WATERPROOF WILDLIFEWATERPROOF WILDLIFE

If the rain repels humans and butterflies, it well suits the newts and certain other animals. I call these the waterproof wildlife of Willapa. For those less well prepared, the point is adaptability rather than true suitability. If a duck takes to water like a duck, then a sapsucker may do so somewhat more reluctantly but do so nonetheless, rather than abandon a fine, sappy old orchard in a downpour. The key word is tolerance, and cheerfulness has very little to do with it. Whether naturally suited to water or not, an organism must in some way come to terms with the fact of much wetness if it is to survive in Willapa.

Actually, it’s easy enough for us. As David Brower said in the narration to a Sierra Club film on the North Cascades, we do well to remember that skin, after all, is waterproof. With a bit of Gore-Tex or oilskin, and a few adjustments to prevent hypothermia and severe depression, humans adapt to more than one hundred inches of rainfall annually quite readily.

It can be more difficult for other animals. You might think, for instance, that slugs in their shiny damp viscidity were better at being wet than we are. But slug skin is not waterproof. These walking water balloons can drown or desiccate quite easily if conditions exceed their tolerance for moisture or drought. So, while slugs prosper in the rain world, they do so through sensitive physiological and behavioral adaptations to moisture excess. They are able to find the damp and stand it with equal proficiency.

Quite a few creatures have managed the task and some have mastered it to the point where we really can call them waterproof wildlife. Among the best are the newts and their relatives, the Amphibia. Like the fish from which they evolved, amphibians retain their physiological dependency upon water. In the larval stage most possess gills, either internal or external, and therefore are necessarily aquatic. Adults may be either with or without lungs, in the latter case breathing through their skin. That trick requires thin, moist skin, able to lose or gain water readily, and, consequently, damp conditions. “Drinking” too is by absorption through the skin. Clearly, these creatures find the water fine.

So amenable do amphibians find life in the wet world of Willapa that we can quite properly call it salamander land. According to Dr. Dennis Paulson, zoologist at Tacoma’s Slater Museum, Wahkiakum County is probably the center of diversity for Washington salamanders. This means that more species occur here than anywhere else in a state known for its salamander diversity. A glance at the field guides shows more species in the American Southeast; but the Southeast is essentially subtropical, and many groups have proliferated there in the ancient, moist hardwood forests and coastal plains. For a young, far-from-tropical region, our salamander fauna is impressive.

In little more than casual searching, my family and I have found red-backed, Olympic torrent, Dunn’s, northwestern, and long-toed salamanders in local woods and streams, as well as the ubiquitous rough-skinned newts. Ensatina, Pacific Giant, Van Dyke’s, and the others will probably show up in good time. We search in the classic places—under logs and stones, alongside clear streams, on mossy forest floors, often with good results. Salamanders make good terrarium subjects, though we usually release them before long in our own stream, whose ravine contains all the above-mentioned microhabitats. So far, two or three species have “taken” or else shown up on their own.

With their aquatic breeding habits and larval stages, and the need to keep their skins moist, salamanders perfectly suit the land of much rainfall—or vice versa. Suitable habitats, as we have found, abound. Sometimes anthropogenic settings suffice for, or even attract, the amphibians. A swimming pool valve-box on Orcas Island proved a treasure chest of trapped newts and salamanders, which we released to a nearby pond. Recently a young northwestern salamander appeared in our stone cellar, having arrived through the walls like the winter spurtings of the floodwater, or up the sump-pump hole, but now in late summer nearly dried to death. It too was saved to enrich our pond, once for trout and now a sanctuary for salamanders.

That find put me in mind of last March, when the spring rains brought many amphibians in search of one another out of hiding and onto the slick roads. One can see the attraction—the flat surface of the highway would be suitably moist, yet clear of obstacles to the search for a mate. Now and again the courtship hunt would even be illuminated by the headlights of helpful drivers. Actually not so helpful: we found it easy to miss most of the ’manders with a little care—“We brake for newts” came to mind as a suitable sticker—if not the moving targets of frogs. Yet, sadly, the roadway lay littered with flatter-than-usual salamanders. So the adoption of the public right-of-way as a rendezvous proves maladaptive after all.

In particular, we noted the massive carcasses of northwestern salamanders. Two of these, both nipped clinically by the head and otherwise intact, we collected for examination at home. The postmortem proved fascinating. John McPhee, in his essay “Travels in Georgia,” has written of the pleasures of road-kill cookery. I find that D.O.R. (dead-on-road) animals, if fresh and intact, furnish elegant opportunities for highly instructive dissection. Thus may the lessons of college morphology classes continue without having to kill the subjects, and thus may poor road-kills be appreciated, even by those disinclined to consume them.

They turned out to be a male and a female, the former measuring 21.5 cm and weighing 30 gms; the latter, 24 cm and 60 gm. That made the female over nine and one-half inches and two ounces, the size of many a respectable mammal, a truly imposing animal. Though just an inch longer than the male, the female was twice his weight. The difference seemed to be accounted for within by elaborate, convoluted, paired masses of white tubes, stretching to more than 50 cm. I took these for ovaries. The actual eggs, consisting of seventy-five or so in each of two jade-green clusters, lay in yellow sacs at the ends of the oviducts. What surprised me was that the other salamander, while possessing the swollen cloaca of the male and apparent testes, also had the ovaries—though much smaller and less well developed and with no sign of eggs.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised after all, since hermaphroditism is well known among amphibians. In The Sex Life of the Animals, Herbert Wendt described how the sex of many young frogs is indeterminate at first. Among obvious males and females, one finds numerous examples of AC/DC adolescents bearing juvenile gonads of both sexes. Apparently, these may eventually go either way. Most of the hermaphrodites will mature into males, some into females. Salamanders are not mentioned, but my sample of two road-kills—one definitely female, one ambiguous—seems to show that these creatures too may be sexually ambivalent in youth.

I suspect that if I knew all the secrets of salamander sex, inside and out, I should have a capital tale. How, for example, do they locate one another in the dark nights of their roamings? It isn’t likely that the shine of their liquid eyes and glistening skin in the dangerous headlights helps at all. The scent of pheromones released in the waters of their destination probably attracts salamanders to one another, at least those that have made up their minds and bodies about which sex they intend to be. Males release their sperms in a gelatinous spermatophore at the proper time as determined by sometimes elaborate courtship procedures; the females then collect this gift with their cloacas. I’m sure we lack many facts, among them the nature of satisfactions gained, if any, through such a chaste form of fertilization. One assumes that, the act completed, hormones allow the mating frenzy to subside, whether the union involves copulo or not; and that must be a form of satisfaction. How little we really know of different strokes.

One thing we do know is something of the way in which these big amphibians repel predators (as they must, for they offer such easy prey in their precourtship perambulations on land). These rubbery animals possess thick, spongy glands behind their eyes, along their sides, and up and down their muskratlike flattened tails. When I squeezed these with the dissecting needle, they fairly oozed a toxic fluid much like milkweed juice. The thick, white stuff stood by in such ready quantity that, from one pressed gland, it squirted into my face, several inches away. I hurried to wash it off. My fingertips were roughened and tender from handling the copious, milky venom. Who would eat such a beast?

Our rough-skinned newts have their venom too, which they advertise with their bright red bellies—a form of self-promotion known as warning coloration. Many brightly colored, distasteful insects, like the monarch butterfly, do this. But for the population to acquire protection, the potential predators have to learn to avoid them through initial unpleasant contact. Hence, the famous photograph of a barfing blue jay in Lincoln Brower’s 1969 Scientific American article on ecological chemistry. The naive jay, having tried one monarch and found it extremely unpleasant, has been educated: it represents no further threat to monarchs. Look-alike viceroys, though more palatable, gain protection by mimicking monarchs. A news item in an Oregon paper a couple of years ago suggested that at least one logger had less sense than a blue jay. Dared to drink a newt in his beer, he did so—and died three hours later from acute toxic reaction. No more red-bellies in the beer in that tavern, I’ll wager. The ploy worked for the local population of newts if not for the test case.

Another western amphibian known for its venomous glands, the northern toad (of the lovely name Bufo boreas), should by all reckoning proliferate throughout the moist, green land of Willapa. But, as we know from Thornton Burgess and Kenneth Grahame, old Mr. Toad is a willful animal. Both writers were as much sharp watchers as they were clever storytellers, and they knew an animal’s nature before investing it with character. As Rat and Mole found, Toad just can’t be trusted to do what you expect him to do. And so it is here. I can’t find a toad for the life of me, nor discern any limiting factors for their living here. Surely not the Rot Factor that I believe discourages butterflies, for they thrive in the moldiest spots. Can’t be cold, for I’ve met them high in the Colorado alpine. Yet they are just not about as they are elsewhere. I have never seen a toad at Swede Park, apparently as fine a Toad Hall as ever there was; and I know of only one or two places where toads have been spotted in the Willapa Hills by reliable observers. The fact that from time to time they get trapped in the ponds at the Naselle Salmon Hatchery proves that they do in fact occur in the area; but why so sparse or retiring? I wonder.

Frogs, on the other hand, abound. Of course, frogs tend to be even more moisture-loving than toads, so their predominance here should not be too surprising. Both Pacific tree frogs and red-legged frogs (more euphonious names: Hyla regilla, Rana aurora) appear in the damp recesses of the woods in great numbers. Both take to water, of course, to breed. The spring-green tree frogs begin calling in the rushy meadow-swamps in February or March and carry on their nocturnal disquisition for months. It is always the same, each evening of each spring: first a single, tentative “rigit,” becoming hortatory as more voices arise, finally a full-blown shout as inflated trills join in concert; then tailing off in exhaustion, ennui, or simple satiety. But before the croakers rest, each a jade and jaded voice box with a thousand-watt amplifier, they’ve given background music to an entire season.

Red-legs issue their quiet croaks from ponds in the woods, often calling underwater if the books are to be believed. Later in the year they show up in the forest. Some, almost as large as modest bullfrogs, startle the prowler of the fern banks by stirring far from any water. How, in a dry summer such as this just passed, do they remain moist? By the dry time the tree frogs too have shifted position. When the water withdraws from the ponds and the rushy bottoms, they take to the trees and bushes. And by August or so, all we hear is the occasional katydidlike croak from an oak, or the feeble “braack” of a leaf-mold lurker. The ponds and river backwaters boil with polliwogs, and soon the tiniest frogs you ever saw—bright green mites with raccoon masks and golden eyes or mottled brown hoppers with strong pink thighs—populate the woods to wait for winter wet and yet another spring.

Bullfrogs, introduced, float in shallow lakes with their huge eyes poking out: joke frogs. Other native species we have yet to find in their favored waters. One of these species recorded for the hills has shown up only as two tadpoles. Ed Maxwell, watchful keeper of the Naselle Salmon Hatchery, who spotted most of the local toads I know of, also found a pair of immature tailed frogs, one each in the Naselle and Gray’s rivers.

The tailed frog (Ascaphus truei) has to be regarded as one of our most interesting organisms. Its name originates in the caudal flap that covers the genitalia of the male. This “tail” is actually a copulatory organ that facilitates a kind of internal fertilization—a sexual practice engaged in by no other frogs. Such an adaptation probably arose to permit mating in the swift streams occupied by the species. Without it, the spermatophore would be swept away on the current more often than not.

The tailed frog’s distribution is as interesting as its sexual structure. Restricted to the Pacific Northwest sensu lato, it occurs in many separate streamside populations in California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and British Columbia. Yet its only close relatives are three species of terrestrial frogs in New Zealand. Lacking the genital “tail,” these frogs nonetheless share sufficient traits with Ascaphus to make the relationship clear.

So how does a frog-family founder get from New Zealand to Oregon, or vice versa, and why doesn’t it show up elsewhere in between? Consulting my old college notes from the late Professor Frank Richardson’s excellent class in zoogeography, I find that these long-lost cousins are prime examples of relicts. (Relicts are species left behind on outposts when their formerly more widespread kin become extinct in between.) I read, too, that the tailed frog and its relatives are considered to be the oldest, most primitive family of frogs. So presumably they evolved long ago, whether in the South Pacific, the Pacific Northwest, or somewhere entirely different; dispersed; then died out in all but the two regions.

Frogs get around, like other animals, either under their own steam or by rafting across seas in storm-tossed bundles of wrack. Continental drift may have affected their earlier whereabouts. They drop out in the intervals due to all the catastrophic or gradual changes that bring about extinctions everywhere. The resulting pattern illustrates disjuncture, whereby once-widespread species have withdrawn over a long period to isolated fragments of their former range. Disjunct relicts are not infrequent in the floras and faunas, but few examples are quite as dramatic as the tailed frog and its New Zealand relatives.

Having failed to find it here for years, I suspected that isolation might have excluded the tailed frog from the Willapa Hills; or else, the fact that it seems to favor cold-water streams, whereas most of ours are relatively warm due to low altitudes and lack of glaciers or snow-melt upstream. But Ed’s discovery would seem to prove that the animal occurs in Willapa. Even so, he might have missed it but for another remarkable trait of the tailed frog: an anchor against the current.

The tadpole’s mouth is as interesting as the opposite end of the adult. Possessed of a sucker, it clings to stones in the rapid streams where the species lives. When Ed worked at the Klickitat Hatchery in the southern Cascades, he noticed large numbers of tailed-frog larvae (his coworkers thought they were leeches) attached to the cement side of fish ponds, where they apparently fed on algae and microorganisms. That experience keyed Ed to watch for the unique polliwogs when he moved to other hatcheries. After he’d found the first one in the Gray’s River, we figured it just might have been an introduction, since Klickitat fish had been moved to Gray’s River, and the tadpoles could have hitched along. But Ed’s duplicate discovery in the Naselle River clinches the case: tailed frogs do dwell in the Willapa Hills.

Still, in order to find the adults and finally see the tail of the male, we shall, I suppose, be obliged to spend still more time alongside the rivers of these hills, perhaps at night, watching for the eyeshine of the nocturnal frogs, or overturning stones by day. No penalty this, for we love to do such things. Finding the tailed frog, which I have never seen, would be a great satisfaction. And in such pursuits, the pleasure lies largely in the search itself.

I remember a day spent in Mount Rainier National Park with my friend Noble Proctor, a New England naturalist intimately associated with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute. Noble had never seen Ascaphus either, and his blood was up for finding it. Avidly, we began turning cobbles in the Nisqually River. Eventually we were forced to give up as our hands stiffened in the glacial meltwater and the day’s light ducked out. But the search added one more shining coin to our joint treasury of Mount Rainier memories, and we know we shall try again.

Meanwhile, my wife, Thea, and I intend to join the Maxwells in seeking tailed frogs in the rivers of these hills. I can hear the tavern-talk of more conventional hunters, bringing back their elk or deer, declaiming upon the sight they saw: “. . . and here were these people hunting some goddamned, fancy-pants frogs!” To each his own.

Superbly adapted to life in swift streams, the tailed frog seldom strays from that habitat. Different amphibians favor quiet waters. The newts are among these. When not actually immersed, newts suit themselves to wet places generally. Not only do they wander over the green sponge like true habitués, but they also display such exuberant fecundity in their season that they can only be thought of as “happy” with their surroundings—in an ecological sense, of course, unless you will grant me leave to personify my newts after the fashion of Burgess and Grahame.

When I took a group of local schoolchildren on a nature walk to a nearby lake last spring, the prolific feeding newts stole the show. But only later, when ponds diminish into puddles, does the real spectacle of massing ’manders exert itself. In the mossy bottoms of Hendrickson Canyon, a nearby old-growth forest remnant we visit often, we found perhaps half a hundred rough-skinned newts crowded into a pond the size of a backyard wading pool.

That was nothing, I guess, compared to the spectacle observed by Ed and Cathy Maxwell this past hot summer in a small swamp fringing Elochoman Lake. Mostly dried out, the swamp offered only puddles for exploration. Crossing one of these on a log, they gasped at the sight of a seething clot of newts some three or four feet across and several inches thick, writhing just below the surface.

Ed, a fisheries biologist accustomed to estimating numbers of small, squirming animals in the water, reckoned there must have been a thousand or more newts taking part. Every one, it seemed, constantly sought the center of the mob. The attraction remained obscure—whether the shade of their own bodies, a concentrated food source, the pheromones of a receptive female, or some other sort of chemical triggered the mass assembly, we can for now only guess. Feeding frenzies take place among sharks and great mating orgies among certain toads; but to what end thronging newts?

All this talk of newts and the Maxwells brings to mind a favorite anecdote. In his charming classic Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell tells of his walks through the streets of Kensington with his Indian otter, Mij, on a leash. This took place during a brief, necessary stopover on the way to the better otter lodgings of the author’s Scottish retreat, Camusfearna. Not too surprisingly, the Londoners encountered on these walks often failed to recognize Mij as an otter. The range of their guesses ran the gamut of mustelids, from mink and weasels through ferrets and badgers, and included beaver, seal, walrus, and brontosaurus. (I experience the same range of guesses as to the identity of an otter on a ring I wear.) But the strangest and funniest speculation came from a navvy who figured Mij for some sort of a great newt!

Actually, that London laborer, perhaps familiar with the smooth newts in his garden pond, showed a rare perceptivity on a gestalt, or Aristotelian, level. Or so it seemed as I observed newts and otters in propinquity last spring. At a small lake near Olympia, a beaver-dammed portion of McLane Creek, I had the good fortune to come upon a fishing river otter. Again and again it dove, snatched a shiner, rose, and crunched it in its sharp, strong teeth, while apparently standing on its tail in the shallow water. Eventually the otter hauled out, basked, and preened on a log for a spell, then resumed its fishing. Sated at last, it dove once more, came up in the center of a hollow, upright cedar stump, and bedded down on the top among huckleberry shoots and soft, rotting cedar fibers. I was privileged to watch a wild otter asleep, unguarded and thoroughly at rest. This was a deeply moving experience for me. Then passersby on the pondside nature trail disturbed a beaver, causing it to slap its tail on the water. That noise alarmed the otter and caused it to bolt down into its cedar holt.

The next time I went to McLane Creek I watched newts at the same time as the otter. From my vantage on a wooden fishing/bird-watching platform, I could see the otter clearly; could watch the bloody-shouldered blackbird clamber up the cattails before issuing its screeching song, and the newts hunting small aquatic game at my feet. What struck me so was the remarkable similarity in form and function between the newts and the otter. In feet, in tail, in sinuous trunk and pellet-head, in buoyancy and fluency, in gentle glide and rapid stroke—here were two unrelated animals performing much the same act with much the same movements and appearance.

We are dealing here with convergent evolution. If something works well, it will likely have evolved more than once. Species possessing analogous features may give the appearance of close relationship, or at least show striking similarity of form. Coincidence has nothing to do with it: take animals of diverse descent, add water, mix with natural selection, and you get newts, and others that look not a little like newts.

Some of the others, besides otters, include muskrats, beavers, and the introduced nutria, or coypu. Each of these aquatic mammals occurs in the Gray’s River valley. Otters we sometimes spot midstream while out in the canoe, but never yet behaving as brazenly as at McLane Creek. Beavers show themselves chiefly in their work—felled willows, great cottonwoods chiseled halfway through, then abandoned. Around here they live in bank burrows, and you see them chugging past like ponderous, submerged locomotives at river’s edge. Up at the Lake of the Newts, they even fell hemlocks (seeming not to mind getting the acrid pitch in their vibrissae) and build the standard dams and lodges and ponds and sluiceways that so reorder the countryside.

Muskrats show chiefly in the little Lily Pond down valley that gave the first dairy here its name. A tenth of the mass of beavers, they steam around among the lilies like Little Toot to the beavers’ freighters or sit preening on emergent logs.

Now we wait to see whether the muskrats will survive in the Lily Pond, for the nutria have moved in, and certain texts advise that the latter are prone to drive out the former. Nutria came from South America as a potential fur source. As with most alien animals (George Laycock’s potent term), damage is done in the introduction. The big, heavy rodents burrow into banks and graze the uplands, causing drainage leaks and loss of forage. They compete with native furbearers for their primary food, a range of aquatic plants. And in a manner not entirely clear to me, they are supposed to exclude native aquatic mammals. We will watch the Lily Pond and see what happens with the muskrats.

In any case, the nutria make good watching material. Unafraid, they permit close approach as they haul their great, squared bulks over the pasture banks, their huge orange teeth working the grass like a mowing machine. Wombatlike but generally black, they add a definite presence to an already-altered ecosystem, and they are somewhat more interesting than cows.

When any of the aquatic mammals take to shore to preen themselves, you can see how fur has become a waterproof fabric. The thick guard hairs separate into silvery, spiky locks that adhere so closely, and yet hold so much air, that they must let very little moisture through to the skin. Indeed, as the soft underfur lies exposed to the kneading teeth or claws of the animal or its mutual groomer, it looks as dry as could be. Immersed in a northern river, we would quickly become soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone. But not these creatures. The accomplishment of adaptations such as body fat, fine, downy close-fur, guard fur, or feathers, and special oils is to permit warm-blooded life in cold water.

Therein lies much of the devastating effect of oil spills upon such animals. By ruining the necessary nap and natural oils of the bird or mammal, petroleum products destroy their water repellency and admit cold water to the skin. Or if the oil itself doesn’t do it, detergents and other cleaning agents may. Further, the action of the currents and tides tends to carry the oil deep into coves and channels and inlets frequented by aquatic furbearers, exacerbating the likelihood of injury—this was demonstrated by the disastrous Mobiloil spill in the Columbia River two years ago.

As long as the rivers remain pure, the holts unflooded, the lodges undynamited, and the animals themselves untrapped (the perils of the aquatic life are many), these animals will thrive in watery regions. Of course, no animal accustomed to life underwater is going to mind a little rain.

For terrestrial mammals, it’s a different matter. Unequipped for immersion, how do rodents and rabbits, ungulates and insectivores, bats and bears and bulls, keep from drowning in the deluge or, at least, from becoming discouraged to the point of emigration? And as for the cattle: why don’t they simply rot out there, I often wonder from within my warm, dry cell. (My friend Marilyn Gudmundsen, wife of a beef farmer, told me recently that they do rot: at least their hooves can rot in a long, wet winter when the mud never dries for month after month.)

Some mammals just don’t take well to the rain and do not occur here. Neither foxes nor rabbits do well in Willapa, though the surrounding ranges have plenty of each; have they a limit to their tolerance? Hares occur but sparsely—a rare condition for their ilk. Skunks and porcupines maintain lower numbers than one might find in most drier parts of the state. I suppose this could be an illusion due to the dense vegetation, making them harder to spot; but their sign and the number of roadkills and direct sightings all tell me they are not common. Maybe it is something else about the Willapa Hills that keeps down the numbers of mourning cloaks, toads, skunks, and hares, but the obvious scapegoat is the rain—as for everything else.

Raccoons too seem less abundant in the Willapa Hills than in many another locale. Clearly they love water, but just how much? They take to hollows or leafy crotches for the storms, faring at least as well as John Muir did climbing trees at such times. The plentiful opossums, whose hobby seems to be patching the roads with their own hides, just get sodden in the rain and look that way, with their matted and sparse gray hair overlying dense, cottony, skintight wool. If they are half as miserable as they look on a rainy night, it might help to explain their terrific mortality on the roadway. The human suicide rate is known to be especially high among transplanted southerners in the rainbelt of the Northwest. But sunbelters, human or possum, seem to increase here nonetheless. The accents in the country bars attest to it. Arkies brought the possums in the first place, during the Depression, goes one version; and they’ve brought their coonhounds too, perhaps in part explaining the dearth of raccoons in some parts of the countryside, whereas they proliferate in the middle of Seattle.

Opossums, raccoons, and coyotes all do well in human habitats, provided an adequate amount of cover remains. This mixed kind of countryside just suits coyotes. They can hide out in the rough tangle of the second-growth woods, then range into the valleys at night after rodents, afterbirths, and cats. They seem to have come to terms with the precipitation—or might their coloratura yips and yowls be as much bitching at the rain as celebrating a clear, moony night?

The prey of coyotes, the burrowers and hole-dwellers, seem to exist to feed the predators of the world and can have little security. My cat will persist in catching, for example, the beautiful tawny and chestnut, long-tailed jumping mice called Zapus. And smaller carnivores step in when the larger ones fail: every dead chipmunk I’ve seen this summer has borne botfly larvae as large as its own ears, eating directly into its gut. (Perhaps that’s why I came to find them: the cat, maybe as disgusted as we, ignored them after a trial pounce.) Still, when they do find rest in between the constant chase and scratch, these small ones presumably make themselves cozy in quarters lined with mosses, lichens, and thistledown. The very vocal, none-too-common Douglas squirrels or chickarees have their tree holes, Townsend’s chipmunks their endless woodpiles. Cold comforts these, perhaps, but at least a roof from the rain.

But what of the moles? How do they keep from drowning like rats in their subterranean tunnels? Perhaps they do drown, in great numbers, and if they didn’t our gardens and fields would be completely mounded and undermined by mole-workings instead of only mostly so. Moles make two kinds of burrows, shallow for feeding, deep for breeding; both, it seems to me, would be subject to inundation. In fact, whenever the floods rise in our valley and the water table forces itself out ready-made geysers in our garden and cellar, one of the most insistent spouts always issues from a certain mole hole.

A particularly compelling chapter in Wind in the Willows deals with the theme of home and the gentle comforts of same. To convey this, Kenneth Grahame employs Mole and his return to his subterranean dwelling after a long absence. I admit that I really have to work at believing a mole’s home might be so cozy. It seems to me that moles, shrews, shrew-moles, garter snakes, and the other users of holes must be the most vulnerable of all to the rain, more so even than the deer and the cattle that must abide right out in the open. They, at least, are not likely to drown outright in any but the most severe deluge. These burrowers must all have some way of dealing with the draining of the rain. Whatever it is they surely make it, for each year when the rains back off, spring brings new evidence of their presence in the form of newly tilled mole-mounds, cats’ trophies, owl pellets, and occasional live appearances.

Equally evident is the fact that at least one burrower does very well indeed among the damp humors of the Pacific Northwest. In fact, it occurs nowhere else: although its ancestors lived across the Northern Hemisphere in the Pliocene, and members of the same family occupied most of North America in the Eocene, it has since been restricted to a single West Coast species. Occurring roughly from San Francisco to Vancouver, and between the sea and the high peaks, Aplodontia rufa is considered the most primitive of living rodents.

Commonly known as the mountain beaver or aplodontia, it has also been called the sewellel (an Indian word for a robe made from its hide). The name mountain beaver is unfortunate; people tend to confuse it with beavers, muskrats, and coypu and to assume that it lives in the water or in the mountains. In fact, aplodontia occurs in moist, often streamside conditions in the lowlands and foothills, where it can burrow readily into the soft, duffy soil. It has been known to climb trees rarely, and for all I know perhaps it can swim; but it spends no time in the water proper, according to the literature. About muskrat-sized and -shaped but lacking any apparent tail until you look very closely, the sewellel (I like that name best) shows itself infrequently.

My own encounters have been restricted to two or three nocturnal spottings, when the reddish pellet pattering over the wet road resolved itself in the headlights into aplodontia; and a single road-kill found near home, so pancaked by repeated poundings that it took me two days to figure out what it was. Stretched by truck after truck into a big brown tube, it looked like a very fat weasel’s remains; finally the minuscule tail gave it away.

Yet, though we see the sewellel but rarely, its evidences abound around us. Like Townsend’s snail and the white trillium, aplodontia is a classic creature of Northwest ravines. No one can pad through the sword ferns in search of chanterelles without eventually caving into a mountain beaver’s burrow. Up to ten inches in diameter and like a winterknot of snakes in design, these tunnels put up a formidable barrier (perhaps second only to devil’s club) to anyone wishing to navigate these ravines.

Sewellels make their presence known in another way as well. I recall a day afield with Melody Allen, Portland conservationist, in an Oregon old-growth forest slated for logging if a deal could not be hatched by The Nature Conservancy, for whom we both worked. We marveled properly at the big Douglas-firs and admired mossy knolls, potted with blossoming saxifrages. But what struck us most that May day in the Cascades foothills was the haystack of the sewellel we came upon. There, in an animal runway between the giant cedars, we found it: as neat an array of cut flowers and greens as you could imagine. All lined up, scissor-clipped ends altogether, certainly the work of some sylvan gardener, florist of Faerie. And so, I suppose, it was; only the hand-maidens to Titania were furry, primitive rodents, rather than fairies in gossamer.

But really, is it any wonder that tales of little folk should arise in the greenwoods of the world, given evidences such as these, and people’s proclivity for imagining and embroidering rather than biding by night to observe and explain? The young ferns, saxifrages, oxalis, inside-out and piggy-back flowers, grasses, and bedstraws that made up this hoard looked a perfect fairy-queen’s bower and selected for looks rather than nutritive value. Perhaps the sewellel is a meticulous animal, more than the pika of the high country, whose vernal haymaking must be hasty in preparation for winter’s rigors. Pika stacks look more like broken hay bales than floral tributes. Aplodontia, on the other hand, occupies mild territories where, even in winter, something green to eat may always be found in its ravines.

None of this speaks to the ancient animal’s ability to withstand wet. Make no mistake—its habitats are among the wettest around, even in Washingtonian terms. The water off the tops funnels down the ravines like recycled beer in the bog of a British public house. The rodents tend to stick to the slopes; you seldom find them in the very bottoms. They burrow in deep duff of needles and decomposing moss and rotting wood, young soil that drains well, among supporting roots of trees. So I should think the chances of their burrows flooding far less than those of the moles of the valley floors, who must grow gills in winter. (The mud-puppy stage of moles is another of the evolutionary enigmas missed by the phylogenists, like the evolution of otters from newts.) I am in no position to know whether mountain beavers enjoy more than the coldest, dampest comforts in their lairs, nor whether this most primitive of rodents possesses “enjoyment” in its repertory of sensation. But one feels that fifty million years is too long to spend uncomfortably. Roughly the same sort of creature for at least that long, aplodontia shows a degree of evolutionary complacency that must say something about contentment.

Evolving along with A. rufa have been its parasites, for all creatures have them. These attest to the species’ antiquity, for they are both unique and specific to their host. They include both the largest flea in North America and some of the few parasitic beetles known, the platopsyliids. Even whales and salmon, in their fully aquatic existence, bear external parasites; so we should not be surprised that any damp-land animal would do so. And there is no getting away from them, whether you roam the seas or remain within a few hundred yards of your birthplace, as the sewellel is thought to do. It is stuck with its big flea and bloodsucking beetle just as, being endemic to the Northwest, it is stuck with the rain and makes the best of it.

Swallows too have their fleas, passed from parent to hatchling in the nest. But at least they can leave the rainiest months behind, and do. Gilbert White was unwilling to admit the total desertion of Selborne by his favorite birds in winter and kept on seeking their hibernaculi all his life. Now the evidence is in: they do, indeed, leave, fair-weather friends they.

Our birds of passage cope with the wettest season by simply going elsewhere. But this may have little to do with rainfall. Just as birds forsake cold-weather places for warm in order to find food rather than to avoid snow and ice, our departers probably do so because of the seasonal decline of their necessary resources. Whether they would migrate if adequate food were available, one can only guess. But those birds whose food supplies remain available throughout the year (flickers, juncoes, towhees, and crows, for example) stay home—and handle the hose spray off the sea and out of the clouds in their own specific ways.

As with aquatic mammals, many birds like nothing better than a watery world and seem (in our minds, at least) to revel in the rain. Ducks, of course; their numbers swell with the margins of Larson’s pond in winter. The kingfishers, whose rattles sew up the space between the covered bridge and the trees upstream; the great blue heron, crusty croaker when disturbed in the dusk; the bald eagles, and the ospreys, and the rafts of mergansers—all these fishers rely on the water to get them through the year and take what the water dishes out in return. Others just abide (dispirited, damp fluff ball of chickadee; crestfallen, faded-blue jay), and, like the snakes, few lizards, and fewer humans of Willapa, make the most of the basking sun when it comes.

I watch the birds a lot and have many sights to share. They will have to wait for another book, along with the moths, and the mushrooms, and the fish. But there is one vision I must include here, for it has to do with abiding in the rain and making the most of the sun. It happened in September 1985, as Thea and I drove eastward along the Columbia River. Just before the Wahkiakum-Cowlitz County line, I spotted two large birds spread-eagled in a snag, stopped, and went back. Actually, there were five big birds in the snag, and they were spread-vultured. The odd bird stood on the very top of the tall, dead tree; beneath it, two more turkey vultures perched side-by-side on spindly branches alongside the trunk and, beneath them, another pair. Each bird held its six-foot wings outstretched entirely, much more erect and rigid than cormorants in a similar posture. As cormorants do, the vultures were drying out their wings and absorbing the warmth of the sun through their black feather cloaks. It had rained for days and nights and days, and I can imagine the scavenging great birds were thoroughly sodden, as well as totally fed up.

Arrayed as they were, symmetrical and steaming in the early beams, the pyramid of vultures resembled ornaments for some macabre anti-Christmas tree. All gray and black, no greenery, no color at all save the birds’ lurid red faces, this pastiche could have seemed Stygian and bleak. But all that is flimsy fantasy. Far from sinister, this magnificent fivesome displayed all the bright cheer of those who feel the sunshine on their backs after chilling to the rain on their heads for a long, cold time. In the spread of their great wings they embraced the sun for us all. And that’s fancy too, but I prefer such a view.

The rain fell. The wet birds huddled. The sun came. They spread their wings and grew warm and dry.

Before we left, the clouds closed, and one by one, the vultures folded their wings again, reluctantly, it seemed. Last of all, the bird in the angel’s position atop the tree drew in its broad black vanes. Then the rain began to fall.