Imagine you’re 7 years old. You’ve just come home through a typically chill, rainy April night. Just another Maine mud-season drive… and then you see on your doorstep, a large, black splay-toed creature with bulging eyes and bright yellow spots all over its body. What kid wouldn’t be fascinated?

Though he didn’t realize then, for Dr. Greg LeClair, it was a life-changing moment, that led, through twists and turns, to Maine Big Night.

At the time, the spotted salamander on the doorstep inspired him to persuade his mother to take him driving on rainy spring nights looking for more amphibians. “One memory in particular was on Marsh Road in Sabattus where there was a group of what must have been somewhere between 6 and 12 spotted salamanders marching across the road in one small area. That probably cemented things more than anything else for me,” he says. What was also clear from these drives was the danger that the frogs and salamanders faced crossing dark roads to get to the wetlands and vernal pools they depend on to reproduce.

Flash forward to 2018 when Dr. LeClair was a student at what was then Unity College. Through his college Herpetology Club, he started Big Night as a limited, local effort to protect migrating amphibians as they crossed dark roads. The project recorded almost fifty amphibians and generated a piece on the Portland NBC television outlet. LeClair was quoted in the story, saying: “A lot of people don’t understand what it means when we say we’re going herping. It sounds like a weird term, a lot of people think we’re studying herpes, but … a lot of people here are really familiar with it, a lot of people are excited to hear about it. Today, I just kept hearing from more and more people, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to come out with you!’”

Going out with the students meant setting up traffic cones on cold wet nights to encourage drivers to slow down where amphibian crossings were known. Amphibians, though they can live 20 to 30 years, are the most endangered of all vertebrate classes. The culprits are diseases like Ranavirus and chytrid fungus, though these aren’t a big problem in Maine, and urban sprawl, which is a big factor in Maine—especially when roads separate good hibernation sites from the wetlands and vernal pools the amphibians need to spawn. It’s very hard to see a wood frog crossing a dark road.

The success of 2018 led LeClair to expand it state-wide in 2019 as Maine Big Night. The project is community science done by volunteers. Protecting the animals as they cross the roads is part of the job; the other part, as the website puts it, is to collect “data that can be used to improve our understanding of how wildlife interacts with our infrastructure and how to protect wildlife, including amphibians, with smarter infrastructure design.”

It “really took off in 2020 because of the pandemic forcing people to find something they could do outside with social distancing,” says LeClair. Though it may be one big night for any given amphibian, for volunteers it can involve several nights, usually from early to mid April in most of the state. The amphibians’ travel is triggered mostly by thawed ground, nighttime temperatures above forty degrees, and enough precipitation to make the ground wet.

The handful of sites in Unity in 2018 has expanded to 627 sites now available for adoption according to Dr. LeClair. The Maine Big Night website reports nine kinds of frogs and eight kinds of salamanders observed. Asked about any changes seen in the counts over the time they’ve been done, Dr. LeClair says that amphibian “populations boom and bust naturally, so you need long-term data to pick out real patterns. That being said, what we have started seeing is a general trend towards earlier starts to migration. A recent year had migrations starting in February – usually they don’t begin until late March! We do hope that our data can help track shifts like these.”

There’s one site on the Maine Big Night map in Harpswell. Asked about new sites here, Dr. LeClair says “Harpswell is very rocky and sloped, so [there’s] not a whole lot of freshwater wetland potential compared to other areas like South Berwick, Kittery, and Orono which are basically just big, forested swamps.” There are locations that fit amphibian wish lists but there may not be many that require the animals to cross a road. If you know of a site that looks like it would fit the bill, you can suggest it to Maine Big Night at https://mainebignight.org.

Meanwhile, Harpswell Heritage Land Trust is fortunate to have Dr. LeClair leading a vernal pool nature walk this month. He now serves as Municipal Planning Biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, as well as being Board President and Executive Director of Maine Big Night. That yellow spotted salamander in 2003 spawned more than further generations of salamanders—she generated a wildlife biologist and committed conservationist, and in doing so, saved multitudes of amphibians from oblivious drivers!