Vernal pool activity

It's that time of year again when salamanders and wood frogs head to vernal pools and spring peepers fill the air with their chorusing.  We had no luck finding migrating spotted salamanders at night, but did find quite a few under logs during the day.

These three were all tucked away under the same log.  Just a few feet away, there were plenty of eggs in the pool.

There were also some spermatophores scattered on the leaves underwater.

 Large fairy shrimp swam about, although not as many as there were a couple of weeks ago.

Other finds included two water scorpions...

dragonfly larva...

and lots of leeches and green frog tadpoles.

Fisher

Three days ago, we had our first fisher (Martes pennanti) sighting.  There were several times we'd seen tracks, but not the actual animal.  We were on our way home from hiking/checking out vernal pool activity around 4:45 pm when we drove past a woman on the side of the road.  She was staring at something way up in the tall pines abutting the cemetery.  I craned my neck from inside the passenger side to see if I could spot what she was looking at.  Probably a hawk, I thought until I saw the long black tail hanging down.  We pulled over and got out to watch a beautiful fisher climbing to the top of a pine.  The woman said she had stopped only when she had heard screeching and screaming.  She believes she saw the fisher raiding a squirrel nest.

We stood and watched for about 15 minutes, but it just stayed up on a limb, hidden behind clumps of pine needles.  I pointed my camera in the direction of the dark clump, hoping that I'd get a couple of decent shots.  It was so far up, I'm happy I got anything at all.  Looks like maybe it was settling down for a nap after eating.

Just hanging out sleeping off dinner...

Tracks from January in the mud and...

in the snow...