Guilt got the better of me, and while I've had a mountain of work and family matters to wade through—all of which offered credible excuses for my failure to conduct a May survey of the Miner preserve—still, I felt lousy about not keeping tabs on the natural history of the area. I got up early this morning and completed an overdue writing project, so I had an opening my schedule, got in the car, and went to the refuge, which greeted me like a long-lost friend. Actually, it had only been a little over a month, and since it had been quite cold, not much had changed in the critters I was charged with monitoring. There were very few odonates in the air, and a paucity of butterflies. In the two vernal pools, the Wood Frog tadpoles had about doubled in size, but they were still without legs. In the North Pool, I continued to register zero Marbled Salamander larvae, so maybe, because of the lingering drought through the fall, they just weren't able to breed. Or maybe last year was an anomaly. With the n=1 situation, you can't be definitive. But I can say that the Spotted Salamander eggs have started to hatch and there are a fair number of larvae on the pond bottom. With any luck and some cooperation from the rain gods, the baby Macs will run the hazard gauntlet and metamorphose into land-living adolescents by mid-summer. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a better job chronicling their trial and tribulations—and bearing witness to their success.