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HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SALAMANDER?

This Marbled Salamander (Ambystoma opacum), is a three-inch long burrowing amphibian that dwells in hardwood forests prone to periodic flooding from rainfall. Adult marbled salamanders live amid leaf litter
where they find earthworms and insects to eat.

In autumn, adult salamanders migrate to isolated woodland pocket ponds to reproduce. After mating, the female seeks shelter under a log near pond’s edge, where she will place a dozen or more silvery-white B-B-sized eggs, and then curl around them to conserve moisture while autumn and early winter rains fill the pond and eventually flood the log.
This phase in the salamander’s life cycle hinges on timing of rains that hopefully flood the log just after each embryo has developed into a 1⁄2-inch larva, complete with a pair of feathery gills that extract oxygen from the
pond’s water.

While marbled salamanders are in decline throughout much of New Hanover County, by good fortune the Northeast New Hanover Conservancy owns and protects several parcels of wooded habitat that support rainpools that we know still support other kinds of salamanders, and we are hopeful our monitoring work will reveal the presence of the beguiling Marbled Salamander.

The Conservancy’s monitoring work is ongoing and marbled salamanders are a focal species for us because they indicate forest ecosystem health, which is relevant to people because biodiverse forests deliver irreplaceable ecosystem services including carbon-sequestration, air filtration, and rainwater storage and cleansing; in addition to providing a compelling sense of place and inherent connection to this place we call southeast North Carolina.

Landfall Nature Trails

Our nature trails within Landfall suffered damage from Florence. They had already had damage from previous storms and we are embarking on a program to repair them.

They were originally designed as walking trails but we hope to improve them enough for bicycles. This will be done in a nature sensitive way without using impervious surfaces.

The climate is causing the wetlands to fill more than normal so that some of the nature trails are wetter in areas than others.

Landfall management had an intern last summer document the parts of the trails that are worse off and those will be targeted first. We will be able to get help building simple bridges over the worst areas by Landfall maintenance.

Update from NENHC

This has been another busy year for the Northeast New Hanover Conservancy! Hurricane Florence was not kind to our conservation areas and we have been working on cleaning up the nature trails and some of the conservation areas near residences. We are fortunate that the adjacent landowners are helping by removing broken trees when it is deemed necessary. Landfall maintenance has been a great help on the nature trails.

2017 Year in Review

This has been another busy year for the Northeast New Hanover Conservancy! In addition to conducting habitat assessment and data collection for monitoring reports, we also implemented on-the-ground management projects including removal of potentially hazardous storm-damaged trees adjacent to Conservancy neighbors. Other completed works included enhancement projects to improve the appearance and ecosystem function in a number of interface areas fringing Conservancy properties and adjacent residential properties. This neighbor-requested and funded work included removing invasive plants, hand-pruning rank vines and sensitively cleaning existing but otherwise unkempt plants in advance of installing native trees and shrubs to add visual appeal along with flowers and berries to benefit birds, butterflies, and neighbors.