When I was growing up in central Illinois, the coolest thing a kid could find was a salamander.
Back then, we wandered the forests, fields and ravines leading down to the distant Illinois River, building forts, climbing trees, throwing dirt clods at each other, doing crazy stuff.
But we always had our eyes open for the animals and insects that shared our vast playground.
We kept pets we found. Tadpoles, toads, garter snakes, red ants, black ants, even bumblebees. I once built a toothpick cage for a cricket, hoping it would sing me to sleep at night. I’d read that the ancient Chinese did that.
One day, a friend of my dad’s gave me a box turtle. Sadly, it quickly escaped from the backyard pen I’d built for it out of chicken wire. It vanished into the deep gulley behind our house.
The coolest thing? I found the turtle a year later, down in the woods, maybe a hundred yards from its pen. How did I know it was my turtle? I’d written his name — ‘‘Mr. Dillon’’ — on cardboard and taped it to its plastron.
But salamanders were the thing.
We boys recognized intuitively that here was an amazing creature with a niche so small in nature that some evolutionary imperative full of mystery and precision was occurring, something we could marvel at but never comprehend.
The salamanders we found primarily were Eastern tiger salamanders. There would be a newt thrown in sometimes, but the Eastern tiger was the main attraction, found with great whoops of joy under rotting logs or near swampy soil and piled leaves.
They were marvelous. Soft, cool, black and shiny as licorice, with bugged-out eyes and yellow spots, they squirmed but did little else.
They were amphibians, like frogs and toads, and their life cycle, we would learn, was itself a marvel. The cycle was, in two words, delicate and complex. From eggs laid in ponds or puddles to efts to developed salamanders that left the water to live on land in burrows, coming out at night to eat worms, snails and bugs.
The reason I bring this up is because salamanders are disappearing. All amphibians are in danger, but salamanders most of all.
According to a report that just came out in the British journal ‘‘Nature,’’ 60% of all salamander species are threatened with extinction. That’s not just decreased numbers; that’s extinction.
The culprits? The usual: global warming, habitat destruction, pesticides, human intrusion.
Salamanders are delicate animals. They absorb oxygen through their skin. They have no scales, fur or feathers to protect them from chemicals and bacteria. They are cold-blooded and can’t adapt to extreme temperatures. They live in precise environments. They don’t migrate.
We know about the billions of birds that die in the United States each year — from windmills, cats and the glass on buildings such as McCormick Place (or even our own bay windows) — and we know about the loss of so much else in nature as we heat and pollute our planet.
We’re sick of hearing this stuff. It‘s depressing. It creates anxiety. That doesn’t make it less true.
The smoke that gave Chicago the worst air quality in the world for a spell last summer, that came from Canada. That only shows that we’re all in this thing together.
A study released Monday by the National Academy of Sciences states that parts of the world, including the Midwest in the United States, are on track to become too hot and humid for humans to handle, meaning ‘‘a quality-of-life shift would occur since a majority of a person’s time will have to be spent inside for the sake of their health.’’
There’s a thing that has to do with human memory, a baseline of ‘‘normalcy’’ that defines the way we recall the past and thereby project the way the present and future ought to be. It’s like a restrictor plate in an engine. That is, if you don’t remember buffalo running wild in the plains or even songbirds at your backyard feeder, you won’t think it’s abnormal not to have those things again.
I’m not sure what we do about healing our planet, but we don’t give up.
We can’t let the oil industry, imperialism and science-deniers lead the way. We can’t. And we have to remember all the things we have right now, all the things swinging in the balance, that we control. Things such as salamanders.
Boy, will I remember them.
