Phenology for 5/16/12: Salamander

The clouds are finally thinning out. Color me frustrated. I woke up this morning thinking, "I don't want to spend another day online. I caught up with the e-mail. I wrote about as many words as anybody could possibly want to read. My eyes are tired." The sky remained pale grey. I counted the books on the stack of books I'm ready to resell. There were more than a dozen. Time to pack up a dozen books, post reviews of them here, and take them to the dear ladies at Mountain Treasures, the charity store. (The children of one of these ladies run Oliver's, a for-profit store; books they consider valuable may appear on the shelves there. And they like to read, so some books may go straight to their homes without appearing for sale in either store. If you ask for a book you don't see, it may appear in the store next week.)

So, okay, I have something else to write about. My eyes are still tired of looking at computers.

Anyway, awake but bleary-eyed, or weary-eyed, I went into the mud room to check on Candice's kittens. Candice, who had been a Naughty Cat and stayed outside all night, whined and nagged at every step. She whined for food, then paused while eating to whine and point me to the water dish. It still had water in it. Did it have something else in it, besides water? I took the water dish into the light.

Heavy rain always floods the homes of some little animals that enjoy a moist, but not underwater, environment. The terrapins are the biggest; sometimes crayfish, frogs, and various insects move up into the yard in wet weather...and today we had a salamander. Apparently it had crawled up the drain pipe of the kitchen sink before remembering that, although it breathes air, it needs to stay pretty damp in order to survive. In less damp weather the salamander would have remembered this before it got all the way into the kitchen, but the air was so damp, yesterday, that it didn't. So it had started exploring the kitchen, then started to feel dry, and, not having enough brain to remember the way back down the drain, it had made its way to the water dish. It was hanging on to the rim of the dish, swishing its tail around in the water, adding several little globs of yellowish-tan slime to the water.

If you want to know more about salamanders than the general information page at Wikipedia has to offer...good luck looking on the Internet. The North Carolina Herpetologists' web page seems to expect readers to know their critter's scientific name before looking it up, which is useless. Most of the salamanders in the stream at the Cat Sanctuary look like this one...

http://www.herpsofnc.org/herps_of_nc/salamanders/Psemon/Pse_mon.html

...but I don't really know which species they are. They do live in mud; they are mud-colored, although I have seen some little red-orange ones, which seems to fit the description of the Mud Salamander. They're mostly harmless to humans, unless eaten, and seem to have no economic value, so nobody seems to have bothered to find out much about them.

The Herps have photographed mating pairs of salamanders and documented that they hug and kiss when mating. I'm sure the idea of salamanders smooching is just what you all needed to brighten your work days.

Only some species of salamanders are known as newts. I'm pretty sure the one I dumped out in the still-wet yard, before washing Candice's water dish, was not a newt. However, slimy and cold-blooded though it was, I found it less repulsive than Newt Gingrich. Even if the visiting salamander had abandoned its mate (I don't know how to tell their gender and am not sure I want to know), at least it hadn't stood up in public and promised to cherish its mate until death did them part.