urbpan | Vermont, Part one: Around the House (Reply)

One of the nice things about visiting Vermont, in addition to seeing family, is the abundance of wildlife right around my in-laws' house. We found three red efts while we were there. I sometimes think of amphibians as simple, primitive animals, but they can have surprisingly complex life cycles. The eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens) starts its life like most other amphibians: as a pollywog in fresh water. After some time it grows limbs and lungs and comes out onto land as a red eft, vividly orange with red spots to advertise its toxicity. In this stage it is still sexually immature, roaming the forest floor and feeding on tiny animals, but unable to reproduce. It stays this way for between one and four years, until it changes into an adult newt, and returns to the water to live the rest of its life as an aquatic predator, and eventually mate and lay eggs there.

This long life cycle which requires a great deal of time and access to several different kinds of habitat explains why the eastern newt is not usually found in the city.

The slabs of schist making up the wall of the porch are full of cracks and crevices. Insects find refuge and spiders like this transverse-banded crab spider (Xysticus transversatus) lie in ambush for them. This is the spider

cottonmanifesto is looking at in this picture.

This lone orange wildflower was on the slope below the porch. Identification, anyone?

My nephew Oliver found this spider on the back bumper of my car. I don't know how far he traveled, but I can see by his small abdomen (the butt part) and large palps (the roundish things coming off his face) that he is a male. His front two pairs of legs are oriented for grabbing, like crab claws, and I think this spider is in one of the crab spider families.

I couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of rocks that needed balancing around the house.

Morning rains produced this troop of mushrooms, which I think are the fruiting bodies of the tree-root parasite Armillaria, sometimes called "honey mushrooms."

My honey taking this amazing picture. Adult eastern newts, while not as toxic as the efts, are still bad to eat; when they want to make this point clear (when threatened by a predator) they curl up to expose a bright yellow underbelly. I don't know if this eft is precocious or if all efts have the same defensive posture as the adults, but gosh it's cute.