blue sallies of Bemihjee Mini-soda

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rhyno
Posts: 16
Joined: July 7th, 2015, 10:05 am

blue sallies of Bemihjee Mini-soda

Post by rhyno »

In the middle of this last July, I got a chance to go to the Bemidji, MN area for a family outing. When we weren't out tubing and wakeboarding (or in, getting rained out from tubing and wakeboarding), I took the opportunity to get out into the woods surrounding the cabin for some herping. Though the weather was warm for salamanders, I had high hopes of finding some blue-spotted, which would be a lifer and only my third Ambystoma.

The forest was an interesting mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, and the gently rolling hills were carpeted with horsetails (I'd only ever seen them at the margins of ponds and rivers). Luckily, these hills were also dotted with large vernal pools, and, though my first outing revealed only a couple wood frogs and a near-biblical swarm of mosquitos, early the next morning I turned up my very first blue-spotted salamander, a medium-sized adult ~10 cm long:

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Though the temperature was rapidly rising the mosquitos were getting pretty nasty, I stayed out in the hopes of finding just one more. I ended up flipping it (as my cousins in the area would later tell me they often do) under some firewood right next to the cabin:

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Unfortunately, I only had my phone with me, and the camera's autofocus is pretty terrible, so all but one of these pictures turned into little more than an exercise in creative photoshopping (well, gimping... grad student budget). I'm very proud of that second picture though--probably the best of my very young herping career. In any case, it was awesome to get a chance to find a lifer while on the road with my family.
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