HANOVER — Along with May flowers, April showers bring about roadkill of the amphibious variety.

The evening time trill of spring peepers — a type of small “chorus” frog — marks for many the turn of seasons in northern New England, and it also puts creature-conscious motorists on high alert.

The Hartford Salamander Team is out to reduce the mayhem.

The Upper Valley’s wood frogs, spring peepers and yellow-spotted salamanders migrate (in that general order) from forests to their breeding grounds in swampy wetlands on the first rainy nights above 40 degrees after winter.

The animals are methodical. One marked salamander has been observed to move at a consistent time every year. “We’ve got late movers and early movers,” said team leader Ben Lay.

The amphibians’ pilgrimage sometimes can prove fatal. Roadways cut through some crucial crossing points.

Volunteers with Lay’s group don reflective vests and help ferry the migratory parade across busy streets by hand or by bucket. But the lives of many amphibians begin hidden from the threat of headlights and tire treads.

Last week, Jason Berard, of the nonprofit Upper Valley Land Trust, led a group of about 10 on a “vernal pool” tour through the roughly 550-acre Tunis Conservation Area in Hanover. There, egg masses grow in the flooded, peaty depressions of old log landings and skidder roads. These seasonal pools, where most amphibian life begins, are fleeting. They evaporate when temperatures rise.

Salamander eggs in the pools are encapsulated in “a big gelatinous blob,” about the size of a lacrosse ball, Berard said. Frog eggs are more individual, strung together in floating rafts.

“This sort of reminds me of where Yoda would live,” Berard said, referencing Star Wars as he stepped over mossy hummocks created by root systems from trees that have grown and fallen down over thousands of years.

But while amphibians enjoy a relatively quiet beginning deep in the wooded vernal pools (they do have to look out for barred owls and other hungry birds), they face another threat out among the humans.

The strip of paved road between forest and wetland on Lily Pond Road, off of Sykes Mountain Avenue, in White River Junction is known as a “critical crossing” to members of the Hartford Salamander Team.

The group includes four volunteer-run outposts in Hanover, Hartford, Hartland and Thetford. Members send off the data they collect about crossings to a larger amphibian migration project run by the North Branch nature Center in Montpelier.

“Those guys even want us to count the ones that are squished in the road,” volunteer Sarah Smith said.

Last week, Smith, who runs Dartmouth’s book arts workshop, and her husband Dan Parella, a chiropractor, trudged out on a rainy night to taxi an amphibians that might show up at the Lily Pond Road crossing.

The night was a bust (“We didn’t even see a frog,” Smith said), but the weather had put them on guard.

The segments of Route 5 across from King Arthur Flour in Norwich, and then south, across from the Upper Valley Acquatic Center in Hartford, are also crucial migration points.

Since 2020, the Hartford Salamander Team has helped almost 700 amphibians cross the road to breeding grounds. But that’s not the end of their journey. In the next few weeks, frogs and salamanders will be heading back into the woods.

“I think the best way anyone could volunteer for us is to just opt out of driving on warm, wet nights this spring,” Lay said.

Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.]]>