Why can't I find this salamander

October 19, 2026.

I blame a book, A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, by Robert C. Stebbins, 1966, for contributing to my non-linear life. I blame my Uncle Jim, who gave it to me, as well as all the best and interesting books I received during my childhood. He was concerned for my intellectual development. My family life in southern California was squee-jawed, and I showed early, unmistakable signs of being a wild one, in dire need of discipline and direction. I laugh in the face of discipline, that's something superiors and uppers do not like about me, which only made life harder and me angrier. That kind of discipline just does not work. I never did anything bad. My kind of bad is failing to put a rock back in place, talking back, or throwing a rock and breaking a light sconce. Yawn. Ok maybe I accidentally overwrote someones Bard's Tale saved game on a 3.5" floppy. Otherwise I'm harmless.

If you are precocious and fixated on something shiny, you just can't and won't understand. Nor will people around you who are blessed with neurotypical parental units (thanks Rolf Aalto) and economically rewarded stable lives. Nowadays they call it high-functioning autism, and throw pills and behavioral modification to help corral it so you turn out to be of at least marginal use to society. I have mitigated the best I can and had many self-realizations. In my day it was called being a pain in the ass and difficult to work with. The school of hard knocks does not give a damn about feelings. Salamanders and scientists don't care either. That reminds me of Victor Twitty. Another rumination someday about newts.

Put the cover items... back

I think I gave that softcover book from my uncle to another young herpetologist years ago, in my 20s when I worked at Arizona Game and Fish Department, when the 2nd edition was released and I barely afforded it. You are welcome.  Maybe it was Eric Wallace, who continues the good work of herpetology and conservation, now in Tucson, Arizona. I hear his name from Jeff Sorensen because he volunteers for terrestrial mollusk surveys. I remember it well. It was well travelled, but I cared for that book as if my life depended on it. The book features an Ensatina eschscholtzii klauberi on the cover. Dr. Stebbins made his name in the 1940s when he described the salamander complex Ensatina eschscholtzii as a ring species. When I began to earn an actual living wage in my 30s, I bought a hardcover at a used book store for $5.99. That book is the source of the map pictures. I appear to have been the first person to actually open it since it was published, before I was even a twinkle... because the spine was bereft of a wrinkle.

Here is a link to Dr. Stebbins' work on Ensatina:

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/a-closer-look-at-a-classic-ring-species/discovering-a-ring-species/

The species occurs along the California Coast Range, from south into Baja California Norte', north all the way into British Columbia, and in California crosses the coast range at the Lassen divide and then southward along the entirety of the Sierra Nevada, towards the Tehachapi Mountains, which bridges to the coast range. There are no significant morphotype breaks; only gradations where introgressive hybridization occurs in a neat circle. That took a huge amount of work to quantify and document, and in the 1940s! His talent and artistry were foundational to capturing their detailed coloration and morphological variation. Science requires the right talents. Ensatina eschescholtzii klauberi is perhaps the most distinctive of its immediate kin, and it has been a source of scientific intrigue as to whether it is deserving of specific recognition. Some people crave the recognition of having their name attached to a species. I'm guilty, and it probably serves as a major behavioral driver of my ambitions.

You should see this photo of Ensatina eschscholtzii picta by Mitch Mulks, also of UC Berekeley, who earned his PhD studying Lampropeltis zonata. His fate was similar; despite putting his heart and soul into doing the hard and good work, wound up without financial reward or position, instead having to go out into the world that he had not expected to find himself in after investing his life in the academic world. He is friends with, and supported the work of, Sean Reilly, who also grew up in my neck of the woods, but  managed through thick and thin to disambiguate the Aneides flavipunctatus complex in his doctoral thesis and land a real academic position. Dr. David Wake's last student. This is by far the most beautiful picture of Ensatina you will ever see, unless you've taken one yourself. And it's gone. It had been posted on fieldherpforum.com years ago. This tangent brought to you by... but it is still relevant, you will see, and will remain.

All of this from memory, and a particular image I last saw 20 years ago shared by Dr. David Wake from UC Berkeley who I had the pleasure of crossing paths with, and taking direction from. I volunteered to collect salamanders from the hinterlands of northern California and was given the privilege to walk the very halls of Dr. Joe Grinnell and Dr. Stebbins, and earn my stripes as part of the unofficial Salamander Hunters Club. Dr. Wake replaced Dr. Stebbins at retirement in the late 60s, a position of considerable stature as Dr. Stebbins was loved as a scientist, educator, and artist. It is clear from the Wake's work that their dedication to detail and peerless scientific illustration were pivotal in their choice. I had always wanted to attend UC Berkeley, but life happenned and took me from that goal. Perhaps I was snubbed a smidgen, not for purely professional reasons. I was demonstrably awful at illustration and missed key details on specimens, which Dr. Wake pointed out to me to my embarassment. Queue reasons interpreted as excuses ... poor lighting in field conditions becasuse I worked during the night in the snow, uphill, both ways (that is literally true) and didn't have any money to afford accomodations and equipment or time because I was a hard charger... and drove like a bat out of hell to get him the specimens he desperately needed to fill out the genetics sample tray. What was my thank you? No can has Ph.D.  Well anyway.  Dr. Stebbins gave me his blessing. He answered each of my letters until his passing. There were other powers at play.

It was my dearest dream to attend UC Berkeley. It was the west coast Mecca for herpetology. All of the herpetologists who had the misfortune of crossing paths with me were educated by Dr. Stebbins, Dr. Wake, and Dr. Bury, who I still have the pleasure of working with, much to his irritation because I can't finish what I start. This chain of educators, I suppose,  represents my "intellectual" pedigree, the concept of which I find disturbing. Controversy brewing. 

I have struggled with modern academia. I put my time in. I served my quarter. In the good old days, all it took was a deeper than average appreciation for nature, persistence, and dedication to writing ones thoughts to earn a PhD. The science of natural history lies within its description, appreciation, and the scientific products are a reward for attention to detail. Musings and brain droppings fall naturally from that curiosity. If you haven't heard of Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, you owe it to yourself to read about it. His musings and brain droppings took matters to a whole new level of controversy.

I didn't write this to indirectly compare myself to Charles Darwin; that is crazy talk. I wrote it to share my own journey. And my journey accelerated within Dr. Stebbins' guide from the Maps section after page 224, specifically the distribution maps of Plethodon elongatus (13), and the Aneides species. I happened to live smack in the spot where three of the coastal species were expected but whose ranges were on the edge. Aneides ferreus was in my back yard. Why weren't the other two Aneides and Plethodon in my stomping ground? That question and a host of others emerged from just studying those very low resolution maps and a great deal of time outside turning rocks and logs, and an equal amount of time putting them back. Always put them back. I remember someone getting very angry at me when I was little and then soon thereafter my dad and I living in a Volkswagen bus.

On topic... nevermind

I took great interest in not only Plethodon elongatus, but Aneides ferreus, A. flavipunctatus, and A. lugubris. I was fortunate to have A. ferreus (now A. vagrans) in my own stomping ground. Beautiful animal, and as subsequent study by others has shown, an amazingly well adapted animal to the habitat it dwells in, far beyond the wildest imagination and truly only something one can learn through hardship. I went out of my way to collect for Dr. Dave Good and Dr. Todd Jackman, when they were student's of Dr. Wake's back in late 1980s. Dr. Jackman authored the study that described Aneides vagrans and how the disjunct population of A. ferreus on Vancouver Island arrived, as demonstrated through molecular genetics. A breakthrough study for its time. That species, along with many other now documented hitch-hikers, rode along with lumber shipped to all ports along the West Coast, by rail inland, and beyond.

It is a fantastic study, but back to Dr. Jackman and Dr. Wake. I was uncredited for my help collecting salamanders, and that contributed to resentment boiling within me.  A measly stipend of perhaps $100 doesn't cover wear and tear on my own personal vehicle, obscene insurance rate despite being accident free, tuition and just living while trying to hold a slaves wage job at the USFS Redwood Sciences Lab and attending Humboldt State University. I sent many shipments of various species that had been requested of me, not just Aneides. Plethodon, Ensatina, Rhyacotriton, and Ascaphus as well. I took time to repeat visit many localities that I had discovered if animals didn't arrive in good health or if the university refrigerator and cold-tissue storage malfunctioned. Unpaid, unheralded work.

I think it is more than fair to  insist on proper attribution for this paper, as well as several others that emerged, from my time actively supporting their research. I had skin in the game far and above the call of duty of a "field monkey" or some disinterested party who happened to collect a salamander or frog on their journey, never to be heard from again. It is a lovely study nonetheless, and am happy to see the success of its author who put their heart, soul, and time in. The study is summarized here:

https://amphibiaweb.org/species/5289

https://wakelab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2020/11/232.-1998_CanJZool_Aneides.pdf

I'll get to the other papers, but that is too far a tangent for now.

Talus

All organisms great and small have a niche'. Some have a niche' that allows them to be invasive and cosmopolitan, such as the garden snail Cornu aspersum and the decollate snail Rumina decollata. Some have a niche' that requires an actual structured spatial microhabitat derived from rocky substrate. Where I grew up and had no ability to travel further than 10 miles north to south, there were barely any rocks. There were no rocks to look at outside of an odd volcanic stack that I could not get to or along the coastline shrouded by stinging nettles, salmonberry, and sitka spruce ripped by high wind and salt spray. I didn't know anything about rocks. But my friend, Rolf Aalto and his father, Dr. Kenneth Aalto, did. Rolf also has a PhD, in geology, as did his grandfather and now his son. It's a dynasty.  Professor of Mud. Practically everyone in my circle has a PhD. It inspires me as much as it rankles. Anyways. Rocks.

Dr. Aalto studied the Franciscan formation, a vast oceanic basalt layer mixed with micro-continent fragments and terranes that managed to survive being scraped over the subduction zone of the Pacific plate and adhere, then be uplifted, to form the Klamath Mountains of Northern California. He also hypothesized, without due credit, and suffered intellectual theft, for iceball earth.  The Klamath Mountains are composed of a vastly complex melange of geochemically dissimilar terranes. The mountains are 5 million years old, and at the head of it sits Mt. Shasta, a fairly gentle stratovolcano. A lot has happenned in that time. I was fortunate that when I was older he took me along on field excursions, river rafting, and hikes into the Trinity Alps and elsewhere where there were lots of interesting rocks and geomorphology. The Mendocino triple junction lies just 50 miles as the crow flies to the southwest from Trinidad. There are a lot of rocks, but not where I stood most of my time as a youngling.  I grew up on sandy Klamath River deposits that had been uplifted a scant 100,000 years ago and had only been weakly incised by stream flow. The answer is always in the rocks, and it was my privilege to be in Dr. Kenneth Aalto's orbit.

The reason the salamanders that I searched for were not there, was because of habitat.  They require porous soil conditions and mixed rocky substrate with outcroppings, which provides for the microhabitat: talus. There was no talus in Trinidad, near my back yard, or in Patrick's Point State Park across the street, nor along the ocean. Anything rocky, such as the coastline and seastacks, as well as the entire forest floor, was welded together by coniferous forest leaf litter and moss, and then beneath that was sand and muck. If you, like me, explored the forest floor, you will find the entirety of northern boreal forest choked in moss, and a near absence of certain organisms, restricted to special locations identifiable by active geomorphology.

Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) are the devil. Their needles are sharp, which discourages searching through it. They are also very fine and moss will emerge from them almost immediately when they hit the ground. When the moss sprouts, the needles and moss swell together and all access to the subsurface is cut off except when a small mammal burrows through, a tree is toppled, or a branch hits the ground. No access to interstitial space, no salamanders. If you are a tasty type of salamander, one that cannot defend itself or exude enough protective mucus, or saturated with tarichatoxin, then using mammal burrows is not an option.  Talus provides for a nice, narrow, interstitial habitat that a morphologically squat salamander can get into and dive deep underground when surface conditions become hot and dry, or a shrew is on the chase. I state this as matter of fact because it is. It does not require a $100,000 NFS PhD grant disbursed by the University of Calfornia Regents to study the habitat characteristics of an economically unimportant species to come to conclusions. Persistent and dedicated observation does the job just fine, as it has for the duration of Hominid evolution. I see no need to spend hours filling out field notes and provide intricate drawings when I can just absorb the information nature provides me without a filter. I'd rather keep watching and write when I am done thinking, which can take a very long time. It is scientific in nature, but does not show the process. People frown upon that these days, and without a formal study, are hamstrung when discussing scientific things without a tome to slap down on a table. My bad.

Aneides lugubris are found in woody debris just as do A. vagrans and A. ferreus. Then why aren't they in Trinidad?  That isn't the right question to ask. Were they there... and then back and forth north to south countless times over the eons as climate fluctuated, because they are adapted biochemically to warmer microhabitat? They are most abundant in oak woodlands. A. vagrans and A. ferreus are also found among oak, but they are most commonly found in strictly coniferous forest, from sea-level to sub-alpine. There was a common ancestor involved and due to metapopulation dynamics, locally differentiated and gene flow bounced their newly specialized genes until they achieved a roughly uniform and recognizeable morphotype. This process is ongoing. Evolution does not simply stop. Environmental conditions occur on a gradient, the climate changes, landscapes change, habitat is gained and lost. Not always in a smooth enough fashion for gene flow to keep up. The organism survives by being pre-apted and then adjustment through adaptation occurs. If the environment is stable over long geological periods, specialization occurs, and there-in carries a risk of extinction because you can't just cross from one peak to another when you've successfully climbed to the top of Mt. Improbable... unless something carries you. Thank you to Dr. Charles Dawkins for this remarkable intellectual leap.

In here I have given a brief overview of how a multi-disciplinary view can inform ones understanding through deep time. I've implied predictions about the causes of organismal distribution, the nature of microhabitat, and its foundational geomorphic basis. Evolution occurs upon this stage. Can we leverage this for other predictions?

Back to the maps

In the intervening years from when I began this exploration, beginning in 1977, I thought a great deal, talked and wrote a great deal (and never finished), and hobnobbed with those I respected and took direction. Do not try to meet your heroes; let them remain so and continue to inspire from afar. Interpersonal group dynamics and I do not mix, and interactions have repeatedly occurred that have stamped out the small embers of joy I managed to kindle. Further, I was unrewarded for the lion's share of any of it at a financial or recognition level. One must sometimes make do with personal gratification and follow the path presented when a landslide comes down on the one you prefer to take.

If memory serves, the second edition of Dr. Stebbins field guide corrected the distribution of Aneides flavipunctatus and Plethodon elongatus... because they were hand-drawn by Dr. Stebbins himself.

After the 3rd edition, all the maps are extractions from databases and individuals with little to no field experience. They show the positive detections and interpolate that everything between is occupied. It is a meaningless blob that misrepresents ground truth based on pinpoints in database alone.

The "system" as implemented by gbif.org does not take into account the full naturalist account of species distributions. There is no effort to record negative detection data. Thus, maps derived from the data sources is inherently flawed, and used to mal-form species distribution and potential for loss and sensitivity to extinction. Data jockeys are not scientists, and trusting the entirety of your knowledge base to one and then relying upon it as gospel is not science based. It is ignorance gallavanting as science, it is scientifical.