Sexy Salamanders and Other Rites of Spring

Silly humans.

We always think it's all about us.

We're so busy grousing about how spring must have decided to land somewhere else this year that we haven't even noticed the wildlife romping all around us with the fervor of newlyweds.

Go ahead. Stick your head out the window at sunrise tomorrow and listen to all that wooing going on. It's a whole neighborhood of pillow talk.

"The cardinals are far more vocal right now," Harvey Webster said. "Chickadees have a shift in their songs, too. And the robins have been singing for weeks."

Webster's official title is director of the Wildlife Resource Center at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. That doesn't begin to describe the spell he casts whenever he starts talking about nature carrying on. He's more like the Wizard of Wild, weaving tales of wonder as he points his finger and says, "Look there, right there ," and then describes the magic unfolding right in front of you. He's exactly the kind of guy you want to run into when you think you can't bear one more day of this snowplow spring.

"No matter how desperate the climate, the birds are sticking to a pretty tight schedule," he said. "The great horned owls, for example, are generally courting and laying eggs by the first of February. Bald eagles already have chicks in the nest."

"No way," I said. "Holy moley."

He took a deep breath.

"You need to get out more," he said.

The summer crowd arrives early. The great blue herons are back. So are the puddle ducks, not to be confused with the diving ducks, who I guess aren't much for mingling. And right now, nature is all about homesteading. Robins sprint across lawns, building homes for two, maybe three generations of youngsters before they leave in the fall. Red-tailed hawks have set up their big-stick bundles in the crotches of trees.

And you know all those Canada geese flying last month in V-formation? Well, that friendliness and all-for-the-flock business is history. They're serial monogamists, and they're really serious about the monogamy, which is why we're seeing so many twosomes scouting for safe places to nest.

Unfortunately, there are so many of them now that they don't always pick prime real estate.

"If they're nesting in road ditches or flowerpots on balconies, it's because the best spots were already taken," Webster said.

As an aside, when you're around Webster, I don't recommend making fun of the intellectual gifts of geese. If they decide to nest near an offramp on Interstate 90, for example, it's our fault, not theirs, he said.

"Back in the '60s and '70s, it was 'highly fashionable' to keep geese around," he said. So clever humans that we aren't, we "shortstopped" their migration, which is why so many neighborhood parks are now full of small children and prissy little dogs running for dear life from geese who think they own the place.

Finally, no talk of the feverish rites of spring is complete without due mention of the amorous mole salamander. Any day now, hundreds of thousands of the dark, 8-inch-long amphibians with yellow spots will rise from the earth and return to the vernal ponds of their ancestors throughout New England and the Midwest for one glorious week of romance.

Webster said it happens on the first warm rainy night of spring. In some places, officials close off the roads so that the salamanders can sneak their sizzling selves safely across lanes on the way to their beloved woodland pools. Then by the hundreds, they meld into a "giant ball of erotic delirium" called a congress.

Yes, he said congress. Little "c."

Anyway, the males do a dance under the night sky to lure the females into picking up packets of sperm they've spun. Soon the mothers-to-be are fastening their eggs to underwater plants, and then whoosh, just like that, the salamanders recede from whence they came, gone for another year.

Webster said, "We call it the Night of Salamander Love."

Coming soon to a vernal pond near you.

Because spring has sprung, no matter what we humans say.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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