trauma!

Today was not a good wildlife day. We had a salamander (!) which turned up as we were clearing off space to lay out a unit, and was terribly cute except that something bad had happened to its tail slightly before we found it, and when I picked it up gently to photograph and release it somewhere out of harm's way, the tail came off. This was probably intentional on the part of the creature, and the tail sqirmed mightily after the separation, while the salamander itself went very still, bled a little on my hand and on the leaf where I put it carefully down, and had disappeared without any further trail of blood when I went back to check on it. So we figure it will most likely survive.

( You're so cute! You're so out of focus! )

The small pinkish worm snake, however, who was hanging out in the middle of strat II of my unit, will not survive having been segmented by my shovel. He was all curled up underground, and the shovel went right through soil and snake and all, and there was nothing left to do but pick up the two pieces I could find as gently as possible (and with my gloves on) and export them to bury in the loose dirt at the top of an old shovel test to let it die in peace. There wasn't much if any blood, but there were pale guts spilling out and everything. And then I found another inch-long segment in my screen. waah!

(I mean, if I'd intended to kill the thing, it wouldn't be a problem, and if it had died from some other cause and I'd found it that way, that would have been kind of cool, but slicing a perfectly innocent snake into bits because I didn't know it was there is highly traumatic...)