Salamander Festival returns to Homewood

11th Annual Salamander Festival

Presented by the Friends of Shades Creek

Saturday, Jan. 31

Homewood Senior Center

2 p.m. Nature Hike, Patriot Park

3-5:30 p.m. Festival

4 p.m. Presentation by Friends of Shades Creek and city officials 

The dance begins sometime after Christmas each year. 

Jet-black creatures with bright orange and yellow spots emerge from the Homewood Forest Preserve behind the high school and scurry to a vernal pool nearby. Once they arrive, they jump into the water and perform their mating dance, flipping over and surfacing for air. Viewed from the side, they always appear to smile.

“It’s like magic,” Jim Brown tells people. He would know. The Samford University history professor has been watching them for 30 years.

The spotted salamanders mate in water but live most of the year underground in the preserve’s hillside. Their skin must stay moist, so they choose a warm, rainy night after it’s been cold to migrate.

“We think about birds migrating north or south, but there are also a lot of migrations on a smaller scale,” said Kristin Bakkegard, a biology professor at Samford. “It is about the only time you will see the salamander. Once you get to know them, they are very charismatic animals.”

A decade ago, Brown told members of the Friends of Shades Creek about the migration, and in the years since, the event has developed a following. Brown and Friends president Michelle Blackwood go out on nights when the conditions are right and watch for salamanders to emerge. When they see them, they start calling a list of 25 people. Sometimes it’s midnight, sometimes it’s 3 a.m. But for this group, it is worth getting out of bed at any time of night.

A few weeks later the salamanders return to the forest, leaving in the pool masses of jelly with eggs inside. Soon the next generation will come into being and find its way into the forest. Like salmon, they tend to go back to the same pool where they were born late in life to mate.

There are nine types of salamanders in the forest preserve, but it is the spotted salamander that has become the icon of the Friends’ annual festival, scheduled this year for Jan. 31. 

The spotted salamander represents the environment well because it depends on undisturbed forest to live all year long and on pools of water near them for reproduction, Blackwood said.

“We want people to think about how a lot of wildlife needs two different environments,” Blackwood said. “There are so many creatures you can’t see. We wouldn’t know the spotted salamanders were there unless we saw their migration.”

Salamanders, which live 20 to 30 years, are also a good indicator of a healthy environment, Blackwood said.

“They are the first things to go when something is wrong,” she said.

The Salamander Festival began 11 years ago to draw attention to the Homewood Forest Preserve. At the time, the city had recently purchased the property from Samford University. The Friends of Shades Creek, which started in 1998, wanted to preserve the forest to prevent future development of the natural area, which has little sign of ever having been cut. Working with the city, they secured a conservation easement for its 65 acres in 2008. 

Today the spotted salamander’s environment is mostly safe from harm. Its only threat in recent years has come from traffic around Homewood High School. In 2012, the salamander migration began as traffic was letting out from basketball games at the school. Forty-seven of the creatures were killed that night.

Since then, the Friends have worked with the city to put up barricades in the parking lot near the armory if the migration happens during hours when people are at the school. City Chief of Staff J.J. Bischoff and Mayor Scott McBrayer have been supportive of the salamander conservation efforts, Blackwood said. 

“We want Homewood to be livable not only for people but also for critters,” she said. 

Bakkegard was able to use DNA from the salamanders killed in 2012 to study the biodiversity of the population; she found that there is great gene diversity in the population. 

At the festival on Jan. 31, kids and adults alike can hold salamanders and ask local biologists and naturalists questions about them. 

UAB biologist Ken Marion will bring his “stable of salamanders,” and other animals from Shades Creek will also be on display. The creek is home to the goldline darter, a threatened species, and the Alabama shiner, which is endangered and has brought more interest in water quality to the area. 

“The festival is about the environment, but we want people to learn about other things too,” Blackwood said. “It’s fun with an educational element to it.”

Other displays will feature birds, fossils, native plants and the Homewood High School Environmental Club’s projects.

The Herb Trotman Band will play bluegrass music, and tickets can be purchased for a chocolate fountain. All other activities are free. This year’s event will also feature an art contest for works representing Shades Creek; cash prizes will be given to winners.

At 4 p.m., Brown will tell the story of the salamander.

A hundred years ago you could still see migrations of buffalo out West, he will say, and now that’s gone. But we can see a natural migration of a creature in our backyard that has been doing so for thousands of years.