How to Catch a Salamander Safely (and Whether You Should)

Catching a salamander is easy. Catching one without harming it takes two things most guides skip: wet hands, and putting the log back the way you found it.

When and where to look

The places worth turning over:

• Under rotting logs and loose bark on the ground
• Under flat stones and old boards lying on soil
• In deep leaf litter in shaded corners
• Along the margins of streams, seeps and ponds
• In temporary woodland pools in spring, where the larvae are
• Around a damp compost heap or the shaded side of a water butt

Handling it without doing damage

This is the part that matters. A salamander’s skin is permeable and, in several families, the organ it breathes through — lungless salamanders have no lungs at all and take in oxygen entirely across the skin.

The technique:

1. Lift the cover object from the far edge, so it opens away from your hands.
2. Look before reaching. Snakes, spiders and wasps use the same shelter.
3. Cup a hand over the animal and let it walk in, or slide a flat hand underneath and lift with the whole body supported.
4. Never by the tail. Many species autotomise — drop the tail deliberately — and regrowing it costs fat reserves the animal needs to breed.
5. Under a minute, out of direct sun, and never in a dry container, a pocket or a sealed jar.
6. Replace the cover exactly as it was, then set the salamander down next to it and let it walk back under.

For aquatic larvae, a small dip net through pond vegetation works, and they should be returned to the same pool within minutes — never moved between ponds.

Why it goes straight back

Three reasons, and the third is the serious one.

It is often illegal. Many salamander species are protected at state, national or international level, and collecting or possessing one without a permit is an offense in a lot of places.

They do badly in captivity. Wild-caught amphibians are stressed by handling, need specific temperature and humidity, and frequently stop feeding.

Disease. Chytrid fungus and ranavirus have caused catastrophic amphibian declines worldwide, and both are spread by moving animals, water, mud and equipment between sites. A salamander taken home and returned a week later can carry a pathogen into a population that had none. If you visit more than one site, clean and dry your boots and any net in between.

Better than catching: attracting them

A yard that supports salamanders is a yard with fewer slugs, snails and cutworms, and it takes almost nothing to make one:

• Leave leaf litter in a shaded corner instead of clearing it
• Put two or three untreated logs or flat stones directly on soil and leave them alone
• Keep a shaded damp area near any water feature
• Build a small pond without fish — fish eat salamander eggs and larvae, which is why a stocked pond rarely holds either
• Stop using broad-spectrum insecticides and slug pellets, which remove the food and poison the animals through their skin

Do that, and instead of hunting for one you will find them under the same log every time you look.