Romantic Rainy Nights––

It’s April: Do You Know

What’s Going On In Your Vernal Pool?

By Dottie Evans

In early spring, nature lovers of all ages want to be where the action is –– down at the local vernal pool.

So they don raingear, grab their flashlights, and head outside to those small, quiet standing bodies of water in nearby woods and wetlands that show up every spring and dry up every summer.

These ephemeral places are called vernal pools and they are the ancient breeding places where frogs and salamanders congregate in great numbers to mate and lay eggs.

After waking from hibernation, the amphibians leave the relative comfort of their dry burrows under logs or leaf litter and scurry into the icy cold water of vernal pools. Having found their ancestral breeding pools, the males announce their arrival by singing, calling, and generally displaying for the females.

To catch the mass migration as it happens, one must “think like a salamander,” advised Audubon Education Director Ellen Turner on Sunday, April 6.

Ms Turner led a group of visitors to one of the eight vernal pools that scattered across the 800-acre Bent of the River sanctuary in Southbury. As they walked, she talked about the critical issue of timing.

“It is best to go out after dark on a moist, rainy night that is not too cold. If you are lucky, you might see dozens of spotted salamanders all mating at the same time. It is a sight to remember,” she promised, describing roiling waters stirred up by writhing sinewy bodies and long flashing tails.

At least one member of Sunday’s group besides Ms Turner had seen the spectacle for herself.

“I’ll never forget it,” said Trumbull resident Cynthia Riegle.

“Now, I’ll never think about our little backyard pool in quite the same way, I won’t take it for granted. These places are precious and we have to protect them.”

It was a rainy April night a couple of years back, Mrs Riegle said, when her daughter had come running in from outside and told her to come quick. Something strange was happening in their “pond” and she should see it right away.

“We must have hit it just right,” she said.

The bluish black salamanders were everywhere, she said, flashing their yellow spots just under the surface of the water, “squirming and swimming around.”

Spotted salamanders are four to six inches long and they may lay up to 250 eggs in gelatinous masses that may be found attached to subsurface sticks or debris.

At the Bent’s vernal pool, observers found three clumps of salamander eggs. Within a few weeks, the eggs would hatch into tadpoles.

Here Today And Gone Tomorrow

Amphibians lay their eggs in vernal pools because the seasonal bodies of water dry up in the summer, meaning that no fish can live there. Fish are carnivorous predators that would quickly eat the frogs’ and salamanders’ eggs as well as the developing tadpoles.

Without fish patrolling the waters, the vernal pools provide a perfect amphibian nursery. They are a temporary sanctuary where the next generation of amphibians can grow until summer, when they are mature enough to crawl or hop out of the water.

Then they return to the fields and woodlands where they will spend the rest of the year.

Creatures born in water and moving onto the land –– it is like the process of evolution itself being repeated each spring. After hibernating deep in the mud over the long winter, the amphibians emerge and return to the vernal pools to breed and the cycle is completed.

Audubon Center Manager John Longstreth wrote recently about amphibian migration in the organization’s spring newsletter, The Kingfisher.

“Salamander enthusiasts have been known to spend rainy spring nights acting as crossing guards where the salamanders’ ancient migration routes take them onto heavily traveled roads.”

In England, where all vernal pools are protected, some towns have built strategically placed tunnels under busy roadways for use by frogs, toads, and salamanders on the move.

In the United States, towns are becoming more and more aware of the importance of protecting vernal pools from being filled in during development, added Ms Turner.

Newtown’s Vernal Pools Are Protected

Newtown Conservation Director Steve Driver said Friday he is aware of several vernal pools in town, “though there may be hundreds more that we don’t know about,” he added.

“People need to submit information about them if they are on private property. When we know about vernal pools, they are protected under state statute,” Mr Driver said.

“A vernal pool is one of the first things the Conservation Commission looks for when someone comes in with a plan for development,” he added.

“There is a big one in Botsford that you can see from High Ridge Road, where an industrial building project variance has just been approved by the Zoning Board of Appeals.”

The approval came with the stipulation that a large conservation easement would be established as a buffer area around the pool. But the application still has to pass through Planning and Zoning, Mr Driver added.

Many Newtown residents are lucky to have vernal pools in their neighborhoods, he said, but they might not know what they are.

There are clues, however, and watching the changing ecosystem around a vernal pool as the year progresses is one way of identifying it.

First, one would hear the spring peepers and the quacking of wood frogs late in March.

Then the wading birds and possibly a pair of ducks might arrive.

In warm weather, the dragonflies cruise the surface and defend their territories.

Walking alongside a vernal pool in late spring, one might surprise green frogs. With a yelp of alarm, they leap back into the water at the sound of an approaching footstep.

On the far shores of a larger pool, bullfrogs croak and herons prowl.

If it is a true vernal pool, however, by late summer the area will have dried to a mucky bog and the herons and frogs will have moved on.

Long-since hatched from their eggs, the salamanders and frogs have moved on also.

Next spring when the waters return, they will be back to breed –– always on a rainy night.