Love Is In The Water

It's the middle of February, which can only mean one thing around here: it's time to jump into a cold swamp up to our nipples and look for evidence of amphibian romance. Yes, Team Brewster is once again gearing up to monitor egg masses of frogs and salamanders for the regional government entity in charge of wetlands. They won't know how good a job they're doing until we come back with some hard data. It's not always comfortable out there, but one neat thing about being immersed in a cold swamp is you barely notice the stiff winter winds.

Sadly, Team Brewster has lost half its members. Elizabeth, who keeps an overcoat on when she visits us, even if we have the heat jacked up to ninety for her, bailed out this year. Even after I offered helpful suggestions. "Quit falling in," I told her, but she was unmoved. I'll miss her, but there's a lot to be said for diversifying the gene pool a little bit. Brewsters have their good qualities, but none of them are all that useful. We're great at showing up, and tipping over, but don't look to us for direction. There have been Brewsters in this country a long time; the starter set barreled over on the Mayflower full of righteous fire and not much else, watched everybody drop dead the first winter, and had barely enough gas left over to procreate. Now, nine or ten generations later, we're still a sparse population of, shall we say, unusual intellects.

Fortunately, Dave has stepped up. Among his other fine traits, Dave does not confine his activities to the sensible. Plus, he has much higher nipples. He proved to be a natural right off the bat. I told him to look for egg masses that look like oranges (Northwestern salamander) or grapefruit-sized tapioca (red-legged frog), and, attuned to all things edible, he homed in on some right away. Everything stops at this point while we write down our data and flag the eggs. Elizabeth and I had trouble with this, juggling a clipboard, several markers, a spoon (don't ask), tape, a stopwatch, and a large bundle of bamboo sticks. It was always an ordeal. Dave starts right out by laying the bundle of bamboo sticks on the water.

"Bamboo sticks float?" I said. Well, don't that beat all.

Minutes later, he was working his problem-solving skills again, when he tried to determine if his waders leaked by farting in them and looking for bubbles. The man complains that his cognitive powers are slipping, but he has a long way to slide before he gets to the Brewster mental terrain.

Last year, our assigned patch of wetland was barely manageable for two monitors. It was a lot of territory. This year, same location, Walden Pond had been replaced by Lake Michigan. We're going to be at this a while, I thought. Meanwhile, Dave was hard at work.

"Whoa," he said, bending over.

"You got eggs?"

Dave nearly had his nose in the water. "Pretty soon," he said.

Whereupon he reached in and scooped out a pair of rough-skinned newts, locked in embrace. "Dude," you could almost hear them saying, but nobody was letting go of anything. The female was smaller and had the standard grainy skin texture, and the male was so engorged--all over,

mind you--he'd gone smooth. They can remain clasped together for hours or days, and sometimes a whole group of them are tangled together. It's called a mating ball--which isn't what we used to call it back in college, but we might as well have. We started to see them everywhere. We haven't logged too many egg masses yet, but there's romance in the air. It doesn't look like these guys are giving anything up for Lent.

It's still Muddy Gras in the old town tonight.

Wade Bogs

My niece Elizabeth and I were ready to set the world of amphibian egg mass monitoring on fire. It's a small world, but we're a small flame. We are among eighty or so volunteers checking on the health of local wetlands by locating and recording frog and salamander egg masses. We got our personal swamp assignment from the Big Frog Egg Boss, Jean Lea, and we were rubbered up and ready to wade. Hoo-yah! Team Brewster was on the march. We were familiar with the plan: wade your bog in a straightforward, methodical grid, taking care not to stomp the eggs or stir the murk, and flag all egg masses found. We were pumped. Jean Lea met us out at our site and waved in the general direction of what appeared to be, at most, a damp spot. "It doesn't look that big," I noted, to which she replied: "Well, it's deceptive."

An hour later I was up to my nipples in deceptive. Admittedly, this doesn't take as much water as it did ten years ago, but still. It was nearly impossible to wade the site methodically. Where we had envisioned a nice square Colorado of water, we got New Jersey. The margins were thick with willows and nearly impenetrable. We peered in as far as we could, but saw nothing. In the more open water, we were quickly within an inch of flooding our chest waders. We had at it from numerous angles, crawling through a barbed-wire fence and whacking through blackberry vines, and everywhere it seemed to call for a kayak or at least much taller amphibian egg mass monitors. I found myself fantasizing about the sites that had been assigned to other monitors. They looked like football fields; in my most despairing moments, they even came with yard markers to make the grid-walking easy as pie. Had we been sent on a snipe hunt? Was Jean Lea trying to drown us? Had she been informed that we had no progeny, and that once Team Brewster was gone, the world would be rid of us?

Worse, we had seen no egg masses at all. It was possible that they had not yet been laid, but we couldn't rule out that we were just the worst amphibian egg mass monitors ever. Self-doubt reigned. And then we saw them. Four massive blobs of red-legged frog egg jelly, green with algae and speckled with future tadpoles like an illustration of the meaning of life. Could anything be jollier?

The Northern Red-Legged Frog lays her eggs with the help of her smaller mate, who, according to the froggy manual, grasps her about the waist and squeezes. This in itself is romantic, because although the frogs are undeniably beautiful, they really don't have waists, so much, or not by our standards. But they might like to think they do. Part of romance involves shading the truth a little. It's sort of like when Dave and I were in the Louvre and he observed that the Venus de Milo's rear end reminds him of mine. This doesn't have much to do with the frogs, but I like to work it in whenever I can, and this post seemed like as good a place as any.

To be continued.
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Addendum: In an earlier post, I hinted broadly that it would be swell if we got official Amphibian Egg Mass Monitor badges. And my buddy Mary Ann Dabritz, an artist and unthwartable spirit, apparently agreed and promptly stepped up with this solid bronze beauty, which can be viewed along with a host of other amphibian art, and frankly, almost anything else a body could want at www.castofcharacters.com; there's a link in the left margin, under "Mary Ann's Astonishing Animalware."

Morning Eggs

I don't know what you all did Tuesday morning, but I got up and went outside in a 33-degree mixture of snow and rain to stand in a swamp up to my navel and sample salamander eggs with a spoon. The precipitation was vintage Portland: first it clumps on your hat, then slides down your neck. Yes indeedy, so far, retirement is everything I ever dreamed of. There were about a dozen of us at this party, and we were being trained to be Amphibian Egg Mass Monitors for the regional government entity. They didn't bring the spoons this time, and we didn't get Egg Mass Monitor badges, but they did provide chest waders. These were all flung willy-nilly onto a tarp for us to pick out; it looked like a massacre. There were the standard rubber jobs such as a first mate on a salmon boat might wear, and there were also slick new neoprene models. I tried those.

It takes about ten minutes to shovel yourself into neoprene chest waders, especially without lubrication. They are quite slimming, when worn by a slim person such as our trainer, Jean Lea. Otherwise, they make you look like the love child of the Michelin Man. It is no cakewalk to pull them all the way up. It's like stuffing melons into a garden hose. You really need a tool. I have a new item in mind: it would look something like a thin tractor seat on a handle. I'm calling it a Heinie Horn. But the neoprene is toasty and dry, and might just protect against sexually transmitted diseases as well.

The idea is to survey a section of wetland in a measured pattern to determine how many egg masses have been laid. We're just looking for red-legged frog eggs and northwestern salamander eggs, because they're huge and bulbous and easy to spot. A few other kinds of amphibians will have made some deposits as well, but their contributions look like something you might hawk up in the morning, and for our purposes we can ignore them.

Light conditions and turbidity affect our ability to peer through the murky depths, but on this day we also had a veneer of ice to contend with. However, it was no match for my trifocals and my zeal. I found one phlegm ball a foot deep, the output of a long-toed salamander. It didn't stand a chance--I've got skills. My daddy used to take me out to the swampy patches during spotted salamander mating season (this was even before Nintendo), and he'd take notes and photographs while I scavenged. Some people have been primed for a career in medicine from an early age; I was groomed for an unpaid position in hip-deep muck, like a lot of other people in this economy. Daddy would be a hundred by now, and he would have been so proud his youngest finally made something of herself.

The spoons supposedly make it easier to see and identify the egg masses, and we'll get our own spoon and stopwatch and a map to our own personal patch of swamp in a week or so. I'm still hoping for a badge, too.

Wearing waders reminded me of steelhead fishing. Steelhead are a mythical fish said to roam the cold waters hereabouts, but you never actually catch one, even wearing the good waders. Likewise, we found none of our target egg masses this morning. We're just a little early; the amphibians in question are holding off on a night of romance in the kind of temperatures we humans were willing to go out to look for them in. This just goes to show that evolution isn't always all it's cracked up to be. It's something to think about the next time you hear someone explain that we need to care about the health of the amphibian populations because they are indicator species, and their fate portends our own. No.

We care about the amphibian populations because they are worthy and handsome and noble of eye and spirit, and a credit to the planet. Really, the hell with us.