For four years now, the dedicated volunteers of the Chileno Valley Newt Brigade have been carrying tiny amphibians across Chileno Valley Road to spare them from meeting an untimely demise beneath the tires of cars and trucks. Their efforts have previously won them coverage in the New York Times—and now a $77,876 grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The money will be used to seek ways to help the newts safely cross the road without assistance from human beings. The brigade plans to hire a civil engineering firm to consider various options, including lifting a section of the road, altering existing culverts or installing amphibian tunnels beneath the road. United States Geological Service staff will assist in the study, which will be conducted over the next 12 months.
Newts and other amphibians and reptiles are often killed while attempting to reach Laguna Lake in northern Marin County during their four-month spawning season, said Sally Gale, the rancher who founded the brigade.
“Our tiny group is being taken seriously by a government agency tasked with protecting vulnerable species,” Ms. Gale said. “Who knew we would have gotten this far?”
The Marin County Department of Public Works has given its blessing to the study, though any solution that emerges would require the department’s approval and the brigade would need to find additional funding to implement it.
Newts have migrated to Laguna Lake for thousands of years, Ms. Gale said, and if their lives are not cut short, they can live for 30 years. But they must make the dangerous Chileno Valley Road crossing twice a year—once to get to the lake to breed and once to get back to the hillside forest where they live during the rest of the year.
They cross along a one-mile stretch of road, but most of the activity happens along a quarter-mile stretch at the eastern end of the lake. Ms. Gale and her husband, Mike, first came upon the newts while driving home from dinner one rainy night in 2018 and realized that many of them had been crushed.
Ms. Gale founded the brigade to spare more newts from this miserable fate. Since then, more than 80 people have volunteered, many of them retirees. Among them are teachers, a surgeon, a family practice doctor, computer scientists, graphic designers, naturalists, hikers and birders.
Working in teams, the volunteers search the road with flashlights. The newts freeze in the light, and the volunteers pick them up, carry them across the road and set them down in whichever direction they were heading.
So far, the volunteers have logged over 1,700 hours and saved over 7,400 newts.
“On a normal night, we’ll have a team of 10 volunteers with a captain, and they’re out there for about two hours,” Ms. Gale said. “But one night last year, some of the more dedicated volunteers were out there until 3 in the morning.”
For more information, go to www.chilenovalleynewtbrigade.org.