 Thanks for being here. My name is Sean. I'm gonna slow down the talking so that Matt can get the video started back there. Hi everybody, welcome. My name is Sean. I'm a staff naturalist here at the Nature Center. Thanks for coming out and helping support, and save, and jibbians all around the lot. I'll introduce Zach here in a minute who's gonna take the reins for most of tonight, but I just wanted to first welcome you. I'm not gonna go into all the other great stuff you do here at the Nature Center, but I would say on your way out grab our spring calendar for all the stuff we have coming up between now and June, all of our pretty programs and botany and classes and workshops and all sorts of things. And I'm gonna send around this clipboard here. We're gonna ask you to sign up in a couple of different places for a couple of different things tonight. So as you'll learn shortly, if you're not already kind of familiar with the game here, these amphibian migrations happen under certain weather conditions. And so when we're going out to monitor our amphibians, it kind of has to be the perfect storm literally of weather and temperature and darkness and all this. And so we send out little email alerts saying, hey, looks like tomorrow night's gonna be a good night, or looks like early next week is gonna be a good night, that kind of thing. So to get yourself onto that list so we can send you alerts of when there might be a good amphibian movement, add your name to this. If you already get those emails from us about amphibian alerts, then you don't have to put your name on here, but I'll have to do that. I'll send that around. And then the other amphibian-related resources that we have for you tonight are out in the back that we'll point out as we go. Pretty much all of the resources that we're gonna be talking about tonight are available on our website that you can just download as PDFs and print them from the comfort of your own home and all that. So we printed out some stuff, but not enough for everybody necessarily, so if you're comfortable doing stuff online, then we have all this stuff on our website as well. So tonight we're gonna spend a while talking about amphibian ecology in general, about amphibian conservation, why we're doing this project, how you all can get involved in this. And so we'll talk natural history, and then we'll transition into talking about the actual citizen science project that we do and the protocol for that, and how you can effectively and safely contribute to amphibian conservation here. So we're going to turn it over to Zach Koda, our AmeriCorps teacher naturalist and resident amphibian guru in the spotted salamander hoodie. So yeah, take it away, next time. Thank you. A question to start off with. Other than the one that's in the back of the room, who has seen one of these creatures before? A spotted salamander. Oh my goodness, so many salamander experts in the room. This is gonna be a breeze. And I know some of you have come to this training before last year. And so it will be some review, but I'm hoping there's some new information as well. And for some of you folks that have never seen this, you're gonna learn a lot tonight. And hopefully be excited to get out there and work on this project. So we're gonna talk about three main stages in the lives of these amphibians. First, kind of how they live, what they spend most of their lives doing. Their migration, which is coming up soon. And breeding, which is really why they're migrating in the first place. And we're gonna look at these three life, big life stages through the lens of some characters. So our first character that we're gonna look at is a spotted salamander. So it's about the size of a sticker's bar. And it's got this nice kind of blackish-gray body with yellow spots. Fossorial. Does anyone know that word? It refers to kind of where it lives. Any guesses? In the mud, that's a good guess. They're underground. They're living underground most of the year in small room tunnels. So, you know, if there are moles underground, they're following mole tunnels. And they only really come out at night. So, they're a hard one to find unless you really go looking for them. They're eating small invertebrates, pretty much anything that will fit in their mouth. And they're really common. If you look at this map here from the Vermont-Wresttown amphibian atlas, you can see they're in almost every town in Vermont. They're probably in every town of Vermont. They just haven't been documented in every town. So they're pretty widespread and extremely cute. You know, just the most charismatic little animals. And if you haven't seen one, we do have one. Her name is Squishy Marbles. Yeah, I didn't choose the name. It was voted on by you here at the Nature Center. And that was the name of Squishy Marbles. But Squishy Marbles came to us in a very interesting way. She came to us a couple of months ago. Someone brought her in and said, I have this salamander in my house. Has anyone heard of that before? Or any ideas on how it might get into some of the basement in the middle of the room today? Well, they're fosorial. So they're underground in these mold tunnels. And if anyone has a really old house with kind of a stone basement, one of those mold tunnels might lead right into that basement. And the salamander is just following it and pops out and finds themselves trapped in some of the basement. And so this person, it's actually a fairly common occurrence. And unfortunately, the basement is probably not as well insulated as it is underground. So luckily for this salamander, the person brought it here and now the salamander has a lovely home with us at NeuroFrance. So if you haven't seen one before, you might take Squishy Marbles out so you folks can see her later today. I don't know what's a female because we'll talk a little bit about this, but the vent kind of the backside behind the hind legs of the spotted salamander actually swells up during the breeding season in the males. She doesn't have a swollen vent and it's now coming into the breeding season. So we're pretty sure she's female. Our next character is the wood frog. Who's seen a wood frog before? This, as you can see, another super common frog in Vermont in pretty much every town in the state. They have this beautiful kind of light brown color with this darker mask. And these two lines that run along the sides of the back are also lateral ridges. They make black like a duck, which we'll hear in just a second. And they're living in the woods. Anywhere we have woods in Vermont, you can find a wood frog. Just like the spotted salamander, they're eating any small invertebrate that will fit in their mouths. And they're very, very cute as well. And you can see their ranges throughout the Northeast, but even up into Alaska and against the Arctic Ocean, which is a pretty amazing thing. They're one of the northernmost amphibian species in the world. I wonder how an amphibian would survive that kind of extreme climate. So we'll talk about that in a minute. There's the... I don't like this volume. Sean's going to work on the volume because this is a really phenomenal... Yeah, it's a really phenomenal duck that sound. And hopefully we'll be hearing this in just a few weeks. I don't know how. Let's see. And our third, our last character is the four-toed salamander. Now, who has seen this salamander in Vermont? Or anywhere? Okay, a lot fewer people. And that matches up nicely with our map. And you can see there are only a handful of places in Vermont where this salamander is found. Unlike the spotted salamander that can make its home underground in pretty much any field or forest in the state, these four-toed salamanders require a really specific habitat. They're like a certain type of wetland with a certain level of elevation gradient. And there are only a handful of places along the Connecticut River Valley and in the Champlain Valley where they've been found. They've never been found in Central Vermont. So if you are surveying sites around here, you're probably not going to see them. This is a really beautiful salamander with colors ranging from a slate gray to a kind of rusty red. And then the real surprise is when you flip them over and their bellies are pure white with these black specks on them. It's a really beautiful little salamander. And they are small. They're about the size of a little Smarties package. And they're eating smaller vertebrates as well. This is a species of greatest conservation in Vermont, unlike the wood frog in the spotted salamander that are pretty much everywhere. Because this salamander requires a really specific type of habitat, their numbers are pretty low. And it doesn't take a lot to really impact their population, which we'll talk about more about. And they're just really, really beautiful. So these animals are living mostly on or underneath the ground. The spotted salamander is in those road tunnels. Underneath logs, they really need to stay moist. They absorb moisture through their skin. So if they get dried out, it does not end well for them. So they're looking for wet places. And for an animal that's black with yellow spots, they can blend in amazingly well. It surprises me how well they can blend in with their color. But they do. Wood frogs, another one that's just everywhere in Vermont. And if you can kind of look at its color, it really looks like a leaf. And if you are walking through the leaf litter in Vermont, it's going to be hard to pick one of these out of lesson leaves. And then when it stops moving, it's going to be really hard to find. It just blended so well. And this one, this four-toed salamander, as I said, they really like those lowland, those wet areas with really specific types of forests and really specific elevation gradients. One of the amazing adaptations of this salamander that has a little constriction at the base of its tail. And if a predator grabs its tail, or even if it's stressed by a predator, its tail will fall off. And its tail can actually wriggle on its own. So its tail will jump around and look just like a worm. And so the predator will say, well, that's a nice easy worm. Grab that and the salamander can scurry off. Now the salamander can survive, but it has to regrow its tail, which takes a lot of energy for a little salamander. Imagine trying to regrow your leg. You know, the salamander can do it, but it takes a lot of energy. How long does it take, like months or years? Yeah, months or even years. I've seen some salamanders that have little tail bugs where they've lost their tail. You see this in redback salamanders, and you can see it's healed over and starting to grow back, but it takes a long time. Yeah, these are beautiful, nice, damp places, forest and wetlands for these four-toed salamanders to live. And it's not always easy to be in and for the end. You're kind of on the bottom run in the forest. Lots of things like to eat you. Snakes, certainly. Raccoons, possums. I often see possums at crossing sites. It's a perfect little snack that's easy to catch. All sorts of small mammals. Owls love to eat amphibians as well. And an interesting thing, have you ever heard of wood frog eggs on branches of trees? You've heard of this? How do you think of wood frog egg mass that usually is in a vernal pool or a swamp would end up on the branch of a tree from the owl? From the owl. Exactly right. Owls, green-pointed owls and barred owls will go to these vernal pools where the frogs and salamanders are breeding, and it is just the perfect buffet for them. And they can grab that wood frog and they take it up to a tree to eat it. And the wood frog in its last moments has the, you know, it wants to lay its eggs, and so it lays a little cluster of eggs that comes out about the size of a quarter. And then when it rains, it absorbs water and kind of swirls out to be this kind of soft ball-sized egg mass on the middle of the tree. So sometimes near vernal pools, you might see that. And it's a sign that a wood frog probably was eating by an owler. Would it survive or does it have to fall into the water? It will probably dry out. Yeah, those egg masses will show you pictures of them. They take a while to develop, and if they dry out, they're not going to survive. And then how they survive the winter, well, the spotted salamanders, like we talked about, they're living underground, so it's actually pretty warm and they can get by fairly well. The fortune salamander, similarly, is going down underground and it's finding places between like rocky ledges underground where they can spend the winter. But the wood frog is pretty phenomenal. The wood frog turns into a frog popsicle. And in the wintertime, they have special sugars and special proteins in their body. And the proteins cause ice to form in a perfect alignment so that it doesn't break their cells. And the sugars make it so that some of the ice doesn't form or that it forms at a much lower temperature. So they can survive. That's how they survive the winter in the Arctic. And they are totally frozen. There are heart stops eating, they're not breathing, there's no metabolism at all, they don't eat anything. If you were to find one, it's as hard as a rock. And then when it gets warm, this is where it's kind of sunny in the 50s and 60s, they get, they kind of warm up and they thaw out from the inside out, which is pretty phenomenal. Their heart will start and then they'll start eating and then little by little, they'll kind of thaw outward. Pretty remarkable. They're sort of buried? They're actually right under the leaf litter. So probably walking through the woods in the middle of winter, you know more than a couple of feet a few inches from a wood frog. Yeah, they just kind of tuck themselves down in the leaf litter and the snowpack really helps insulate them. Which is one of the things that I'm curious to see with climate change is there's less and less insulation. They can thaw and refreeze, but when we're talking about big swings in temperature with none of that snow to insulate it, I'm curious to see what happens with these wood frogs. And really, this time of year, they're getting a few different cues to figure out that it's time to make a move. The soil is getting warmer, the ambient air temperature is getting a little bit warmer, the snowpack is melting, and then the big cue for them to migrate is the first swing legs. So we haven't had much for those here yet, but in the coming weeks, we'll get some of those first spring rains and see some amphibians moving. I was given a talk last week down in Cornwall, just south of Milbury, and they don't have, well, they didn't until this last storm, have any snow there. And so all these amphibians have kind of gone through the process of waking up and prepping themselves, and I visited a crossing site on a night where it was just sprinkling a little bit, so already down in Cornwall, there have been movements. So we're still a few weeks out here, you know, in some places, to feed the snow. It's pretty remarkable the movements these salamanders can make. Spotted salamanders are traveling a quarter of a mile sometimes to get their vernal cool, which doesn't sound a lot to us, but for a creature that's a big feat to move a quarter mile. And they're crossing woods and fields and making their way through wetlands and oftentimes crossing roads to get there. And they found that this great study looked at how concentrated this migration is. And they looked at a few different vernal pools where the salamanders were migrating back. And they found that 90% of the salamanders that came back to this vernal pool arrived there in a span of five days. So this is taking place in a really short period of time. Now it varies based on local conditions, like snowpack and weather, but for a specific location all of them may migrate in just a few days. And this is what it looks like in some places where we have a big beautiful wetland here and woods and a road a busy road right in between. So this is going to be a really hard place to be an amphibian to have to make it across this busy road every spring. And this is where they're, this wouldn't be ideal for an amphibian. A beautiful, small body of water, free of fish, and we'll talk a little bit more about why it needs to be free of fish. This is where they're spending their winter is up in the forested areas and then they're migrating downhill to these wetlands. So that would be a pretty nice place to be. And unfortunately this is what's happening. They're trying to cross the road and they're getting squished and 10% a year over time can lead to the loss of an entire population. And in some sites we're seeing as high as a 25% or a 30% mortality rate. And that's just not sustainable. They're going to be gone pretty soon. And so where they're breeding, they're definitely breeding in wetlands that are fish free, but the best place are these vernal pools. These are small depressions in the woods where snow melts and collects in the spring and stays there long enough through the summer for them to complete their breeding cycle. So that's laying their eggs for their eggs to grow and hatch and then those larva to become either adult salamanders or wood fronts. So it's taking months for that whole process to go through. So these vernal pools are really kind of special places in the woods that need our protection. Vermont Center for Eco Studies did this project where they look at satellite imagery to find potential vernal pools and then went out and actually confirmed whether or not they were vernal pools. Some of them they found were, you know, like old agricultural implements that gave a certain signature that looked like a pond. So they had to go out and field verify these. But there are quite a few in the Central Vermont area. And a lot of those we found were right next to the roads. Their animals were having to cross from their uplands down to the vernal pool. These vernal pools can't have fish because the fish will eat the eggs in the larva of developing their proteins. And these are really amazing new ecosystems containing themselves. They have all sorts of small invertebrates. They have their freshwater snails. There are all sorts of things living in these vernal pools that support membrane amphibians. And this is kind of the process of a vernal pool. It may not look like much in the winter or in the early spring. But as the snow starts to melt you get the sense of a small pond within the forest. And as the summer progresses it gets drier and drier until the end of the summer or maybe early fall and it's dried out completely. Some of them don't dry out completely every year but a really important trait is that they dry out regularly enough that fish can't survive. And how they're breeding these spawned salaminers are really amazing and they have an elaborate courtship where they're nudging each other and the males are really competing for the females. The males actually lay a packet of sperm. If you visit a vernal pool you might see these little white sperm packets on the bottom of the vernal pool and then the males kind of escort the females towards it and the females are choosing which packet looks the best. And the females are laying about 100 eggs and sometimes multiple clusters of 100 eggs that are kind of all held together by this jelly-like substance. And this is kind of what it looks like. You can see this chromatophore there's little white sperm packets and there are males laying the sperm packets and then there are males also nudging females kind of come over here, check this out. That's underwater, right? Yeah, this is underwater and it's actually a fairly deep pool and you can see some of the invertebrates swimming by. That's why you see the salaminers swimming kind of towards you because there's some depth to this pool. But you get these really amazing collections of salaminers all together in a small area. So if you have a vernal pool near you that you can access, it's definitely worth checking out in the spring and watching this happen at night. It's pretty amazing. You can go to a vernal pool during the day and you won't see a single salamin group. During the day they're all hiding in the leaves that are really hard to find but at night that's when all the action happens. The wood frog, one of our earliest frogs to call and you hear that kind of chorus of those duck-like sounds. They are explosive breeders which is not a nice sounding term but what it means is that they breed really quickly and a lot. They will lay egg masses of more than 700 eggs. They lay their egg masses all together kind of in a big raft of eggs and I've been to some ponds where there's some vernal pools where you look out on top of the vernal pool and it's just one giant mat of wood frog eggs. It's pretty astounding. And they breed doing this thing called amplexus where the males are actually grabbing on to the larger females and they hold right on and you will actually see the females hopping across the road with males already getting a free ride and they don't let go. And then the four-tailed salamander is a little bit more unique than the spotted salamander and the wood frog. It needs really specific wetlands with stagnant moss and they're not laying their eggs in the water like the wood frogs and the spotted salamanders. They're laying their eggs underneath this layer of moss right next to or even over top of the water and then when the eggs hatch they fall into the water. So the eggs are in the water and the larva fall into the water and they really don't like it very high up, less than a thousand feet in elevation which is also why they're restricted to the lower areas of Vermont. So another project you can look into that kind of works side by side with our project is the vernal pool monitoring project. So a lot of the amphibians that we're surveying are crossing to get to vernal pools. So we're really focused on helping them get there. This project looks at what happens when they get to that vernal pool. So they use citizen science to go out and survey these vernal pools. There's really an amazing amount of data that they collect and it tells us a lot about the health of these pools and if they are sustainable over time and what sort of conservation they need. But this is our project here at North Ranch. The amphibian road crossing or ARC program. When we started this out North Ranch had been doing some amphibian work previously and we decided we wanted to kind of formalize the way we did it and we set these three goals for ourselves. The first to get you really excited about amphibians. Is anyone excited about it? We're working on it by the end of the month to be there. So it gives people really involved and engaged with amphibian conservation and then the next thing is to literally get the salamanders and frogs across the road to keep them from getting hit when they're on the roadways. And then the third is to collect some data and the data that we collect are going to planners either local community planners conservation commissions who are going to be able to go to their communities and make a change to the transportation infrastructure. We'll see some pictures right here about what can be done at a local level to help salamanders and in some places they've actually closed roads on nights where they know that there's going to be salamander migration and if we know that 90% of the salamanders in one area will cross in the span of five nights. It may not be that terrible of an inconvenience for people living on a rural road to have a detour on a couple nights a year, but it may save hundreds or even thousands of amphibians. And then another opportunity we have is when we're rebuilding our roads is to look at places where there are already culverts near crossings and make the culverts bigger. Once you've dug a big hole in the road it doesn't really matter if you put it in a culvert that's this big or this big but it does make a big difference for these amphibians. They'll cross or maybe go through a culvert that's this big but are not as likely to go through a culvert that's that big. And this is really the best example we have of changing our infrastructure in the month. This was a really busy crossing in Moncton and they had really high mortality rate and they noticed that it wasn't sustainable. The number of amphibians that were getting killed at this site they were going to use some of the population and so they kind of rallied the community raised some money, got some grants and built this salamander crossing it's amazing I recommend going to see it. They built essentially this tunnel underneath the road. It goes from this upland forest and to the left is a wetland so they're crossing underneath this tunnel. The kind of barriers help guide the salamanders to the tunnel and then at the end they have a little piece that kind of curves them back around if they get going the wrong way and kind of redirects them back towards the crossing. And this is what it looks like. So I'm going to play a video where it's a picture every minute for an hour and you can see how well this is working to get salamanders and frogs in the river. What is the bed on the floor of that? It's leaves. It's what? It's leaf litter. Yeah, you kind of see some of the leaves here. Yeah, it's leaf litter. So here's what it looks like in action. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And what species? These are a number of species. This is like the spotted salamanders. There are probably eastern newts and redback salamanders that happen to cross through as well. Or to the salamander that's a species of greatest conservation need in Vermont. That was the one they were really concerned about using from this site. And so in addition to the amphibians crossing during their migration year round there are animals using these crossing sites. A lot of small mammals are using these. So they're a pretty amazing development. And this is what we can do if we have really good data and really engage community. And you, you all are a big part of this. So it really depends on citizens sometimes volunteers to get out and do this work. And Finn here is an amazing citizen scientist. I think he's eight. And he is really passionate about helping the amphibians. And here is a picture of a salamander. You can see that beautiful white belly with those kind of black specs on it. So how it works. The first step is to adopt a site. So we have sites we kind of looked at places in Vermont where there are a wet area across the road from a big place. And those are areas where amphibians are more likely to cross the road. And we ask people to adopt a site so that you can look on the map and see if there is a site near you. And then step two is to actually go out and check these sites. So on rainy evenings in April, sometimes as early as March, they march in some places in Vermont, but mostly the month of April and even into early June in our snowier places. You go out to your site and you essentially walk the stretch of road. And while you walk you're picking up amphibians, helping them cross the road and then tally them down so we can have a record of what's actually there. And then we ask people to photograph some of the rare ones that we really want to make sure we have good documentation on. And then turn around and walk back and record another set of data and do the same thing. And so you'll notice that we have Spinal Salamander and Woodfrog on here at Forto Salamander. But there are a lot of other characters we haven't talked about yet. So I want to briefly go through and share some of these other amphibians with you so that you can learn more in case you see them. And it is also in our volunteer manual that you can take home with you and study up a little bit more. The first one is this Eastern Redback Salamander. It is perhaps the most abundant vertebrate in the forest of the Northeast. They are every width. They are one per square meter in some areas, which is astonishing. And they are living under the leaf litter in pretty much any forest in Vermont. And they are living underneath fallen logs and things. And really they're not migrating. These are fascinating that there are really terrestrial salamander. They don't need water to breed. They are finding enough moisture in rotting logs to lay their eggs. So they don't need a big pond or anything to breed. They're not really migrating. But just because there are so many of them throughout the state, occasionally they cross the road. And that's what we're seeing. So we're not really worried about them in terms of a population level problem at a road crossing. But it's interesting to note when they do cross. And they have this kind of beautiful dark red back and a kind of creamy yellow belly that you can't really see there. An interesting thing with this species, there are actually a few different color morphs. There's one that lacks some pigment, so it kind of has a yellowish back. And there's one that's kind of all red and kind of gray. And that one is more prevalent in South because it can be active at higher temperatures, being all black. And so what's happening is as climate change is kind of moving, progressing and it's warmer, they're seeing higher levels of the lead colored red back salamander compared to the red colored red back salamander. And so there's a really interesting program that's studying these salamanders all throughout the Northeast and they're seeing fewer and fewer of these actual red back salamanders and at some point they may all be black or lead and then we'll have to change the lead. And then this is one that we can see here in the Central Vermont, the Jefferson salamander. This is another really big salamander about the size of our splotted salamander and it's this really kind of more brown than black and it does have a little bit of blue sometimes you see them really with not much blue color at all just mainly kind of this kind of brown, gray color. This is another species of concern in Vermont. There are a mole salamander they're living most of their lives on the ground. They're one of our earliest migrants in Vermont and they also require a little bit more specific of a breeding habitat than the spotted salamanders do. And they also interbreed with our next species, the blue spotted salamander. This one's hard to find in Central Vermont, mostly in the Champlain Valley but there are a few populations in Central Vermont. The same shape as the Jefferson and the spotted salamander, but a bit smaller and instead of kind of a gray brown base color, they are really black. They're really a jet black salamander with these bright blue spots on them. They're really pretty. And they're doing the same thing they're living underground and coming out to breed in the spring. The tricky thing with these two salamanders is that they hybridize. And when they hybridize most of them actually like 99% end up being female. So they have these populations where you can't really tell if it's a Jefferson or a blue spotted salamander somewhere in between and 99% of the population is female. So all it takes is one male from one species or the other to get in there for them to all breed. And this is one where we're asking people to submit photos. If they do see it that way we can help you figure out where it is on the spectrum of blue spotted to Jefferson salamander. Anyone seen an eastern new before? This is probably our most frequently reported most commonly identified salamanders in Vermont. They've been pretty much every pond in the state. They're really widespread. They have a fascinating life cycle where they start out in a pond as a larva. They grow up to this juvenile. The juveniles leave their wetlands and roam for sometimes three to four years on land as this kind of orange salamander, what do we call this? The kind of reddish red f's. So they kind of roaming land as these red f's and after a few years they find their way back to a pond and they turn into this olive green color and spend the rest of their life in the water. So it's not like the other salamanders where they're making a huge migration in a really short time, but they're kind of roaming all over the place that's why sometimes we see them at road crossings. We're not really concerned about them from a mortality standpoint at a road crossing, but it's an interesting thing to know when they come through. I'm actually seeing a cluster of 20 and 30 at a time. And it's probably areas where they're just the right mix of woods and ponds. They don't actually require fish reef ponds. They're really good swimmers and so they can do some degree. Here's one that we also see a little bit later at our crossing sites. Not so much early on in the spring, but our American toad is kind of chunky, warm looking thing. They're living a lot on land, but do require water to breed so they're finding a pond. They don't have a huge migration really concentrated like wood frogs or spotted salamanders. So we don't see any huge numbers at crossing sites, but we do see them. Spring papers, we see a lot of at crossing sites. Just like the wood frogs, they're spending the winter kind of right under the leaf litter and are waking up and moving across the roads in big numbers. I think there was a site in Stowe that Stowe Land Trust adopted last year that happens to be right next to one of their properties. And they had 99 of these cross the road at their site in about an hour and a half. They're really small, about the size of my thumb which also makes them really hard to pick up out of the crossing. They hop really well too. They have these little pads on their toes so just like tree frogs they can kind of stick and clean. Someone at our last training showed me a picture of one that was stuck under a window in her house. She thought it was a tree frog and the way to tell the difference if you're kind of not sure what this little frog that's hopping around is if you look at its back it has the cross this kind of X on its back where its Latin name crucifer comes from is this cross or X on your back. So that's a surefire way to know you found a spring tree frog. That's the specific name. It's called genus. Oh the genus? Pseudocris? It used to be Hila which is the tree frog genus, right? And they changed it to the chorus frog genus. All these frogs that make these little kind of peeping sounds and that Pseudocris is a false Pseudocris is crickets. So these sound like these kind of really high pitched notes that sound almost like a cricket. So this is the false cricket frog with an X on its back. So you can kind of hear I'm going to play the sound and you can hear that false cricket sound and this really for me is a sign of spring. I know spring has arrived it's here when I start hearing the speakers. They're pretty amazing when they get to their wetland and they want to find a perch where they can really project for it so that they're used to climber, caftales and wreaths and they'll actually fight and the males will kind of push each other off and try to get to the highest perch so that they can broadcast their voice and they'll really loud really loud. So those are all the amphibians on our checklist that we're asking folks to really survey for. When you get done I want to show you just kind of we have these these checklists where you go through these data sheets where you're asking folks to collect the number of amphibians for alive and dead, what the weather conditions are, the road conditions and then counting passing cars we printed them on right in the rain paper because these are kind of wet rainy nights that we're doing it and we did field test it. Zach, what are the rain conditions right now? Wet. Downhorn. So they do they do work in the rain and once you've once you've collected your data you've had a wonderful night helping amphibians cross the road you can go home and put this data into our system so it's got everything that your data sheet has you can play it into the computer or if you want to just do it on your phone or your tablet you can do that as well. It's up for you to congratulate yourself just help some amazing animals get across the road and collect some really important data. And so with that I want to ask for a couple of volunteers yeah nice to hear right there you weren't taking that back you can go back there with Sean one more volunteer, do you want just two? Two enough? One more volunteer would you like to volunteer? What's your name? Sierra. Okay, and I'm Dr. Sean. Lucy. So there you go, get ready but a long time about how you make sure you're safe we're asking you to go out on the side of the road on a rainy night and it's cold and it's not the best conditions to be standing next to the road so a flashlight is really important I bring a headlamp and a spotlight the headlamp is more just so I can see where I'm going the spotlight or a flashlight is really to find the amphibians so I put a headlamp on and I have a flashlight too a reflective safety vest it's really important to be seen on the roads especially in the conditions we're asking you to go out on the crossing signs so we have some crossing signs for folks if the crossing sign someone was asking me at our last training why don't we just put a bunch of crossing signs out and then people will drive slow and the amphibians will get across the road and the problem is they're really hard to see and it doesn't really make that much of a difference whether you're driving 50 or 15 they're not going to be able to get out of your way so really the crossing signs are more to let people know that you are out there doing a survey and to slow down raincoat is really nice rain pants it's going to be wet rain boots are really important a camera is nice especially it's nice to document what you find we have a project using iNatural where if you send us photos from your own crossing site we can upload it to this program called iNaturalist or you can do that as well smartphone extra batteries unfortunately you are going to see some bad things on the road and in order to make sure you're not counting it the same dead sound every time you walk back and forth a spatula is really handy you know kind of slide underneath and scoop them off the side of the road a clean bucket I actually use a cooler that has a lid on a hinge that way I can put the lid back down otherwise the spring papers tend to just jump right out at some crossing sites that are really busy it's sort of impractical to move each individual across the road because you just be moving back across the road so I carry a bucket a cooler with a lid and I put a bunch in the bucket when I get the bucket pretty much full I walk to the right end of the side of the road with the water and I process over again you put anything in your bucket? it's raining so there's water in your bucket but anytime you're touching these amphibians you need to have moist hands so it's going to be raining your hands are probably going to be moist a point I will make I have pretty dry hands so I'm always putting lotion and things off on them before you go out to do this wash your hands and rinse them really well that way we're not sharing our chemicals with these salamanders make sure you've got your dentistry and a clipboard and a pen and then we are ready what are we ready for, Jack? we're ready for the amphibian road crossing fashion show 2019 so we're going to help you welcome Sierra to the stage it's the best that cars can easily see her out there Sierra is wearing a wonderful face to everyone as they can see Sierra is also wearing a flashlight a bright flashlight so cars can see you coming from a long way away and because those little tiny spring peepers are hard to see on gravel roads let's have a bright flashlight what else do we have, Sierra? so you can safely get those you can't quite pick up yourself in the bucket so you have the same place to put it into so you can look at it for a while what else do you have on the other hand, Sierra? a sign what's the sign for, Sierra? what is the sign for? the sign is to let motorists know that there are amphibians crossing so we recommend you make your own sign that says there are researchers in the roadways here slow down or also there are salamanders in the roadways slow down so you can talk with us if you want to sign but we also recommend you can make your own and know that you are also sporting some beautiful rain foods right now too it's a proper waterproof footwear for these rainy, cold, beautiful nights thank you, Sierra that vest is not a reflective vest but a reflective tape on some of your clothes which is why Lucy is also wearing a red reflector which motorists are alluring to mean that there is a biker and there is somebody up on the road so lots of lights lots of reflection but more visible too so as much visibility as you can also sporting rain boots also sporting rain pants sporting a bright stroke flashlight as well not sporting any insects any other muck spray but you are sporting one of our waterproof data sheets with a clipboard so you can keep track of your data and that data sheet is too sad it's chair so, we mentioned that when you do this protocol you are going to start on one side of your site and you are going to walk down on the other side of your site and every pass you take is one transact, is one survey so we printed these athletes sheets out double sided to get you back to your car on a second survey the way out from the way back are to great braids a passionate spirit passionate spirit it's ready for every main gossip season thank you so the last point I want to hit on is just to share with you we had our first season of this new relaunch project last year how we did last year we surveyed 35 different sites in 19 towns representing 4 counties mostly in central Vermont this year we're expanding a little bit beyond central Vermont we had 46 volunteers last year that put in 179 hours surveying amphibians some people put in more than 10 hours just on their own which is pretty incredible we helped 3,330 amphibians get across amazing in water bearing we have three generations of citizen science working together grandmother daughter, granddaughter team working together on a really important site in water bearing still land trust their team helped 171 amphibians get across in less than an hour and a half which is pretty amazing and then in Cabot one of our volunteers found a site where someone fencing put up by road crews was actually causing frogs to get stuck to turn around and cross back across the road there was a lot of mortality we were able to quickly get that problem by through our survey efforts so what you're doing is really important and can make some pretty quick change for these amazing creatures and now what now that you all know now you are really excited about amphibians we've achieved our first goal our second goal is to get you out there and adopt the site so what we're going to do I'm going to stay up front and kind of answer general amphibian questions and Sean is going to be in the back and he's going to be signing people up if you want to look at the map and see if there's a crossing site near you or if you want to sign up for the program in general you can do that this spring we're going to have some pop up nights where we have a site down the road here from the nature center if you're not feeling like you want to adopt a site for the season but you still want to come out on the night and see what it's like on a big night with us and kind of see what it's like on our website we have a whole page under citizen science dedicated to our amphibian work so under citizen science click on amphibian conservation you scroll down and on the right you can sign up this is the link to actually volunteer if you find a room crossing that we don't know about yet you can report it here we'd love to know if your manual that's in the back is actually right online so if you're an internet connected person you can read online rather than taking a paper copy and I also have that so we kind of went over the protocol pretty quickly and really it's quite easy I mean the nuts and bolts are that you walk the transect you take amphibians off the road you record what you found and a couple other pieces about how much it's raining or passing that sort of thing but this protocol manual goes through each one of the things that we ask you in terms of data and gives a little more of a description of that so we ask that everybody that wants to do this project either pick up a hard copy of this manual or download online right there question on your website do you have tonight's a great night or tonight's only 50% good or something so for those that came in a few minutes late we're passing this clipboard around which is the list that you want to get onto this is who will send out these alerts to saying hey tonight's the night or tomorrow's the night or something like that it's also good to pay attention to the weather yourself because as you know above 40 degrees Fahrenheit rainy, dark, April early May either that's when things are going to be moving and so we'll send out alerts but if you see that forecast and also if you live in Cabot that's going to be very different than if you live in Richmond or out in Champlain Valley or something so we'll send out alerts but just tailor those alerts to your own situation and so keep track of the weather forecast yourself but I'm going to put this clipboard in the back now so that if anybody wants to get onto that list they can get their name on and do that in the manual, I didn't talk about this but in the manual we recommend that people go out at least once during the day to a site that they've adopted a way they can kind of find where the set of hands and ends see maybe where they're going to park their car you know whether they're going to be in the survey and then also to see what the snow cover looks like because when we put out these very general alerts you might have a site where you know it's a south facing slope and the snow's already melted and you know things are ready to go versus a site that's for the north that has lots of shade and it's going to be three or four more weeks before things start to move and then you know pretty much everything you need is right here including the crossing map so you can actually it's an interactive map you can click on things, you can scroll around find the crossing sites in the view and what Sean is going to be doing is allowing you to go on and actually see if there's a site option and can you send out so I want to talk about that just for a second so if I back out here you'll see that there's a lot of crossings in central Vermont there's not a lot of crossings outside of central Vermont there are crossings all over the state as Zach has explained but there's only so many that we know about because we've only you know we only have so much time to go and try to use remote sensing or imagery to try to identify these places so if you live outside of this area and there's a crossing site that you know of that you'd like to monitor that's in your backyard that's a little bit farther away just kind of the Montpelier, Barrie, Cabot, Mount River area then by all means tell us where that crossing is we'll make you a crossing site and you can monitor that site using these protocols and we'll just roll you right into the program our goal is to expand this so that we can cover the state over the next few years so there's a lot more crossings out there than what we've represented here so in person tonight if you like you can talk to me and we can try to get you set up with the sites that you leave tonight with the site everything you can do is on your own you can go to our website you can click on on the crossing map and go through this yourself and find where you live and see where the closest site is and click that and you'll say okay this is ARC059 and that's kind of the one that I think I want that's where I live near well I can go and volunteer to adopt your road cross and they just put in ARC059 and I'll send an email right to Zach and I saying this is your preference, this is the site you'd like to adopt so you can do this all from the comfort of your own recliner at home if you'd like to take this information home and get back to us right now so do check out the map and then the data form is available and you can actually open it up as you can open up the PDF and actually print it out yourself if you run out and once you have come back in and taken your raincoat off and dried off a bit and you're right down to the data you just go to this online data entry portal and it will open up this form right here and you'll put in all the exact same information on your sheet in the same order this sheet is presented so you just go through and just transcribe the information right under this and it's submit and you can I have this URL saved as a shortcut right in my home screen so I can on my cell phone I can just pop that open as an icon and I can go right to the data entry sheet so I can skip the data form all together and walk down the road I'm at my site and just put in the data on my phone as I go so there's low tech options high tech options but at the end of the day all the data has to get into the online system to be submitted well thank you all for coming and like I said if folks want to sign up tonight they can head to the bathroom room with Sean general or general questions we're going to have to go