Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 14, 1993                   TAG: 9305140012
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IS IT 1 IF BY LAND, 2 IF BY SEA?

They're searching for the Peaks of Otter salamander, which lives nowhere else on the planet but a 45-square-mile patch of forest in Bedford and Botetourt counties.

At that, it lives mostly underground, content to foray upstairs in the open air only after dark.

The Peaks of Otter salamander is no spotted owl, no great panda, not even a Roanoke logperch. It's not scheduled for extinction next week. There seem to be plenty of them in their limited world.

The hunters, mostly Liberty University students and their instructors, don't want to kill the finger-sized salamander. They just want to count them, or at least count enough of them to get an idea how many are out there.

The Liberty University salamander team will be compiling information about the reclusive amphibians for the Jefferson National Forest.

How else can we know how logging in our national forests affects Peaks of Otter salamanders without counting them?

We are going to find out.

The national forest is going to let a private logger cut the timber from 17 acres in Bedford and Botetourt counties, within the range of the Peaks of Otter salamander.

Seven acres will be clear-cut - all the mature trees taken down. Ten acres will be cut in stages, taking the prime trees first and, over a period of years, the rest. Eight acres will be left natural to see how the salamanders fare there.

It all will start late this summer.

Because dedicated Liberty University students are counting salamanders in those very areas, we'll know how many salamanders lived there before the chain saws started chewing bark.

When the cutting is through, by fall, the salamander counters will return to do what they do best - count salamanders on each of the three tracts.

They will count again every two years until 2003. Will there be fewer Peaks of Otter salamanders? More? No change?

This is an interesting scientific strategy. We have plenty of salamanders, but we know that someday we may grow short of them. Would logging devastate whole salamander populations, sending Peaks of Otter salamanders like so many fleeing villagers, running for their lives and suffering violent deaths by the bushel because of our brutal logging?

What better way to find out than by doing some logging now, right over top of their little salamander heads?

"We want to make this realistic," said Larry Neuhs, a wildlife biologist for the national forest. "We do harvest timber, but we want to consider other resources. We want to know what timber sales do to this salamander."

Wouldn't it be instrumental to learn by our experiment that the Peaks of Otter salamander dies in mass numbers when exposed to timbering of any sort?

Neuhs says there is no chance that the salamander logging will wipe out all of our known Peaks of Otter salamander reserves.

Those Liberty University counters may not sleep well tonight. But the rest of us can.