After taking what I need (length and weight measurements, photographs, a fungal swab, and a tiny bit of tail for genetic analysis), I release the salamander and watch it crawl beneath the rock where I found it, just ten minutes ago: a female, salamander number FR-25, 39.6 millimeters snout-vent length, 1.25 grams in weight, chytrid sample 0033. Her back is dark chocolate brown, stippled with scattered flecks of iridescent, greenish silver, the eggs beneath her translucent belly skin a creamy yellow. She disappears into the damp and sheltered darkness beneath the rock, vanishing into a world that I might quantify (30 % soil moisture, 6.53 pH, 30 centimeters to the nearest running water), but will never know. My season’s field work is almost done, and F-25 is one of the last Inyo Mountains salamanders that I will handle this spring. Soon I will leave this canyon, move away from the tangle of willow and wild rose and talus, onto the blinding light of a desert bajada. I will wind my way through barrel cactus and creosote bush, fall out of the Inyos and into a more scattered life. At times I think that I have been too busy with my research, too focused on data, too insistent on hustling from one salamander locality to the next. I have traveled through beautiful and broken country, but I have not held still for long enough, or often enough. And so I rest for a while on a large block of gray-white granite. The outside world falls away—my worries and plans for the future, this research project, the incessant stream of “current events” that crawls across the screen of my iPhone and pulverizes my life—and for a few minutes there is only the drifting whisper of a breeze, the white-noise song of falling water tumbling through wild rose and boulders, the chatter of white-throated swifts, wheeling through the air above my perch. I think about F-25, and imagine her life: those slow salamander years, nocturnal forays into the surface world, long winters spent in some cliffside crevice or deep in the soil, waiting. I think of her eggs and what they imply but do not promise, of infinite patience, of her lineage and the winding, contingent history of the genus Batrachoseps, species campi: five million years or so of stasis and upheaval and isolation, the fault-block thrust of the Inyo Mountains, the waxing and waning of Pleistocene waters, the explosion of the Long Valley Caldera and blanket of smothering ash, the great drying of the Holocene and (now) the Anthropocene. A species whose range has been fractured and cauterized by droughts and flash floods, leaving behind isolated pockets of salamanders, hanging on—an archipelago of scattered springs and seeps, one hundred yards of habitat here, three hundred yards there, each one a lifetime or more apart as the salamander might crawl. And perhaps for a few rare travelers, successful journeys through a killing desert world, miraculous marches from one pocket of water to another—somehow.
The actuality of the salamander's history and ecology is more than enough, but there also is the beauty of metaphor, my desire for something beyond the data and hypotheses. And so my supplication to F-25 and all that her species represents: that she and her kin will endure, that the seeps and springs will remain, that a rising tide of flash floods will not scour every canyon and eviscerate every population. That chytrid fungus and our carbon dioxide spoor will not ravage the Southwest. That the Inyo Mountains Wilderness and whatever protection it offers the salamanders will remain. That unbelievably, the march of human folly will be countered by a more powerful march of human wisdom. For although these salamanders have endured for much longer than there have been human beings—and there is some comfort in that—the past does not guarantee the future. The world will change, perhaps more than we might hope. So, please: go on and on and on. Find shelter in your lonely canyons. Live your lives beyond the realm of human history and concern—but at the same time, offer us a few slivers of hope and longing and mystery, and even the possibility of love. I hoist my pack and start the descent, picking my way through a jumble of talus and onto easier ground, walking out of the canyon, away from the salamanders and into the waiting world.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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