HerpQuest 2009
23 July 2009
No Salamanders. Sore legs.
We got back to Davis Monday night after four days in
the White Mountains. The quick summary is that the
habitat looks good, we didn't find the salamander,
and hiking into Perry Aiken Canyon is a serious pain.
The back story for this record is that a graduate student named Doug Powell in the UC Berkeley geography department reported seeing a salamander in the north fork of Perry Aiken Canyon to Bob Stebbins in 1952. Stebbins wrote a detailed account of Powell's sighting in his field notes, with good descriptions of the location, habitat, and weather conditions. Powell described the animal as looking like an Ensatina, which is surprising given Ensatina's known range. There is habitat near the locality that looks like it could be appropriate (though it's very high). There is also habitat that looks right for Hydromantes and Batrachoseps (both of which would be less surprising than Ensatina, biogeographically). We expected that the main difficulty in detecting a salamander high up in the Whites would be moisture and so we aimed to be there in late July when summer rains tend to hit.
We camped Friday night at around 13,200 feet on the saddle between Mount Barcroft and White Mountain Peak. The next morning we got up and hiked (slipped, scrambled, slid) down into Perry Aiken Canyon. We surveyed the upper portions of the canyon that morning then made camp on a shelf a few hundred feet up the north side of the canyon at around 10, 700 feet (the putative locality is at 10,600 feet). The area here is rocky, with a lot of water in the stream (which was fast flowing and ~ 4ft wide), and thick shoulder-height willows growing along the edges. We surveyed from here down into the Bristlecone and Limber Pine belt below camp (down to around 9,500 ft.), where the habitat changes from mostly willows to mostly pine with small shrubs and grasses. The area here was really dry outside of the immediate stream edges, so finding suitable objects to flip was a challenge. The next day we continued surveying from where we left off the afternoon before, completing a survey of most of the habitat that we could get to. That afternoon we got several hours of rain, which unfortunately came a day too late to be of much use for our surveys. We broke camp Sunday night and hiked up about a thousand feet into the cirque below the canyon rim, where we would start the hike out around 5:30 the next morning. The hike out was pretty rough, but we cleared the rim a little after eight and headed home.
Before the trip, Levi and I joked that the species count was going to be zero or one (depending on whether or not we got the salamander), and this basically turned out to be true. We saw a few species on the way to and from the Whites (Crotaphytus, Sceloporus, etc.), but got no species in Perry Aiken Canyon itself. My gut feeling is that we would have detected a Batrachoseps or Hydromantes in the upper part of the canyon if they were there, but its possible that we could have missed an Ensatina lower down. If I were to go back, I'd want to get in when the soil was wetter and focus on habitat that was lower down.
Backpacking route: The high peak on the right is White Mt., the low peak in the background on the left is Mt. Barcroft. Green is our path down, red is up, blue is how far below camp we went
Just before dropping over the rim.
The upper talus slope on the way down.
Camp.
The back story for this record is that a graduate student named Doug Powell in the UC Berkeley geography department reported seeing a salamander in the north fork of Perry Aiken Canyon to Bob Stebbins in 1952. Stebbins wrote a detailed account of Powell's sighting in his field notes, with good descriptions of the location, habitat, and weather conditions. Powell described the animal as looking like an Ensatina, which is surprising given Ensatina's known range. There is habitat near the locality that looks like it could be appropriate (though it's very high). There is also habitat that looks right for Hydromantes and Batrachoseps (both of which would be less surprising than Ensatina, biogeographically). We expected that the main difficulty in detecting a salamander high up in the Whites would be moisture and so we aimed to be there in late July when summer rains tend to hit.
We camped Friday night at around 13,200 feet on the saddle between Mount Barcroft and White Mountain Peak. The next morning we got up and hiked (slipped, scrambled, slid) down into Perry Aiken Canyon. We surveyed the upper portions of the canyon that morning then made camp on a shelf a few hundred feet up the north side of the canyon at around 10, 700 feet (the putative locality is at 10,600 feet). The area here is rocky, with a lot of water in the stream (which was fast flowing and ~ 4ft wide), and thick shoulder-height willows growing along the edges. We surveyed from here down into the Bristlecone and Limber Pine belt below camp (down to around 9,500 ft.), where the habitat changes from mostly willows to mostly pine with small shrubs and grasses. The area here was really dry outside of the immediate stream edges, so finding suitable objects to flip was a challenge. The next day we continued surveying from where we left off the afternoon before, completing a survey of most of the habitat that we could get to. That afternoon we got several hours of rain, which unfortunately came a day too late to be of much use for our surveys. We broke camp Sunday night and hiked up about a thousand feet into the cirque below the canyon rim, where we would start the hike out around 5:30 the next morning. The hike out was pretty rough, but we cleared the rim a little after eight and headed home.
Before the trip, Levi and I joked that the species count was going to be zero or one (depending on whether or not we got the salamander), and this basically turned out to be true. We saw a few species on the way to and from the Whites (Crotaphytus, Sceloporus, etc.), but got no species in Perry Aiken Canyon itself. My gut feeling is that we would have detected a Batrachoseps or Hydromantes in the upper part of the canyon if they were there, but its possible that we could have missed an Ensatina lower down. If I were to go back, I'd want to get in when the soil was wetter and focus on habitat that was lower down.
Backpacking route: The high peak on the right is White Mt., the low peak in the background on the left is Mt. Barcroft. Green is our path down, red is up, blue is how far below camp we went
Just before dropping over the rim.
The upper talus slope on the way down.
Camp.