You know your husband hasn't been toeing the party line and peeing on the compost pile when you see clusters of swallowtails like this.  I don't mind foregoing the garden fertility for such a dose of beauty.


We live remarkably close to nature despite all of our mowing and weeding and manipulating the environment around our trailer.  For example, a chorus frog moved into the drainage ditch beside the East Wing last week and yesterday a toad joined him.  Blobby clusters of chorus frog eggs and long strands of toad eggs now grace the puddle, and I can't decide whether to hope this spring's relentless rain eases up so that we no longer have to wade through ankle-deep mud, or whether I want it to keep raining so the tadpoles-to-be will turn into insect-eaters.

At night, a spider comes to spin her web outside our kitchen window.  I watch as she teases long strands of silk out of her abdomen and ponder how much we change the natural world just by turning on a light to read by.  In the end, I decide that I'm heartened by knowing that our disturbances don't just help the invasives, but also give our frogs and spiders a spot to thrive.

I haven't been able to keep you up to date on the crescendo of spring --- wildflowers unfurling, migrants arriving, and tree leaves poking out of buds.  With new faces and songs greeting me each morning, I've been too overwhelmed to post anything.  Maybe this picture will be worth a thousand words.

I live on a plateau raised about fifteen feet above a swampy floodplain, so I assumed the toad I heard calling last night was down there in the damp.  But it sounded awfully loud....  When the toad started trilling again this evening, I braved the rain and caught him in the act...sitting on a floating piece of wood in the kiddie pool I use to soak my shiitake and oyster mushroom logs.  I guess a bit of duckweed and a place to sit turn a kiddie pool into toad habitat.  Now where will I soak my mushrooms?

If you want to be an instant expert, learning frog and toad calls is the way to go.  Chances are, you probably have a dozen or fewer species living in your area, so you can't get too confused.  Better yet, frogs and toads start calling one or two at a time --- first the peepers and chorus frogs, then the Wood Frogs and toads, then the summer frogs.  By the time July rolls around, you'll know them all!

But you'd better hit the woods now or you'll miss the early callers.  I captured our Wood Frogs in the embedded video last week, and I expect the high trill of the American Toads to join the chorus any day now.

I like to scout likely puddles, ponds, and marshy areas during daylight, then head out after dark to hear the calls at their peak.  All it takes to learn frog calls is a wet night over 50 degrees Fahrenheit and a flashlight.

If you want to brush up on your calls before you go out, the Patuxet Wildlife Research Center has a fun frog quiz --- you select your state and the site will test you on all of the local species.  I had trouble getting those sound files to work, though, and had better luck with the Frogs and Toads of Tennessee website. 

Do you have a favorite online source for frog and toad calls?  Leave a comment and let us know.

I started reading about frogs and toads early one February, wanting to be prepared for their calls on damp spring nights when they sing to the raindrops.  Frogs and toads (and the salamanders I wrote about earlier) are amphibians, close relatives of the first vertebrates to make their way out of the water about 350 million years ago.  Although some amphibians would later evolve into reptiles that could leave their ocean heritage behind in the egg, amphibians never quite made that final evolutionary leap.  Instead, frogs and toads migrate to lakes, ponds, rivers, and puddles every spring to lay their eggs.  Their offspring hatch into swimming larvae --- tadpoles --- and then eventually crawl out of the water, recreating that long ago journey of discovering life above the surface.

Fifty degrees is the magical temperature that tempts the earliest frogs and toads out of hibernation, but only if the night is wet as well as warm.  On the evening of February 26, the first rainfall came, and I grabbed a flashlight to search for frogs.  Sure enough, Northern Spring Peepers had begun to call from the shallow vegetation along the water's edge, hesitant at first but turning into a chorus as the rain thundered down.  Soon, the chuckle of a Wood Frog joined them from a nearby puddle, and by March, toads had begun to trill in puddles.  All of these singers were males, each one intent upon attracting a mate and passing on his genes.

In daylight, I could see egg masses left behind from the night's orgy.  Peeper eggs are laid singly in the vegetation and are invisible to my eyes, but Wood Frog eggs expand into bulbous masses and toad eggs are laid in long strings, winding back and forth through the shallow water.  Each transparent egg is speckled with a tiny black embryo of the growing tadpole within.

As I scouted nursery puddles one chilly morning, I discovered a mating pair of Wood Frogs.  I cracked the thin ice above them with my fist and pulled the pair out, an easy feat since their metabolism was slowed by the frigid water.  To my surprise, the male showed no signs of loosening his stranglehold, with one foreleg wrapped around the female’s neck and the other just behind one of her front legs.  After a moment, I lowered them back into the water and the female swam quickly away to bury herself into the mud on the pond bottom, leaving the male exposed above her except for a cap of mud on his head.  He would cling to her for hours until she was ready to lay her eggs, then would release his sperm above them, fertilizing the eggs as they were laid.  The mass of eggs would expand as the water soaked into each clear capsule, growing from small enough to fit in the female’s body to the six inch masses now dotting the puddles around me.

Spring advanced and more species began to call.  One day, while making my rounds, I noticed the first toad eggs hatching, tiny black tadpoles valiantly struggling free of the encircling membrane, then lying stunned on the puddle bottom to recover their strength.  By the time the summer-loving Green Frogs and Pickerel Frogs began to mate, the puddles were beginning to dry up and the Wood Frog tadpoles were quickly growing legs to escape to the land.

Every year since, I've listened for the first spring frogs, and sought out their eggs in nearby puddles.  As the year progresses, more species will join the mating dance, until only the peepers are left still singing as summer turns to fall.

Old forests like those along the Cliff Trail are a perfect place to witness one of central Appalachia’s specialties --- salamanders.  These little critters are amphibians, related to frogs and toads, but are often overlooked since most of them spend their days hidden under leaves, logs, or rocks where they can stay moist.  Only at night do they come out to hunt insects, mate, and defend their territories, each activity being facilitated by the salamanders’ keen sense of smell.

Although salamanders can be found throughout Europe, Asia, and North America (and here and there in South America), they reach a peak of diversity here in the the southern Appalachian mountains.  Like our cove hardwood forests, our current Appalachian salamanders can be traced back a few million years to the Pliocene, when dry temperatures turned most of the eastern United States into grassland.  The ancestors of our modern salamanders were trapped on “islands” of mountain forest separated by grassy plains in the valleys.  Since the salamanders were unable to survive in the dry grasslands, each group of salamanders mated only with other salamanders in its immediate area.  Over thousands of years, these populations became inbred and developed traits different from those shown by salamanders on the next mountain over.

When the grasslands receded and the forests crept down off the mountaintops to coat the entire eastern United States, the salamanders came with the trees.  But so much time had elapsed that salamander groups which had begun as the same species were no longer able to successfully reproduce with related salamanders from a different island.  On one mountain island, for example, the salamanders had evolved to survive in talus heaps at the bases of cliffs while on another mountain island the salamanders had evolved to live on the forest floor.  These two populations of salamanders had transformed from one species into two.

Until recently, scientists did not realize how far the Appalachian salamander evolution had progressed.  Our region’s largest genus of salamanders --- the Plethodon salamanders --- was thought to contain only 16 species as recently as 1962.  Now that number has nearly tripled.  Where did all of these new species come from?  They certainly did not evolve in the last fifty years.  Instead, advances in technology have allowed us to untangle the DNA of salamanders and discover that many salamanders that look alike to the human eye are unable to breed with each other and are in fact distinct species.  The Northern Slimy Salamander you find on Sugar Hill, for example, could be any one of 16 species.  Like a human child searching for his real father, a DNA test would be necessary to distinguish between the types of Northern Slimies.

Although I am not equipped to tease apart the exact identities of salamanders on Sugar Hill, I am always ready to spend an afternoon hunting down these secretive members of the animal kingdom.  Salamanders are sparse in young woods, but it never takes long to find a salamander in a mature forest like that found on the side of Sugar Hill.  In fact, salamanders are near the top of the forest floor food chain and are often so numerous in mature forests that they outweigh all of the birds and mammals from that same area combined.  Just imagine how many salamanders it would take to outweigh a single deer.

With such great numbers, salamanders are not hard to find.  Creeks and their banks are often home to the Northern Dusky Salamander and the Southern Two-lined Salamander, one of the Northern Slimy Salamanders can be found in nearly every moist forest, and dry forests are often full of Red-backed Salamanders.  All told, the southern Appalachian mountains are home to 101 salamander species, about a quarter of which can be discerned using the naked eye in our part of southwest Virginia.  As long as you do not get too caught up in figuring out the exact species, turning over logs in search of salamanders can consume many a pleasant afternoon.

Two enthusiastic ten year olds, a sullen teenager, and half a dozen adults carefully tip back logs and flat rocks. We spread out across the moist woodland, each hooked by this ecological treasure hunt. Then ---

“I found one!” hollers a ten year old. She holds aloft a black salamander liberally sprinkled with silver speckles.

“I want to hold it!” demands her brother, the formerly sullen teenager.

“You probably shouldn't...” I begin, but before the words make it out of my mouth, the brother has the Slimy Salamander carefully cupped in his hands.

“...hold it,” I end my thought, too late to prevent super-glued fingers on two kids. The Slimy Salamander is named for its ability to secrete a sticky substance that it uses to deter predators, I explain to the crowd. Birds and other critters often opt to spit the salamander out rather than gulp down the goo. Unfortunately for us, the sticky secretion dries like glue on your hands after you handle the salamander. The teenager no longer seems keen on holding his sister's prize, so we put the salamander back under its log and head up the trail in search of other ecological adventures.

An hour later, I turn my hikers loose. One mother lags behind and heads my way.  Uh oh, I think, she discovered the super glue effect. But all she wants to talk about is how much she and her kids enjoyed the hike. “I learned so much!” she gushes. “But I know I won't remember a tenth of it.”

I have been leading nature hikes in the central Appalachian mountains for nearly a decade, and I constantly hear this refrain. This website and book is the solution to that dilemma. I have compiled tales that highlight the region's ecology so that you can peruse them at your leisure. Here, you will find all of the stories I tell on hikes, wrapped up into a trail guide to one of the most diverse tracts of land in southwest Virginia. So put on your hiking boots and head to Sugar Hill to see central Appalachia's diversity with your own eyes!