I know I'm absolutely the sort of person who you'd expect finds salamanders on a regular basis, but until today I hadn't found any wild ones around here.

Yesterday, I'd stepped out of the house on some other errand after dark, and found that nightcrawler worms were rustling around our front garden moving leaves by the dozen. I summoned the kids, handed over a flashlight, and they spent quite a while gleefully chasing them. Enough fun had been had that way (and it was fresh in George's mind) that today after Denton went off to a birthday party, I convinced George to come walk in the woods with me and flip logs, and we'd see what we could find.

So off we went to Habitat in Belmont, and under our very first log, was a tiny little red back salamander barely an inch and a half long. We found a total of five or six of them, some dark (I think the "lead" phase of the red back salamander) and some classic red backs. Then we did a circuit of Turtle Pond, and George spotted a garter snake in the grass, I spotted a butterfly (a comma, I think) and we stopped to watch a whole lot of turtles in the pond (including one who knocked a smaller one off a log trying to climb up).

George was tired by the time we were walking back to the car, but he was completely engaged by the process of looking for animals - a child after my own heart.