Addie takes a winter peek at the springhead critters

Doc hates when I get a hold of his camera and then spot anything ... well, like a cool plant or a bird or OMG a salamander! Or a butterfly... (Doc says its because I take to many pics and videos)
So when I went down to the spring to check on it after that cold snap we had in early January (we had a few nights below zero Fahrenheit, and a few consecutive days in low single digits, depending on where you were, even just location on the property), he did a silly thing... he said he didn't want to put his shoes back on, so I should just take his camera to take a picture of the frog I spotted... and here's the culled and picked-through results of the videos and pictures I took.

I'm pretty stoked about the critters I found, because they're generally considered to be indicators of unpolluted water.

It has warmed up dramatically in the last two days, as well as about tripling our effective snow cover, but with wet and sticky snow, instead of the dry powder stuff.

That's the snow along the way to the drop into the tiny ravine the spring head and stream are in/form. And here's a view of the spring head.

Not exactly what you'd expect to be your setting for a frog, salamander, and aquatic insect micro safari!

Here's the spring head pool, the black dot in the center is the head of a salamander who's one of the denizens of the pool. You may or may not make out the brown stick fragment like objects all over the bottom substrate of the pool, but there are a lot of caddisfly larvae (an odd word, but it's just plural of larva) living in the pool. Sounds gross, right? All of those critters hanging out in there, it's not like they get out or anything when they have to.... anyway, sounds gross. But they, like the mayfly and stonefly larva I found later, and the salamander and frogs are all really sensitive to pollution, so it's a good thing to see them.

And here's the frog I spotted before I saw the smaller critters.

While I was snooping around on the frog, and also trying to get some good views of the salamander, which decided it wanted to hide and slide back into it's burrow, I noticed the sticks were moving on the bottom of the pool--for me that's not creepy, it's COOL.
I took an aquatic insects class in college, as well as a herpetology course in college, so I kinda know what I'm looking at, and at the same time, I also know I'm probably only going to get so specific in identifying most of the insects... and probably not get near identifying species.
But back to the moving sticks... caddisfly larvae build tubes around themselves for feeding, protection, and other advantageous reasons, depending on species. So if you've spotted a stick bit which moves on it's own, and actually seems to be made of littler pieces of stuff, as well as may have little legs and stuff poking out of one end, you might have spotted a caddisfly larva! (Ok, quick little bio lesson: insects usually go from egg to larva to pupa to adult, and for example, a butterfly goes egg to larva (but we call it caterpillar, maybe because it's more kid friendly for putting in all those children's books), to chrysalis (very rarely a cocoon, that's more of a moth thing) which is about as odd sounding as pupa but also sounds a little more fancy, to adult, the butterfly shaped butterfly).

So here they are!

And here's the stonefly larva (plecoptera) I mentioned earlier. I'm pretty sure that's what it is, I saw another one later, I think, but I don't think I got any better pictures. They both were in the stream bed, and between their size and the water glittering and flowing and stuff it was hard to spot them, aim the camera and my headlamp, and hit the take a picture button fast enough. I also spotted about two inches from the dark stocky stonefly (I think) another wiggling thing, but it was much lighter in color (not that that means much) so it was harder to see. It was also more fragile looking, and had feathery gills along it's abdomen (the end of the insect that's not the head or the middle), which made me think it was probably a mayfly larva. Unfortunately, it was moving on its own, as well as being swept around by the water, so it's so hard to spot in this photo that I can't really even see it... but it was there.

To spot the stonefly, look in the middle, with just a tad of upper right to it. There's a large roundish, flattish, medium grey rock with a smaller lighter grey rock on it. At the bottom edge of the rock is a light shine spot, and to the left of it a sort of sandy greyish rock. Between the light spot and the sandy grey rock, along the edge of the sandy grey rock is the little crawly creature. His head is towards the large rock, and the tail end... well, the abdomen end is lower down. (It could be a her, I don't know).

Here's a picture of another critter, which I think is the same kind of stonefly, but it was holding still better...Or at least a related kind of stonefly?

And I had to be careful about where I stepped, because I found a lot of salamanders were out and about. I was hoping to see crayfish too, but I didn't see one today. I do see them in the spring pool and along the stream once and a while... I guess it wasn't this while today.

And in this one, there are actually small (small and very small) salamanders.

That is the salamander back up in the spring pool, only by the time I got back up there, he (or she) had decided to come back out a bit. It's a pretty cool angle, because you can see the gills behind his (her) head.

Is another view from above the pool, and here's back down the stream bed where I found the other salamanders.

Too bad I couldn't take y'all with me to get a better look, but at least I did get to take the pictures! Have a great day and thanks for visiting!