For the first ten years of the project, on a night like this, I would hate to go home,” she said. “Even when we were out here, a few cars coming through with this many frogs on the road could leave a lot of dead in their wake.”
Now, the road Thelen frequents on big nights, North Lincoln Street, is closed to cars when conditions are right for amphibian migration. She says that took years of discussions with the City of Keene.
But there are hundreds of other sites throughout New England where volunteers brave wet, dark roads – and the cars that come down them – to provide safe passage. In her yearly introduction for brigade members, Thelen reminds people not to jump in front of any moving vehicles to save a salamander.
Climate change poses challenges to mating grounds
Volunteers say they think of these nights as righting a human wrong, trying to counter some of the ways that roads and cars have made amphibians’ lives harder. As warm, rainy nights come earlier each year, the threat of another human-caused hazard, climate change, looms.
“The first thing we’re always waiting on is for the ground to thaw, the snowpack to melt,” Thelen said. “We’re having less and less snow, smaller and smaller snow packs.”
Last year, frogs started crossing at North Lincoln Street on Feb. 28th – the second-earliest crossing in 17 years of recordkeeping.
Aram Calhoun, an emerita professor of wetland ecology and conservation at the University of Maine, said she worries about how climate change is affecting amphibian habitat throughout the whole annual cycle.
“These winters that we’ve been having with less snowpack and more ice cause a lot of mortality of some of the amphibian species,” she said.
For example, wood frogs that spend winter in shallow burrows may not have enough insulation to stay warm if the snowpack isn’t thick enough.
When spring comes, unpredictable rainfall can complicate the conditions in vernal pools.
“One year we had a very dry spring and the new egg masses were hanging off the bushes and out of the water,” she said.
By the time rains came in mid-summer, many of the eggs had already dried out. Calhoun also worries if floods create puddles, amphibians could breed there instead of in their pools.
Amphibians are generally tied to the pools they hatched in. Calhoun says up to 98% of the animals return to the pools where they were born. Their ability to adapt to changes in the landscape lies with the youth.
“Think of them as roving teenagers who set out for new frontiers and say, ‘I’m sick of my family. I’m sick of everything. I’m going to go see if there’s other pools to populate,’” she said. “It is those dispersers that we depend upon to keep populations going.”
Their abilities to adjust to changes in their pools are also threatened by human development, Calhoun said. She has spent much of her career advocating for the protection of connected landscapes, rather than just vernal pools, so amphibians can find new places to breed and have space to adapt as the climate changes.
The new stressors on amphibians make the work of crossing brigades even more important, Calhoun said.
“It’s just so unpredictable lately,” she said, “Which is an even stronger cry for making the rest of their life histories easier.”
The easiest way to help is not driving on rainy spring nights. For those who want to join the effort to help connect amphibians to their pools, Katy Luscombe might have some advice. She’s been bringing her kids out for big nights in Keene for years.
“When we drive home, we’re super careful. We try and brake for them. Sometimes the kids and I will get out of the car in the cemetery and go out and clear the frogs out of the front of the car,” she said.
Luscombe says she had never heard of big night before she started participating. But her whole family looks forward to it now.
“It makes me happy,” she said. “Rainy days are hard, and helping to cross the amphibians is like a little ray of sunshine.”
This story was originally published by NHPR. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
