While I won’t have a chance to do much exciting this weekend (I’ll be spending most of my weekend engaged in out of town wedding festivities) I thought it might be a good chance to finally put up a post about the day trip I did last month to look for amphibians.

Many people may not know this but the mid-Atlantic region has the highest salamander diversity on the planet. Spring and early fall are supposedly the best times to try to locate these little guys, so around easter, my gf and I headed down to Prince William Forest Park (even though the Virginia vernal pools are supposed to be better, I don’t own any waders and I didn’t really want to hang out in a swamp anyway) to see if we could find any.

After some trouble getting there (Google maps is the new MapQuest–the bad directions combined with stupid Interstate 95 traffic managed to make a 35-40 minute drive closer to an hour and a half) we eventually hit the park and started looking for salamanders.

While the general time of year was right, the conditions were not ideal. It had been fairly try for the past week or two and salamanders prefer foggy and damp conditions. Still, we heldout hope that we would at least find a couple in the many little creeks and streams in the park.

Basically the way looking for salamanders works is, you find a creek or stream and then turn rocks over. Sometimes there is a salamander there. More often you find bugs.

We did get lucky though and found four or five salamanders.

In all, it was a pretty fun outing. It’s certainly better than just randomly hiking around. Goal oriented nature works for me. If you’re looking for a good way to spend a weekend you should definitely consider catch and release salamander hunting.

A few more salamander pictures in the full post.

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In light of this past weekend’s events, I’d like to encourage those who have been hiding other various injuries (perhaps an icepick in the neck or a cactus in the face) caused by the Vice President on their property. I understand that you couldn’t come forward before, because that would have jeopardized the status of his “undisclosed location(s).”

Due to recent events though, it appears that some people are chastizing us for not coming out with this information earlier. “Boo hoo, it took us 20 hours to release information about the vice president shooting some dude in the face …,” cry those whiny liberals.

I think it’s time we show them that Cheney shooting a dude is actually not that strange or noteworthy. This is why no one made a big deal out of it on Saturday. Then maybe for once they would stop their inane complaining.

Those who have helped Cheney hunt “the ultimate game” (like a hobo or something), we stand behind you–unless you’re hunting quail … then we stand behind some sort of bulletproof glass.