The Bio Observer

It's 9 p.m. in April of last year and I'm headed out into the woods to look for amphibians. It's dark, it's raining, and it's cold. I've chosen a forest in my hometown because it's full of vernal and semi-permanent pools which would be perfect for frogs and salamanders to lay eggs. These shallow ponds often dry up by late summer which means fish do not reside in them; this allows for minimal predation on the eggs and larvae of amphibians. I knew I would find frogs, but what I really wanted to find were salamanders. Many salamanders are secretive creatures and may spend most of their lives buried in leaf liter or well below the soil. But spring is the time to see them, when they make journeys out from their hides and burrows to ponds. Here they'll swim through the leaves and murky water to find a mate and make the trek back to their hides once the mating period is over. As I approached my target pond, the frog calls were loud. Males were out, posturing...

  Seminole State Forest. That’s where we were going on our last day in Florida. It sounded like a birder’s paradise and due to its vastness, birding via vehicle appeared to be the best way to traverse the park and see as much as possible. While Murphy and I both love a good hike, we were worn out from the past two days of hikes. We arrived at the forest early, about 7 a.m. As we pulled in we noticed that the gate further up the road was closed. “Okay, no big deal,” we thought, “we can probably just push it open.” NOPE. There were half a dozen locks on the gate with no indication of who to call if you wanted to get in. So we parked. It was time to adapt. We would hike around instead. The only problem was that because we had planned to drive through we brought no food and had very little water. Actually, no. We brought no water. Oh well, we weren’t going to let a few life essentials hold us back from possibly seeing new critters. Before starting our hike, we headed down to ...