The Hardin Hollow Farm
The Roundtop Farm
The Trade Branch Farm                                    Sunday night, 14 February 2010, from Nashville.

     As has the rest of the mid-South, we have had to endure, and yet do, the worst winter in many years. Here, we define worst as being excluded from our ponds by way of ice. If you have been a regular peruser of this column--and if you are you must be an uncommonly patient reader because the column updates only every month or so--you know that we collect our amphibians from our ponds only, and this may suggest to the more thoughtful among our readers that cold makes ice, and that ice hampers amphibian collecting and so as well our purpose in life.

     In winter, our break from the dullness of routine is the first spotted run. That is the breeding run of the spotted salamander. We make on this animal, and its egg masses, as we understand it, have put a little life into more than one university class in embryology. But see, we've got to get the timing down so as to be there when the spotteds run. Such concern, I would suppose, enters into the psyche (c.w.?) of those who yet net the salmon, follow migrating caribou, bring down waterfowl, or pursue whatever else is allowed by our ever-strangling governmental agencies that extinguish us one by one so as to parade their vigilance, which masks their fear of budget-cutting and marginalism.

     Anyway, to get back to it. We keep near-perfect records of our salamander runs, and over the past half dozen or so  years they've taken place in February. Where in prior years the first big run was sometime in January. Why then, did  February enter?  We put this to the fact that for the last few years we've had drought, and this drought, at least for now, in our area appears to be in remission. To put it another way, the animals will not run until they know that their ponds can be counted upon to hold, and in the past few years it took February rains to ensure this. 

       I've just reread this thing, and it looks like I'm taking lessons from Gertrude Stein. But it's late Sunday night and I've been grading newts all day.
                                                                                      

                                                                                                  Charles Sullivan