While we found several examples of this species on the day this was taken, to my knowledge, I’ve never seen it before or since. Yet this red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus) was found in the best location nearby to find salamanders and newts of any kind, which is West Point on the Eno River in Durham, NC. Their range across NC is curious, to be sure, especially when it doesn’t seem to follow the rivers that salamanders tend to congregate near. Why is it patchy and separated like that? My guess would be family issues – you know how it is sometimes.
While this image is rather straightforward from the top, something that I try to avoid as much as possible, what I like about it is how the natural speckling of the salamander is duplicated from the underlying leaves, a purely serendipitous effect from the sun angle, but I’ll take it. There’s a potential that pine pollen season had something to do with this too, since this was shot in April, but it looks far more uniform than pollen usually does, plus the fact that until moments before this image, everything you see was under a rotting log. Pollen can certainly get around, but not quite that well.
Plus, these guys are certainly less sticky and oogy to handle than white-spotted slimy salamanders, for eponymous reasons, though they were both found in the same location, just in different years.