Ribbit Rangers

Be a Ribbit Ranger

Wayland's frogs and salamanders need your help!

Wayland Conservation Department needs hands on rainy nights to help Wayland’s amphibians safely cross the road on their way to and from forests to wetlands, vernal ponds, and other wetlands.

If you live near any of these environments, please consider joining us on rainy evenings to help protect these important wildlife.

This is one environmental issue where a single person can make a big difference—and our amphibians need all the help they can get!

Here’s How You Can Help

1. Become a Community Scientist! As part of our effort to launch our Ribbit Ranger program, we need to find out where the highest amphibian crossing spots are throughout our town. Most amphibian traffic spots will be near wetlands, vernal pools, streams, marshes, and rivers. Our Conservation Department has identified hotspots on Glezen Lane and Plain Road, but we need more eyes throughout town to help expand our knowledge base.

We invite all Wayland residents to help us identify where amphibians are crossing the road. We’ve created a simple Google doc survey form for residents to fill out— next time you notice that it’s dark outside, raining, and over 40F, take five minutes to step outside your front door and take a look at what’s happening on the street in front of your house. Do you see any frogs? Salamanders? How many?

This vital information will help us direct where we send our Ribbit Rangers to save the most frogs and salamanders!

2. Become a Ribbit Ranger! On rainy nights, Wayland’s Conservation Department and other volunteers are (safely) hitting the roads on foot to move frogs and salamanders off the road by hand. We would like to cover as much ground as possible with more helping hands. If you’re interested, we have a link to a sign-up sheet here. Here are some simple tips to keep you and our amphibians safe:

• If you’re driving there, find a spot to park well before you reach the wetland crossing.
• Wear reflective vests—this is a must!
• Have bright flashlights (a cell phone light won’t be enough) and be very careful looking where you walk – you don’t want to step on a frog or salamander!
• Keep young children next to you and show them how to look with a flashlight before walking.
• Assume vehicles do not see you and stay off the road when they approach. Shine the flashlight on yourself to become more visible and avoid blinding the driver.
• Frogs and salamanders can absorb chemicals through their skin, so before touching amphibians, make sure your hands are clean and free of any lotions, bug spray, or hand sanitizer.
• When you move an amphibian off the road, move it in the direction it is heading.  Moisten hands if possible, in a puddle before handling it to minimize disturbance to their skin. 
• Wash your hands after you’re all done for the night.

Once you experience first-hand the activity on these rainy nights, you’ll understand the concern we have for these small creatures.  There are many roads in Wayland where amphibian migrations happen throughout the year. If you suspect you have wetlands near your road, consider heading out by foot to check it out rainy nights. 

Before heading out, we strongly recommend you review this safety information here, and watch this 8 minute training video here. These materials focus on “Big Nights” in early spring when mass migration happens, but they apply for all amphibian rescue throughout the spring, summer, and fall. 

3. Stay off the road! One of the biggest things you can do to help your local amphibians is to keep your car off the roads on rainy nights. If you must be on the road, stick to highly trafficked roads like 126 or 20. Higher-risk areas include back roads that pass wetlands and woodland, like Glezen and Plain road.

  These Animals Matter!

Frogs, toads, and salamanders are tremendously important to our local ecosystems. In northern forests, the biomass of salamanders exceeds that of all the breeding birds and small mammals, meaning that enormous amounts of energy move through the forest in the bodies of these tiny creatures. Birds, foxes, fishers, turtles, snakes, skunks, possums, and many other core New England wildlife depend on amphibians for food.

Amphibians are also dominant forest-floor predators, helping keep mosquitoes, ticks, biting flies, slugs, snails, and other pests in check. Healthy populations of tadpole salamanders and frogs can devour billions of mosquito larvae a month [R], while the average American toad eats three times its body weight in insects per day! Meanwhile, adult salamanders are such voracious eaters that they change how much carbon our woodlands sequester. By eating the tiny creatures, like insects and worms, that break down leaf litter, salamanders directly promote greater carbon storage and healthy forest floors.

On rainy nights when nighttime temperatures reach 40F and higher, frogs and salamanders begin to scramble out of their winter hideaways. They crawl over leaves and branches, roads and lawns, to find their way toward vernal pools and other wetlands to breed. Many of them return every year to the same pools where they were born. Unfortunately, this often means crossing roads. Most of these frogs and salamanders are so small, it’s impossible to see them from your car. On many of these rainy nights, dozens to hundreds of these important creatures are killed on the road by passing cars. By morning, the evidence is gone, as the bodies of these soft amphibians are picked over by scavengers and washed away. The early spring mass migrations (known as “Big Nights”) are the most well-known instances of this. But amphibians are on the move on rainy nights throughout spring, summer, and even into fall, anytime it’s after dark, over 40F, and raining.

Amphibians and reptiles make up 90 percent of all vertebrate roadkills. In studies in New York state, 50 to 100 percent of salamanders attempting to cross rural roads died trying. In eastern Canada, researches recorded over 32,000 amphibians—mostly young frogs—killed on a single 2-mile stretch of road over the course of two years. In western Massachusetts, researchers determined that local extinction of spotted salamanders could occur in as few 25 years just from road mortality.