Most brilliant when a young adult, eastern mud salamanders usually dull with advancing age.
Florida was far behind. Jake (hoping for his lifer eastern mud salamander) and I were sloshing through soupy mud topped with shallow water. The water, itself, was capped with oily looking iron slicks. Long dead trees lay helter-skelter, most in advanced states of decomposition, the trunks of others more newly fallen, still hard and unyielding. Working separately, after an hour or so we had between us turned and replaced more than 100 logs and limbs, and had found nothing beneath but more mud. Disappointed, we decided to bring our hunt for the eastern mud salamander, Pseudotriton m. montanus, to a halt and move on to the next target.

We were 25 miles north of the locale when Justin called and Jake told him of our failure. In a few sentences Justin explained that we had been searching the wrong area of the vast swamp and gave Jake some more precise directions. Jake wanted to try again so we turned and returned. Forty five minutes later we were trudging past the area of the swamp we had so recently left and continued along the trail for another half mile.

More soupy mud and more logs in various stages of decomposition now lay in front of us. Having seen many eastern mud salamanders in other areas I elected to search for other caudatans along the shore. But Jake, slogging, slipping and flipping, persevered in the foot deep mud. And a half hour later his perseverance paid off. He found and we photographed his lifer eastern mud. Now it really was “next target time.”