Spring pools. Warm rains during the nights of April 2 and April 7 lured scores of wood frogs and several dozen spotted salamanders to our transient spring pool and, sadly, across a road that proved fatal to many of them.

The goal of the migrants was to seek safe breeding places. Shunning permanent ponds in which fish and turtles may lurk, April’s amphibians gather at pools where rain and snowmelt have collected in large depressions.

Eggs are laid in jelly-like masses and abandoned to the caprices of wind, weather and the chemistry of evaporation. Within a few days, adults return to their forest homes.

But April can be cruel. As spring advances, local forests divert water into leaves and shoots, dooming the shallowest pools before tadpoles and other juveniles can mature.