[BIRDS CHIRPING]
[DUCKS QUACKING]
Today, we're coming to you from the Appalachian Mountains.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, everyone.
Welcome back to the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Conservation
Connect, the show where we learn about cool critters
and the awesome technology that conservationists
use to study and protect America's wildlife
and wild places.
Today, I'm your host, Chelsea McKinney,
and we are at Canaan Valley National Wildlife
Refuge on Cabin Mountain, West Virginia.
The Refuge is home to black bears, flying squirrels, barred
owls, and the cheat mountain salamander--
a threatened species found only here in these very habitat.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
To tell us more about the salamander,
we have Dawn Washington, Supervisory Biologist
for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Dawn, thank you so much for having us at this refuge today.
Chelsea, thanks for coming.
We really appreciate you guys coming here.
Now, I'm wondering-- how did you get interested
in a career in conservation?
I've really always wanted to be in outdoors from the time I
was really little.
So I really knew, at a young age, what I wanted to do.
I really loved the outdoors.
And with the Fish and Wildlife service,
I had a opportunity to work with them a couple
summers while I was in college.
And I was hooked.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The cheat mountain salamander is an amphibian.
An "amphibian" means that it has permeable skin.
So it can absorb things from the environment into a skin.
A cheat mountain salamander in particular is lungless,
so it has no lungs.
It has to breathe through its skin.
Dawn, why is the salamander a threatened species,
and what exactly does "threatened" mean?
The cheat mountain salamander is listed as "threatened"
with the federal government because its
at risk of becoming endangered, and after endangered
would be extinction.
We're lucky that it's only at the threatened status right
now.
We've lost a lot a habitat for the cheat mountain salamander
through a lot of different reasons.
And we went from about a million acres of red spruce habitat
in the State of West Virginia down to 50,000.
Wow.
And we still have a lot of threats to this habitat
right now that we're trying to battle.
And we're hoping that, through a lot
of the management that we're doing on the Refuge
in other places, that we can bring
that red spruce habitat back.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm wondering what device do you have in your hand,
and how does that help go about studying and protecting
the salamander?
This is a GPS unit-- a global positioning system.
So it is pretty high-tech.
It can tell us where we are on the ground right now.
So we'd use this to mark the actual specific locations
of every cheat mountain salamander that we find,
but also going to locations where we might never have seen
any and finding them there.
And we can mark those locations so we
can keep track of the population a little bit better.
So my guess is you have some locations of where cheat
mountain salamanders might be.
Yes.
Do you mind if we take a look and see if we
can find one this evening?
Sure can.
Awesome.
Let's go.
OK.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Joining us on the salamander hunt
were Dawn's two kids, Savannah and Brickel.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So we're looking for this spruce--
OK.
--that we're in right now.
Yep.
But we like to get down on the ground
and look under rocks and down woody debris, which
is dead pieces of tree--
OK.
--or sticks that fell off trees.
Some of the habitat like this is really good.
Oh, yeah.
When things start to decay, it's some of the best places
to look.
And you can lift up--
Ooh.
Should we try to lift this up?
Yeah.
OK.
Let's, like, roll it toward us.
OK.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh, look at this guy.
See how moist and wet it is in there?
There's lots of insects in there.
They're really good hunters, so they'll
go on-- underneath all this stuff and look for their prey,
but they also stay under there to stay wet.
Though we didn't find any salamanders under this log,
we did find one in another area.
Dawn's son, Brickel, took notes while Dawn marked this location
on her GPS unit.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Savannah checked the field guide to learn more
about the cheat mountain salamander.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
As the sun set on Canaan Valley, it
was time to leave this fascinating spruce forest.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What can we do and the students watching
us do to help protect the cheat mountain salamander?
There are some important things that you, as students,
can do to help the cheat mountain salamander.
There are really simple things you can do around your house.
Turn the lights off.
So reducing electricity use.
Recycling.
But also thinking about the trips that you take to town
and combining your trip, so you're using less gas
and have less of a-- pollution coming out
of your vehicle, which, in turn, is going to help
our earth from getting warmer.
We're seeing this trend of our earth getting warmer.
Mm-hmm.
And that can have a big impact on cheat mountain salamanders
because the place where they live, like I said,
were high elevation.
It's really cool up here.
But as things get warmer, it's going
to get warmer up here, too.
And so that could really impact where and how much habitat
they have.
Dawn, thank you so much for teaching us
about the ecology and the importance
of the cheat mountain salamander.
You you, any of you can become a biologist
by getting outside, observing the nature around you.
You can volunteer at your local National Wildlife Refuge,
and I'll bet there's one not too far from your home.
Join us next time on the US Fish and Wildlife Service's
Conservation Connect.
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