Bob Mount: We live in a haven for salamanders and other amphibious creatures

As a youngster living in a small town in middle Tennessee, my older cousin and I were picking up stove wood, and from under a piece I picked up scampered a lizard with a blue tail.
My cousin excitedly exclaimed, “Kill it, kill it, it’s a poisonous blue-tail scorpion.”

The lizard escaped under a brush pile, and several years later I learned to distinguish between harmless lizards and bonafide scorpions. Only one venomous lizard occurs in the U.S., the Gila monster, whose range is restricted to the lower Southwest.

Three species of Alabama lizards have blue tails when they are young, and the females of two retain blue tails into adulthood. All belong to the family Scincidae, the one most frequently encountered is the five-lined skink. Males of all three develop enlarged reddish heads, notable of which is the broad-headed skink, which can attain a head-body length of 12 inches.

I have heard the name “barking scorpion” applied this species. Skinks have no ability to vocalize, but broad-heads are adept at climbing, and when they scamper up tree trunks, they may cause loose scales of bark to fall. This may explain the origin of the name “barking scorpion.”

Quite a few years ago, when I was conducting research in preparation for writing a book on the reptiles and amphibians of Alabama, I was attempting to determine the status of a large aquatic salamander, the hellbender, which once was a common inhabitant of the Tennessee River and some of its tributaries. I asked an elderly trotline fisherman who fished the river if he had ever caught hellbenders and showed him a picture of one.

“I used to catch them, but it’s been quite a while since I caught one,” he said. “They’re what we called walking catfish.”

“You may be interested in another critter that lives in these parts; it’s a lizard that’s sometimes green and sometimes brown. Folks around here call it a changeable scorpion, but it’s not poisonous like the blue-tails.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the unusual colloquial names applied to various animals and plants. Thirty some-odd species of salamanders occur in Alabama, most of which are less than 10 inches long. Often, where a salamander is found determines its colloquial name. If in a spring, it’s a spring lizard; if in mud, it’s a mud puppy; and if unearthed in moist ground, it’s a ground puppy.

Salamanders of unknown origin might be simply referred to as puppy dogs.

In northern Florida and parts of southern Georgia and Alabama, the name “salamander” is applied by many old-timers not to any amphibian, but to a mammal, the eastern pocket gopher, which burrows in sandy soil and pushes up mounds of soil to the surface. The late Dr. Archie Carr, my Ph.D. major professor at the University of Florida, believed the term to be a corruption of the term “sandy-mounder,” applied by early settlers because of the gopher’s push-ups.

Dr. Dan Speake, a retired wildlife biologist, shares my interest in plants and animals. Shortly after coyotes invaded the Southeast, Dan visited a South Georgia farmer whose cantaloupes were being eaten in the field by animals, suspected to be coyotes. Dan confirmed the suspicion and asked the farmer if he had seen one.

The farmer told him, “I might have,” he said. “I saw something that looked like a throwed-out German police dog.” Dan said, “That’s a pretty good description of a coyote.”

Bob Mount is emeritus professor of zoology and entomology at Auburn University and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.