#43: Egg Hunt

As mentioned, I am volunteering this winter and spring to go out and jump in some local swamps to count frog and salamander eggs for Science.

This Saturday was my first outing, in a pond at Howell Territorial Park on Sauvie Island.

It's been years since I spent time around pure wildlife buffs - I'd have to reach back to my teens, attending OMSI summer camps, as the last time I was surrounded by nothing but others geeking out this bad on creepy crawly things. The amount of intel swapped was astounding, on everything from "what is that bug," to fishing and hunting tips, to learning about a group of people who go out at the same time each year to hand-carry hundreds of frogs across Highway 30, when they come out of Forest Park and make for Sauvie Island to mate. Which ties right in to what we were doing here.

The mission: to count egg masses for the red-legged frog and the northwestern salamander. The purpose: see how their populations are doing and how they are responding to changes in management. The how: by putting on waders and jumping in.

Here's a look at how it went.

Here we are hiking out to the pond in gear.

The pond.

Pretty pond, loaded with beautiful, unshootable ducks and

sandhill cranes.

We started off with a little training in spotting a red-legged

frog egg mass that had already been flagged.  See it?

See it? The white spatulas are an essential tool in helping to 

spot things against the muck. Also, I had to monkey with this

picture A LOT in Photoshop to make that thing at all visible.

Once trained, we set off in a line through the muck - kind of like

how you've seen grid searches done on the TeeVee, 

except instead of looking for a body we were looking for amphibian eggs.

I spotted this northwestern salamander egg mass.  (See it?)

Our leader is in the green jacket, trying to point it out to the

rest of the team.

See it yet?

OK, here it is.

Once one is spotted, we flag it and move on.

Results of the day.  Not to brag but four of the five "AMGR"

(northwestern salamander) sightings were by yours truly. But I 

had no luck with the "RAAU" (redlegged frog).