Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Slow down: Amphibian crossing
Volunteers mark 10 years of helping cold-blooded critters stay alive
Why did the spotted salamander cross the road?
To get to the vernal pool of course.
This year marks the 10th year Kim White has been organizing a team of as many as 130 volunteers to come out on cold, rainy nights in early spring, to help amphibians find love.
They have to make their way across St. Peter’s Road from their woodland home so they can spawn in a vernal pool that appears each spring and volunteers cut down on that trip being a fatal one.
“I actually first read about it in The Mercury,” White said Monday.
“There was a woman here before me who was doing it, and she was stopping traffic and the township was getting upset with her,” White recalled.
“I told my husband ‘look, that’s our property where we’re building our house,’” she said.
For White, a certified nature lover, being at the center of a local amphibian migration only added to the value of the property, “although I had no idea it would be like this,” she said with a laugh.
After volunteering for two years, her predecessor moved away and White helped arrange a protocol for the volunteers that the township could live with, and she has been standing at the roadside in the spring rains, with an “amphibians crossing” sign and wearing a reflective vest ever since.
“When it’s really cold, like it was Friday night, I wear my snow pants. I was cold all day Saturday,” she said with a laugh.
After a decade of amphibian advocacy, White has become a bit of an expert.
“With the salamanders, the males go first and leave a sperm packet in the pool, and then they
can go anytime they want. The females come in and absorb it into their bodies, fertilize their eggs and lay them,” she explained.
After ruminating for a moment on the solitary nature of salamander romance, she continued. “For the frogs and the toads, they have to be together.”
“The vernal pool is ideal for the amphibians because it dries up in the summer and fish can’t live there, so there are no fish to eat the eggs,” said White. “I’ve really learned so much since I started doing this.”
White starts to watch the weather in late February and sends out warnings via her email list of volunteers if it looks like the conditions may be right. Then she gets out her “black market flashlight” that her brother gave her one year and heads out into the night.
It has to be wet and dark for North Coventry’s version of “March of the Amphibians” to occur and
still, sometimes volunteers gather and see very little activity.
On other nights, she needs as many 30 volunteers to handle the flood of hopping, scrambling peepers, salamanders, wood frogs and toads.
Those volunteers often come from miles away.
“Friday night we had a man who came all the way down from Hershey because he wanted to see them,” she said.
White keeps tallies, particularly of a threatened species, the Jefferson salamander, which is blue and specific to the area. She reports out to her volunteers via email the next day so they can know how many lives they saved the night before.
“We keep an eye out for the Jeffersons in particular,” she said.
“And the spotted salamanders can live for 17 years, so that’s why I get upset when they get squished by a passing car,” White said. “Because that’s 17 years of life and procreation lost. The toads? Well, they’re really a dime a dozen.”
When White is not standing by the side of the road catching cold
for her cold-blooded charges, she is a reading intervention assistant at Barth Elementary School in Pottstown.
So each spring the youngsters at Barth get a nature lesson from a familiar face.
“I usually take toads because their skin is less sensitive and I have to warn all the kids about their defense mechanism and how we all have to wash our hands afterwards,” said White. (Toads often urinate when handled too much.)
She said she hopes to inspire the students to take an interest in science and nature early on.
As for her? She’s taken an interest for most of her life.
When she was a girl, White was the kind of kid who would come home covered in mud, because she had been playing in a nearby stream.
“I was, and am, a nature nerd, I admit it,” White said with a laugh. “I’m going to the science march in Washington on Earth Day,” White said.
After all, the amphibians will be done spawning for the year by then.