Hi, Mr. Nature here–with some fond memories of salamanders.
Take a look at that Red Salamander (P. ruber ruber)–isn’t he gorgeous? When my friends and I used to go out catching salamanders, this was the grand prize. They were never very common–but just look at that color.
The video shows the Red Salamander entering water, but none of the ones I ever caught were in the water, although they were never very far away from it.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen one of these. As a rule, salamanders are pretty good at adapting to humans in their environment; but we’ve reached a point beyond which salamanders cannot go. Even the little redbacks, who used to be ubiquitous (gee, I don’t get to use that word too often!) around here are getting hard to find.
It would be a poorer world without them: and it doesn’t strike me as wise to squander even the smallest of God’s blessings.
Beautiful! The colors found in nature are so amazing.
A few years ago, I was driving down a backroad and saw a flash of the most vivid orange imaginable up ahead. When I got to the spot it the road I saw the it was a Gila Monster, a poisonous lizard peculiar to these parts, which is colored black and blaze orange. In the forested regions, this color of orange means that Fall in in the air, but here it means “stay away from this lizard”. 🙂
Wow, that is a fascinating creature. I had never seen one of these. The most colorful things I ever saw as a kid were the colorful tropical birds in
my paternal grandparents’ home. They had a sun room with exotic plants and a whole bunch of these birds. The singing in that room was rather fascinating, too. They were quite a couple, raising dozens of chickens,
growing a huge flower and vegetable garden, a herd of cattle and also
the parents of 13 children. Wow, makes me dizzy thinking about all that.
Never had a scarlet salamander, though.
Red efts–immature newts, actually–are even more colorful: vermilion. They can afford it, because any animal that ventures to eat one is not gonna live to eat another.