Last night it was 40 degrees and raining. More on this delightful event later…

Click the image below to get a closer look…

Dear Neighbors on Centerville Road,

I’m letting you know that it’s that special time of year again! As most of you probably recall, I spend rainy nights prowling our street (and often in the adjacent brush and ditches) with my camera on Toad Patrol, photographing amphibians drawn to the bugs under the street lights. This is just a reminder that the season is about to start up again, and you might see me in the street in front of your house.

I’ll always have a flashlight and my camera and will probably be squatting in the road. I’m rarely (if ever) out much past midnight. Anyway, this is my annual reminder to not be disturbed. Feel free to say hi!

If you happen to be interested, I’ll be posting selections as usual to flickr. Here’s this year’s set:http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemedia/

Your pal,

Dave

When I was a 10 year old in that stage of intellectual development in which “facts” about the world were gathered and repeated at every opportunity, regardless of whether people around me cared, or even whether the facts could be verified as true – this is what I would declare about spiders:

1. No human is ever farther than 7 inches from a spider

and, thus:

2. Humans swallow, on average, 7 spiders in their sleep each year.

I have no clue where these supposed true descriptions of the world originated, nor have I ever checked on them. As an adult, of course, I’m deeply skeptical. If I tried to invent from my imagination a pair of urban legends perfectly concocted to freak out my sisters, there could be no better result. So who knows, maybe I just dreamed it up.

The reason the ubiquity of the presence of spiders felt right to me in childhood is because, throughout my life, it’s always felt that spiders are… well… ubiquitous.

This is never more apparent than on days like today – days when I’ll glance at the molding around a doorway I pass beneath, or when I look down at a windowsill while drawing a curtain, or let my gaze wander the edge of the bathroom sink. There’s never anything in the least unusual about finding, on any of those peripheral surfaces and more, a quick and fleeting scurrying motion of a spider ducking away from me. Today it was the bathroom sink.

These photos were snapped of a member of the most common spider family on earth: Salticidae, the Jumping Spiders. There are at least 5,000 species, populating well over 500 genera. They live just about everywhere, including your house. Yes, your house.

Don’t freak out, there’s nothing wrong with sharing your home with them. Between their small size (merely 10 or so mm) and shy ways, you probably miss them. In fact, they’re so quick on their feet, and have such amazingly good eyesight, you’ll never have to catch more than an occasional glimpse of them. Meanwhile they’re likely hunting the bugs you really don’t want much around where you live.

Who knows what this one is? Phidippus is a common enough genus in the Northeast where I live, and P. audax often has the irridescent green chompers (spider experts call them “chelicerae”) you can see in these shots. If I’ve got the species right, its common names are Bold Jumping Spider or Daring Jumping Spider. If so, they’re aptly named.

There’s something confrontational about the way this small fellow turned its face toward me and followed all of my movements. Though it clearly preferred fleeing to confrontation, it dealt with me without much fear as I corralled it around the sink with a paper cup. It would raise its body up on its rear legs, not exactly in a threatening way, but testing the air between us with its front legs and always watching, even staring at me with its excellent, beady eyes.

As someone passionate about science communication, I’m always trying to think of new ways to help people look at the natural world. For an upcoming art show, I’m combining some of my whitebox amphibian photos and printing them at 8 x 10 to encourage a closer, considered look at the shapes, forms, colors, and textures of these bodies.

I’m posting to my blog just to say this one thing.

I’m ready for winter to be done. I’m ready for the secret lurkers in the creek bank and forest floor to stir from their torpor and rise up to the surface. I’m ready for the hidden crowds of dark-dwellers to show themselves on their wet migrations. Ready to roll mossy logs to reveal the skin-breathers. Flip submerged stones and surprise the paddle-tailed surprisers. Spy croakers and leapers in the sunny spots.

I’m good and ready for some amphibians!

Timelapse of me drawing a salamander, on Vimeo.

A resolution of mine for this year is to draw every day.

Drawing has been a part of my life since my earliest memories of childhood, and it’s a way I explore and understand the world, my ideas, and my feelings.

When I was about 10 years old, I determined I’d like to be “a bird artist.” I didn’t really know what a bird artist was, I had never met one, but I knew that I liked birds, and I liked to draw, and my illustrated bird guides (displaying the work of John James Audubon, Roger Tory Peterson, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes) at times literally took away my breath with the wonder and beauty of the natural world.

Shortly before I switched my career from graphic designer to college professor, there was a transitional period when I visited a display of natural science illustration at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and was so inspired I nearly took that path. As it has turned out, drawing animals and plants has remained a consistently enriching and joyful avocation for my entire life.

I’m in the middle of a project of science documentation and communication about amphibians, so frogs and salamanders have been obvious and rewarding subjects for my daily discipline of filling sketchbooks in 2013.

Especially for a visual thinker like me, drawing is an invaluable tool for learning and understanding my amphibian subjects. Their anatomical features and species identifiers, even behavioral characteristics, become more clear the closer I look. And the more I draw them, the closer my scrutiny becomes.

Long hard days at work, periods of illness, personal setbacks, and other  frustrations in my life are mitigated with a pencil and paper. It’s been this way for me since I was a child, and my plan is to keep it that way for every last day of my life.

People see a small arthropod and they say “bug.”

It’s the folk terminology that means something like “tiny creeping critter,” and can refer to anything from a beetle to a spider to a moth larva to a rhinovirus to a human toddler.

But there’s a kind of bug belonging to a group of bugs called “true bugs.” I love the sound of that. They are not false bugs. They are a kind of bug more closely aligned to the essence of what is  a bug. If you’re into Greek philosophy, I suppose they’re platonic bugs.

In phylogenetic terms, true bugs are their own order, called Hemiptera, which includes Cicadas and the flower head guerrilla warrior, the Assassin Bug. There are many bugs in this order, so often the suborder Heteroptera are designated the true bugs. The true bug I met last week is in this suborder, classified in the family Coreidae, the Leaf Footed Bugs.

I suppose their feet look kind of like leaves.

Or rather parts of the rear legs do. Sorta. They flare out a bit. Honestly the name didn’t impress me as particularly apt, until researching them online turned up some pictures of genera from the tropics. Those suckers got some broad and undeniably leafy flanges off their feet. Google can show you what I mean.

Typically I see bugs like this in the summer vegetable garden,

right as our butternut squash vines are beginning to fruit up. LFBs are fruit eaters, especially young developing fruit, and it’s common to find colonies of nymphs and adults clustered in the floppy squash blossoms, or chewing on the tender stems of new squash.

There’s a species that moves into my house when the temperature drops in the fall, and they wander around all winter, usually on their own, like tiny, drunken robot bugs, jerkily marching across windowsills or up the wall.

I found this bug on a small plate of apple slices set out for my daughter’s snack on a January afternoon. They do fly lazily about the room sometimes, and I suppose that’s how it ascended to the top of the apple pile. As a fruit-sucker, I don’t know if it was attracted to the apples, or if it plopped there at random.

They never seem at their best in the winter, often sluggish or limpy.

This one was looking rough, as you can see in the photos. Its main issue seems to be lint, which my house is full of. I think that’s what the stringy fuzz is. Maybe it’s a kind of mold or fungus, or some other pathology. But mostly it just looks like carpet fuzz and dust bunnies to me.

I kept this bug in a covered dish with an apple slice for a couple of days while I waited for some time to photograph it. When I was done I took it to where I’m overwintering some houseplants in a corner of the kitchen. I never mind these seasonal roommates when I come across them, and I hope it can last through until Spring.

By refusing to pointlessly squash it like most of my neighbors would, I hope in my own way to be “true” to these house guests.

ARC is a great organization you should check out online http://amphibianandreptileconservancy.org/ if you’re interested in supporting work to preserve threatened and endangered species and their habitats.

Also if you *like* their facebook page it will add regular updates about amphibian and reptile conservation efforts and other great herp images and information to your feed:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.488510017866342.130593.265972820120064&type=3

The plethodontid salamanders have no lungs. Do you get that? Their small soft bodies draw the oxygen they need directly from their environment, through their skin. Their skin is their lungs. That’s why, when we touch them — with our oily, wicking finger print grooves and the cavernous cracks and wrinkles in our finger joints and knuckles and palms, cracks which hold onto trace elements of every chemical compound we touch, from deodorant to salad dressing to copy machine toner — our touch can hurt them. Can you imagine what it might feel like if someone touched your lungs with their dirty fingers?

This is only one reason, of dozens, to love these creatures. And where do they live? In a far away and exotic rain forest? Deep in the sea? On the moon? No, they live in my neighborhood, right around my yard. Where I live in Western New York state in the US, the mixed temperate forests are home to many plethodontid species.

One of them is the Slimy Salamander. Yes, it’s their actual name! Plethodon glutinosus has a way of resisting being touched. It secretes a thick mucusy slime from its skin. It’s an antibiotic cream to protect against microscopic invasion. It’s a foul tasting, sticky mess which fills chomping predators with despair. It’s a slick lubricating surface treatment to aid in quick getaways through tight spaces. When I get it on my fingers, it leaves a dark residue for up to 24 hours that no scrubbing completely removes.

Like all amphibians, they’re ectothermic, which means they regulate their body temperatures by interacting with their surrounding environments. Too chilly? Crawl under a patch of dark leaves that are absorbing a little more of the sun’s energy. Too hot? Burrow beneath the cool moist shelter of a rotting log. Snow and ice freezing the forest floor? Bury yourself in some densely insulating crevice, or burrow deep beneath the permafrost layer to wait out the winter.

Frosts can appear around here by mid October. Can you tell I love them? Then you’ll know that, after the autumn, I miss them.

I saw what I figured was the last Slimy Salamander of this year around the second week of October. But we never really got any serious snow. The temperature kept dropping below freezing. To the twenties. A couple times to the high teens. But then it started to spike up again.

On December 15th, it was 46 degrees and raining lightly. December 16th it was 50! My hopes were up. I could’t help it. I missed my clever, lungless friends. I wandered the woods, lifting stones. Kicking over logs.

One log I rolled disturbed the surrounding mat of oak leaves. I spied a flicker of wet muscle. Could it be possible? In December in New York?!

These are the pictures I took of that Slimy Salamander. A small, shiny juvenile. Goggle eyed and slim. Confused by my attention, slickening up its super-powered skin as I gently foiled its escape routes. The black growing darker and more reflective with its increasing secretions. The white marks standing out brighter and brighter, piercing against the black. Like the dazzle of stars shot through a galaxy. It looked like one of those Hubble telescope photographs, like a a tiny galaxy on the forest floor.

I couldn’t love it any less than I love the entire Milky Way in which my own planet orbits its sun.

I spend a lot of time in the the forests and fields near my home looking for animals to photograph in natural habitats, usually by rooting around beneath stones and logs and similar places. Many snakes are there.

But I live in western New York state, where we see no copperheads. Copperheads are officially listed in the field guides, but they’re far to the south of me, restricted in their range, and very rare. Same with our other venomous New York snake, the rattlesnake.

I’ve never seen either snake in the wild, nor come close. Nothing I’ve seen MAKES HUMAN-DAMAGING POISON IN ITS MOUTH. So, naturally, I’m in awe of such creatures, ignorant of them, and would be terrified of having my day ruined by being killed by one if I had to keep watch for them.

Mary Oliver’s prose poem, about stumbling upon a copperhead in her path near dusk, describes the experience of finding danger where you don’t expect it, and how theses experiences can make a person feel.

Though only the very rarest of copperhead bites results in death, they can mess you up bad. Here’s what’s likely to happen to you if you’re bitten: swelling, blurry vision, shortness of breath, incapacitation from excruciating pain, a whole lot of nausea, secondary infections, destruction of flesh near the bite, and in grisly scars. In other words, it’s a Life Event to avoid.

I’m struck by the similarities between the physiological symptoms of a copperhead bite, and the side effect risks of something else a person might experience, such as, for example, a year of chemotherapy treatments for chronic lymphoblastic leukemia.

It was during my year of chemo that I returned to Mary Oliver’s poem, and it rang a bell deep inside my experience of trying to survive cancer. The final line has come to be a defining phrase of my life. Observing the change she felt in herself after the snake held her with its gaze, and then retreated, Mary Oliver says this:

“When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.”

It’s true. It happened to me.

When the cancer that held me retreated and remitted, I was overcome with what I think Max Weber would call “enchantment” – a direct experience of the world not characterized by rationality or intellect, but almost entirely emotional and infused with a kind of magic. I found myself distracted to the point of feeling mesmerized by such common and banal things as speaking to a cashier, looking at trees moving in the wind, eating bread. Some days I would walk the half mile to my part time job and be in tears by the time I arrived if I heard a crow calling in the distance.

I was worried that I was losing my mind, so I asked my oncologist about it. He told me it’s “normal” and these heightened observations and emotions would fade over time. He was right. I’ve enjoyed years of remission now, and I’m no longer crying over the feel of the sun on my head or the taste of jam.

However, in May this year, I was in South Carolina, tromping through brush and flipping logs in a scrubby area beside the hotel where I was staying, hoping to locate and photograph whatever species of frog I’d heard trilling for a mate the night before.

I was bumbling around the way I do in New York, where there’s nothing to fear in the brush, shoving my hands in holes and tearing clumsily beneath roots.

And then suddenly it was there. I felt what I’d done, before my mind could name it: I’d blundered, stupidly, dangerously, into the copperhead, looming over it and actually knocking a stick across the long muscle of its body.

I’m so grateful for its self control and its reluctance to go to war with me. The hissing was so loud, amplified by the vibration of its tail against the dead leaves, the way a rattlesnake does on TV. The head rose up so quickly, high above the ground, hinged open to reveal the stark, brilliant white of the inside of its mouth.

I felt everything drop away from me. Adrenaline hammered into every cell capable of feeling, and everything inside went cold. I felt that I might actually pee.

It held me, just like in the poem, just like at the hospital, and when it slithered away I laughed hard, and then back in my hotel room the tears came. I thought I could smell the antiseptic sterility of the clinic and taste the metallic taste on my tongue after an infusion. The old panic and rage, the vibrating aliveness of the mundane details of my environment.

For days, after I met the copperhead, the thumb of fear was lifted.

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You can hear me reading this essay at the cool multimedia storytelling Web site Cowbird: http://cowbird.com/story/46898/Lifted/

My latest Cowbird story, in which I interview my 5 year old daughter Gladiola about some recent drama on our picnic table…

Hear the startling tale here: http://cowbird.com/story/46552/Pumpkin_Squirrel/