File photo.
Children hold spotted and marbled salamanders at the annual Friends of Shades Creek Salamander Festival at Homewood High School in January 2023.
A biology professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is seeking a grant to help save salamanders along South Lakeshore Drive in Homewood.
Megan Gibbons told Homewood city leaders in June that she wants to build vernal pools on the south side of South Lakeshore Drive to provide suitable habitats for salamanders to breed so they don’t have to cross the busy road.
Gibbons described rainy spring nights in Homewood when hundreds of spotted salamanders crawl out from their underground burrows in Homewood Forest Preserve and cross South Lakeshore Drive near Homewood High School to reach temporary ponds, or vernal pools, on the north side of the road.
This map shows eight potential locations for vernal pools to be built to serve as breeding grounds for salamanders thar are native to the Shades Mountain area in Homewood. Map courtesy of Megan Gibbons.
“In those ponds, they lay eggs, and their larvae develop in those ponds like tadpoles,” she said. “The migration is part of an ancient breeding cycle that once expanded across Shades Mountain. But after decades of development, the habitat has been degraded. Most of the pools that were once used for breeding have disappeared, and these seasonal wetlands were filled with soil and drained by digging ditches as roads, athletic fields and other developments were constructed.
“Now there’s only a small population of spotted salamanders left in the area in the Homewood Nature Preserve, and they have to cross the road with traffic in order to breed,” the biologist said. “There is a pool that’s on the nature preserve side, but it’s literally just draining all the way, so mostly they cross the road to breed in the pools on the [north] side.”
Gibbons said the two main pools on the south side of the road have man-made drainage. Those pools don’t remain long enough for salamanders to complete their life cycle.
“As someone who has gone out and observed the migration almost every year since 2001, I can tell you that every year a lot of salamanders get hit by cars as they’re crossing the road, and the number of salamanders in general that complete the migration has been steadily declining pretty much every year,” she said.
A vernal pool is a temporary seasonal wetland that fills with rain in the winter and spring and dries completely by summer or fall. Because vernal pools lack permanent water sources, they sustain no fish, making them vital and safe breeding grounds for specialized amphibians and insects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Gibbons said she would love to build one or two small pools, each of which would cost about $4,000.
“They’re not very expensive to build,” she said. She showed the Homewood City Council a map with eight areas where ponds for salamander breeding could be built. The most difficult and costly one to build was labeled Homewood 1 and would cost about $76,000, so she doesn’t plan to start with that one, she said.
“We want to do some practice ones that are cheap,” she said. “Hopefully we can have some impact quickly. We want to do something by the end of the year, if we can.”
Her grant application to UAB is due July 31, and she probably won’t find out if she gets the grant until the end of August, she said.
The reason she came to the city is because she needs city permission to build the pools on the city right of way, she said.
Homewood Mayor Jennifer Andress said city officials learned last year how highly salamanders rate with Homewood residents when there were hearings about potential development on the south side of Lakeshore Drive.
