Darkness comes at eight instead of nine. The grass turns tawny, the fields decorated with goldenrod and purple heads of Joe-Pye Weed. Milkweed blossoms turn into pods that look like silver rowboats. An occasional maple flares red or gallant orange.
Now is the time to Sing Ho! for the woodpile. Summer's end approaches bringing with it a delivery to my house of several cords of maple, birch and oak. When the wood tumbles out of the truck into a large ungainly heap, my yard gains an instant new habitat.
We stacked four cords of wood last year, delivered in three loads in September and October with each pile yielding surprises with its own set of creatures. I put my hand on a slug, saw two short red worms revealed when a damp piece of bark fell off a chunk of wood, watched a dangerous looking insect with many legs lie on the flat surface of another log, and observed my dog chase a chipmunk into the pile, the dog proceeding gingerly onto the crest of the heap.
One sunny warm day, a host of insects flew up when I passed the wood pile-flies slow with oncoming winter and dusty winged moths.
The most exciting critter came in the first lot of wood and was one I had become acquainted with several years ago while tearing down an old fieldstone chimney. The 80+ years-old sand mortar was damp and crumbling. I pushed one section off and saw squirming in the daylight what I at first thought was a tiny snake ‹ skinny body about three inches long with a brick red stripe down its back and a dark underside and tiny dark legs. Research identified it as a Redback Salamander. The reason for its snake-like appearance is its lack of a "pinched-in" look where the tail meets the body. This is a woodland salamander, favoring leaf litter, crevices under rocks, decaying logs-places that stay damp. They come out on wet evenings to hunt for insects and earthworms. In very dry weather they can go as deep as one foot underground, burrowing in moist crevices.
They are a very common salamander, as you realize when you know where to look, and are a food source for songbirds (who forage in the leaf litter), snakes, shrews, and owls.
The redback is lungless, the larval stage occurring totally on land in the egg capsules. The larvae do not have an aquatic stage. The young retain only remnants of gills that disappear quickly.
Eggs are laid most often in rotting logs, or under leaf litter or rocks, and look like a cluster of white or yellowish grapes. The breeding season occurs in spring and fall. Redbacks spend the winter in crevices, ant mounds, etc., often going down to three and a half feet underground.
Each individual is born with one of three colors: lead-back (no stripe), redback, or red phase (bright orange-red all over the body). The color of an individual stays the same for life and appears to be related to elevation. Striped redbacks occur more in upper elevations.
I enjoy stacking the wood each fall. This year the most "finds" to date happened while preparing the place where the wood goes. I unearthed redbacks, spiders, and a cluster of eggs.
Who knows what the next two cords will bring!
Cassie Horner writes from the Vermont Institute of Natural Science in Woodstock, Vt.
