Efforts to Protect Local Salamanders Illustrative Of Ongoing Conservation Issues
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 – Each year on a rainy spring night, usually some time in March, a miniature migration turns volunteers across Massachusetts into curious crossing guards.
“We have big yellow signs that we hold up that say ‘salamander crossing.’ Everybody wears their fluorescent vests and gets out there with buckets and flashlights in the pouring rain,” said Deb Cary, coordinator of some of the volunteers and director of the Massachusetts Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester.
In Massachusetts, where the land has long been thickly settled by humans, amphibians such as frogs, toads and salamanders often have to cross roads to get from the wooded upland areas where they live most of the year to the low-lying wetland areas where they mate.
These are small creatures – the larger salamanders can grow up to eight inches – and they aren’t necessarily easy to see on a rainy night. On these spring nights, the roads between the main living habitat of these amphibians and their mating areas are covered with hopping frogs, crawling salamanders, the little sperm packets dropped by the males and dead, squished animals.
The salamander crossing program is one of several that benefit threatened species of salamanders in Essex County.
There are six amphibians listed as “threatened” or “species of special concern” on the Massachusetts state list, according to the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, branch of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife that administers the state’s endangered species program. Only three of the listed species have been reported in Essex County in the last ten years, according to the Natural Heritage database, and only two “species of special concern” are found on the mainland: the blue-spotted salamander ( Ambystoma laterale ) and the four-toed salamander ( Hemidactylium scutatum ).
The third species, the threatened eastern spadefoot toad ( Scaphiopus holbrookii ) lives in Essex County only in the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island.
The salamander crossing program is only one of many efforts to raise awareness of and to help protect the amphibious creatures and their habitats.
In another part of the state, Scott Jackson, a wildlife biologist specializing in reptiles and amphibians, has developed a more permanent strategy for helping salamanders in their migration: tunnels.
Jackson is in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation at UMass Amherst. He helped develop a tunnel system for salamanders and other small animals at a site on Henry Street in Amherst, which was known as an amphibian road-crossing area.
“When you have an entire population that needs to cross the road to breed, that’s an obvious issue,” he said.
The crossing programs are useful for drawing attention to the plight of the salamanders, he said.
“It’s a good thing, but it’s not enough by itself,” he said. He noted that the volunteers are rarely there when the adults migrate back to the woods after the mating season is over, or when the young make their first migration into the uplands.
Jackson admitted that the tunnel system isn’t perfect either. He said that salamanders are reluctant to go into the dark tunnels, and other species sometimes don’t make it to the tunnels at all, instead being baffled by the small fences intended to funnel them into the tunnels.
If they help one species and hinder another, “the tunnels and fences themselves are going to cause more problems than the cars,” he said. He noted that on roads with light traffic, signs and speed bumps might be nearly as effective in protecting the salamanders, though larger roads would still be a problem.
“If you’re zooming down the highway these are a lot easier to miss than a snapping turtle or a moose if one wanders into the road,” Jackson said.
Some conservation efforts are centered more around habitat than direct protection of the species. According to its Web site, Massachusetts Audubon has 43 wildlife sanctuaries throughout the state, four of them in Essex County: in Gloucester, Newburyport, Topsfield and Wenham.
The Essex County Greenbelt Association also acquires land for purposes of education, conservation and preservation of green space. Though helping the amphibians is not the association’s chief goal, according to Edward Becker, the executive director, it is one of the many benefits of what it does.
“We own a lot of wetland, we own a lot of marshland, and we keep it for the habitat value,” Becker said.
Another local organization intent on education and conservation is the Vernal Pool Association. Begun in 1990 as part of an environmental outreach project at Reading Memorial High School by then-biology teacher Leo Kenney, it has grown into an independent organization.
Its main goal is to educate people about vernal pools and their ecology. Vernal pools are the wet lowland breeding areas for salamanders. They’re used by “amphibians, certainly, but a number of the turtles go there for feeding,” Kenney said. He added that the pools also are home to “an amazing number of invertebrates.”
Vernal pools are basically “wicked big puddles” (as Kenney’s book about vernal pool ecology is titled) which form when the snow melts in the spring and dry up by the end of the summer. The seasonal nature of the pools means they’re free of fish and larger amphibians who would prey on the eggs and young of salamanders and smaller frogs.
One of the goals of the organization is to identify vernal pools and certify them through the Natural Heritage program. Certification lets the public know the pools are there and helps get people involved, Kenney said.
“A pool doesn’t really have to be certified to be protected,” he said, but they’re a “very interesting ecosystem” that people should know more about.
Protecting this interesting ecosystem can be tricky, according to Alan Richmond, a professor of biology at UMass Amherst.
“Most people see a vernal pool and say: ‘Huh, West Nile. We’d better drain it and kill the mosquitoes,’ or ‘Huh, it dries up, let’s dig it deeper and put fish in it,’ ” he said. “Either strategy is bad news for these salamanders.”
This kind of struggle over the habitat of a few salamanders in Massachusetts is echoed all over the country in the fight to preserve many species that are endangered at the federal level.
The conflict has recently come to a head in the congressional debate over renewing the Endangered Species Act. The act, which President Nixon signed into law in 1973, must be renewed periodically. The latest bill intended to renew the act would make some major changes to its provisions.
The Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005, sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo, a Republican from California, would eliminate the ability of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat, streamline the process for pesticide approval and restructure the way the Fish and Wildlife Service can administer the endangered species program.
It would allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to compensate private landowners when an endangered species’ presence prevents the development of land, causing a financial loss for the landowner.
The House passed the bill, 229 to 193; the Senate has not acted.
Brian Kennedy, a Republican spokesman for the House Resources Committee, which Pombo chairs, said these changes are necessary to decrease the federal bureaucracy involved in protecting endangered species.
Kennedy said the law had produced a “tremendous amount of conflicts” between the Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowners, particularly in western states. He said the goal of the bill is to “protect the private property owner, incentivize the private property owner and make having an endangered species on the land a positive thing.”
He said that the current law may have helped keep species from going extinct, but it hasn’t helped many species to actively recover. The new law would require a recovery plan to be developed for each species within two years of its being listed. These plans would include active intervention to preserve and restore the species and specifics on habitat preservation, which would eliminate the need for the critical habitat designation, Kennedy said.
Right now, he said, landowners fear the hand of the federal bureaucracy in their affairs, especially because of its glacial speed in addressing concerns and responding to permit requests. They also fear losing money and autonomy, he said, and fear being prosecuted even when their intentions are good. This fear leads to what Kennedy called “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
That is, rather than let anyone know that an endangered species is on their land, private landowners would rather kill it, get rid of it and keep quiet than let anyone know it is there and work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to help preserve the animal.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will, if the new act passes, be required to give a timely response to a landowner’s proposal to develop a property. The service, Kennedy said, may then give the project the go-ahead or ask for some changes or reject it outright.
If it calls for changes, it must provide both financial and manpower help.. If it turns the project down, it must compensate the landowner “as if the land was taken under eminent domain,” Kennedy said.
This last is one of the many provisions of Pombo’s bill that has environmentalists up in arms.
Corry Westbrook, a legislative representative at the Washington office of the National Wildlife Federation, said, “It’s kind of like paying developers to adhere to the law.”
“The Fish and Wildlife Service is usually highly accommodating to private landowners,” she said. She added that the permitting process, while it might take time, doesn’t often prevent private landowners from doing what they want to do with a piece of property.
“Usually the project goes forward, but they say ‘put the parking lot over here instead of in the wetlands,’ ” she said.
Westbrook also had problems with the way the new bill defines what scientific data should be used in listing new species and making permit determinations.
It will let the Secretary of the Interior “lock in politically motivated definitions of science,” she said.
But the rollback of protections in favor of the rights of property owners is the big concern. While Westbrook said that most people will want to do the right thing, some of the biggest property owners will not.
“A lot of times, when people talk about private landowners, I think they romanticize and think, ‘Oh, a small farm,’ but in reality, a lot of the owners are private corporations,” she said. “They think about the bottom line, and that doesn’t always pan out for wildlife.”
None of the state-protected amphibians found in Massachusetts is on the federal list of endangered or threatened species maintained by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Any species that are on the federal list are added to the state’s list automatically, according to Tom French, the director of the Massachusetts Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program.
Natural Heritage reviews construction and renovation projects for potential impact on endangered species in the state.
The state designations of “endangered” and “threatened” make it a crime to do anything that would harm a listed animal. The protections the designation affords to animals, plants and their habitats are comparable to the current federal endangered species protections.
“They’re essentially the same designation, except for geographical scale,” French said.
He said some of the clashes the federal government gets into with property owners are less common on the state level. He attributed this to the fact that landowners in Massachusetts and other populous areas must already contend with zoning and many other regulations. This is not the case in other states – particularly thinly populated western states, he said.
“No one here assumes they can fill in wetlands on their property, but those kinds of rights have not been in place for years and years,” he said.
Wetlands and other habitats for rare species are protected at the Massachusetts state level, but while people have come to accept the value of wetlands to wild animals, there is a lot of resistance to protection of the wooded uplands that are of greater commercial value to humans, French said.
“It does make it more difficult,” he said. “People understand that a vernal pool is there and that salamanders have to lay their eggs in it, but they don’t understand that they have to have forest around the pool.” French added that it becomes a question of the minimum area the animals need to live, which isn’t always easy to determine.
Natural Heritage tries to take into account both the needs of humans and the needs of listed species when they review projects. To do this, though, they need to know where the rare animals can be found.
“If we don’t know it, they’re not protected,” French said. The most important, helpful thing an individual can do to help preserve rare species and their habitat is to report sightings of these species, including a photograph, to Natural Heritage,, he added.
“The most important single thing is for us to know where they are,” he said.
###
