The Salamander Situation

The weather today is frankly glorious in my garden. Yesterday it rained, and today it is in the seventies and sunny and the early humidity burned off nicely. Expecting a gardener to stay indoors on a day like today is frankly absurd. I was looking for my gardening gloves before I bothered to put on pants.

Just to wander around the garden at the moment is a delight. The snowdrops are blooming! The weird little hairy wood sedge is…doing a thing that involves seeds, so I guess that’s kind of blooming, although the flowers were nearly nonexistant! The spicebush is…well, blooming. Um. Yeah, about that? I have occasionally seen spicebush listed as a native alternative to forsythia, and as enthusiastic as I am about native alternatives to thuggish invasive plants, I think we may be setting up some false expectations here. They’re nice little flowers, they’re yellow-green and presumably on older specimens quite plentiful, but somebody expecting forsythia’s Visible-From-Orbit-Screaming-Nuclear-Butterscotch flowers…well, they may not be thrilled. Don’t get me wrong, I love spicebush. Me and spicebush are like that. If spicebush ever gets in a barfight, I will pull on my steel-toed boots and get right in there. (You hear that, spicebush? The gardener has your back, man!) Still, it’s its own thing, and should probably be treated as such.

…where was I? Right. Weather.

With great weather comes great responsibility, and before I can start mulching and clearing some of the dead leaves out of the shrubbery, I need to do some work on the Patio That Shall Not Be Named.

Working on the patio just about require earplugs, since it’s next to the pond, and the sounds of Upland Chorus Frogs are deafening. There is no room in the house where you cannot hear them, and they are going all day long, in all weather. An unexpected snowfall a few weeks ago did not dim their enthusiasm. They sound like a cross between a cricket and a zipper, they’re maybe the size of a fifty-cent piece, and they are LOUD.

Accompanied by the strains of a vast amphibian choir (all yelling some variation of “Hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey!”) I head out with my shovel. I am currently leveling part of the patio, even though I still have to excavate a chunk in the back, because frankly I am sick unto death of excavating. I was in the middle of this somewhat back-breaking process when I uncovered something extraordinary.

It's...sorta squishy?

This handsome little devil was wedged under a clod of dirt and chickweed roots, next to a cinder-block. He’s an Eastern Spotted Salamander, and I was so excited to see him that I dropped the shovel and whooped and did a little dance and then yanked out my phone to take a photo.

Eastern Spotted Salamanders are not particularly rare or unusual, but this is only the second one I’ve seen in the yard, and the first that I’m reasonably sure lives here. I am quite certain he moved in since the pond got dug, since salamanders absolutely positively require ponds to breed in. (There could actually be dozens—adults are highly secretive and hard to spot, only come out at night, and are generally tricky to find.) They like dark damp places, they cannot deal with pesticides, and they need either a permanent or seasonal pond nearby. They also eat slugs and snails, which is more than enough reason to give them everything they want in life, including little salamander-sized red carpets.

The trench I dug to place the cinder-blocks, having not yet been filled in and leveled, accumulated water and dirt and turned out to be a fabulous spot for a salamander to spend the night…or more than the night.

It occurred to me, as I carefully replaced the clump of sod over top of the salamander, that he might…um….live there. It certainly resembles an underground burrow of the sort that you would live in, if you happened to be an adult Eastern Spotted Salamander.

This could be a problem. You cannot exactly build a patio without touching a chunk of it—there’s sand and gravel and so forth to be spread, and you gotta fill in the trench or the patio tiles are going to tilt and settle awkwardly.

Am I really willing to hold off building half my patio to avoid inconveniencing one salamander?

Well, duh. Who did you think was writing this? A few earthworms are one thing—shovels are not precision instruments—but an Eastern Spotted Salamander can live upwards of twenty years. Plus they eat all kinds of slugs and snails and pests, plus oh my god it’s a salamander in my garden! How cool is THAT?

Nobody touches the salamander.

Now, I could go to my boyfriend and say “The patio is on hold until the salamander moves,” and he would accept this without question, the way he accepted that I needed nine cubic yards of mulch right away because I accidentally made a snake sad.* But I do eventually need to dig the thing, because any cleared space eventually turns into a mass of chickweed and crabgrass, which would then also need to be excavated, and also I would eventually like a patio, because I can’t add the big flower bed bordering it until it’s in place.

So I’ll go out tomorrow and see if Spotty has moved off in the night, which would really be the best scenario for everybody. And if he hasn’t…um. I guess I’ll go back to excavating on the other side of the patio. Salamander mating season is around the corner, and he’ll have good reason to move, to make the ten foot trek to the pond, meet a girlfriend, and deposit a mass of potential-salamanders attached to underwater vegetation.

And if it turns out that he lives there permanently…well…uh…

“Ursula, why does your patio have one tile missing, and a bunch of dirt piled up in the corner?”

“It’s a long story…”

*For a value of sad that includes “airborne.” Long story.

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