Playing in the Rain and other Extreme Sports

Also known as: Hiking 10 miles, uphill, in the rain, at night. Before we get to that story, here is what we saw earlier in the week.
The week before we revisited our stream sites, it rained. A lot. This meant the salamanders were happily taking advantage of moist nights and were all over the place!

Ocoee salamander with a pretty pattern

Climbing pair 

Such a narrow perch

Surveying its territory? 

Peeking over the moss

Climbing on a spiderweb!!

Proof that seepage salamanders climb too

They look a little silly sometimes

Acrobatics

Tiny mouse! They climb too, but they move much more quickly.

Lots of red on this guy! Even on its eyes and head

We saw another frog! This one we know was a wood frog (Rana sylvatica) because we caught it! It had a distinguishing mask across its face and bright yellow flashing on its back legs. This bright coloration is supposed to be distracting to predators as the frog jumps away.

Must be a close relative of the 'humongous fungus'... (see It ended with a rattlesnake)

Another venomous visitor: this copperhead was seen several times by the dorm (or multiple were visiting, not sure). My field crew walked right by this one and almost didn't see it. Good thing it's tail wasn't sticking out and nobody stepped on it!

Puffball mushrooms are fun when they are releasing spores, because if you touch them you can see a cloud of spores come out of the top.

And finally we come to 'playing in the rain'. My REU student was doing some diet studies and put out insect traps near the sites where she collected diet samples to see if the salamanders were being selective or eating anything. She needed to go pick up the traps, but since it had been raining all day (and the day before) we didn't feel comfortable driving down one of the unpaved roads to these sites. So we hiked about 2.5 miles in to the sites and then down slope to a few more. We finished collected the traps around dark (it took a little longer than we planned) but had to go back to the dorm to pick up a few different supplies for collecting diet samples that night at the same sites. So we hike back out, pick up supplies and hike back in. This is one of our drier and south facing sites, so we had not seen many animals to collect diet samples and were hoping to get more because of the recent rain.  We did see lots of animals and things were going great until we were down slope from the road and had found about half of the animals she wanted. That's when it started raining. Being in a temperate rainforest, we were prepared with rain gear, but it was not just a light rain, it was a torrential downpour. Luckily I had an umbrella so I held it over her while she tried to get diet samples, but we still had to hike up hill to the road and then 2.5 miles out to the car.... It was an adventure, for sure. Needless to say, we both got entirely soaked despite rain coats and rain-pants. 

Before the rain started I did get to take a few pictures. These were some of the largest Plethodon salamanders I had ever seen. Most of them had an abundance of white spots but some still had some red on the legs or cheeks.

At the dorm was this large moth, also seeking shelter from the rain:

End it with a pretty picture, right?