Turning Over Logs in Glastonbury (4/6)

The other day Shannon and I took a walk in the town owned property behind our house. This is really just conservation land so there are no trails, per se. We hiked up onto the ridge and I started to flip over logs in hopes of finding some salamanders. The first one that I tried had a Red-backed Salamander. Shannon got a real kick out of him so we continued walking and flipping over anything that seemed large enough. Sometimes we found salamanders, sometimes we didn't.

After a while we came to an area that had obviously been used as a dumping ground. There was an old truck and lots of tires laying around. I flipped over one of them and was shocked at what we saw. There was a field mouse with what we counted was nine newborn babies suckling her.

She was obviously quite frightened and ran back and forth in the depression where the tire used to be. I didn't want to crush her or any of the babies so I attempted to herd her into the leaf litter. When she eventually made a mad dash for a nearby tree, two of the babies were left behind. Shannon and I were both heartbroken to see these guys orphaned but I didn't think that it would do any good to move them. So we left hoping that the momma would return.

(Prologue: We went back to the same location the next day and the babies were gone.)