Courting Macs, home

After a few last days in hiding, the Spotted Salamanders finally came out of their subterranean below-the-frost-line haunts to, well, play. Usually, the first choruses of Wood Frogs and Spring Peepers are an aural sign that Ambystoma maculatum, a spectacular, beautiful, and large—the females can be nine inches long—salamander species, is about to join the vernal pool breeding sweepstakes, but for some unknown and maybe unknowable reason, batrachian song didn't wake the Macs, as naturalists everywhere refer to them, until tonight. In the light of my headlamp, the previously empty underwater, vernal pool leaf litter was aglow with yellow spots, some of them still and others moving about, as the males began gathering together in groups that can contain as many as a dozen guys, each of them showing off, in a Mac way, for any of the ladies that might be in the area and watching.