There are 27 different species of reptiles and amphibians in Columbia County, Oregon, according to the first ever herpetological-assemblage report of the region. The report is the work of Jon Hakim, who grew up in Columbia County and has been obsessed with reptiles and amphibians his whole life.
It took over 15 months and many volunteer hours to visit every possible habitat type in the county and log all the different species, including 6 never seen before in the county. We talk to Hakim about his work and what he’s learned.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Jon Hakim grew up in Columbia County and has been obsessed with reptiles and amphibians his whole life. He’s ended up living and working all around the world, but he recently spent 15 months back in Columbia County surveying every possible habitat type for frogs, toads, salamanders and snakes. He ended up finding 27 different species of reptiles and amphibians in the first ever survey of its kind in the area, and he joins me now.
Jon, Steve Lundeberg wrote about your work recently in Columbia Insight, and he said that the results of your survey are “hopeful and alarming, wondrous and worrisome.” I want to hear about both sides of that. But we should start with the positive side for once. So what’s hopeful and wondrous about what you found?
Jon Hakim: Well, the really great thing about a survey is that we found quite a few species that hadn’t been recorded in Columbia County before or hadn’t been recorded recently. Columbia County is a place that has seen a lot of habitat disturbance. We’ve had pretty much full forest logging over the entire county. Most places have been logged over at least two or three times. Most of the flatland area, especially near the rivers, has been developed either for agriculture or for cities. So there wasn’t much pristine land in the county. So the fact that we’re still finding a lot of these species despite all that development, despite all that land use, is a positive sign. It was really good to be able to nail some things down that we hadn’t had concrete proof of before.
Miller: You found six species that had never been reported in Columbia County, is that right?
Hakim: Yes. I should clarify that three of those are introduced species, so they were not native to our area. They’re new species because they got brought in by people from outside. But three of them are native species we just hadn’t verified before.
Miller: Let’s start with the native species that hadn’t been verified in Columbia County.
Hakim: We showed Cope’s giant salamander, which is a fairly rarely seen species of salamander. It’s almost always entirely aquatic. They go through their entire life cycle in the streams, and they require very pristine, clean, cold water. So it was great that we found one locality, only one place in the whole county, but one locality where they still exist. Similar to that, the coastal tailed frog is another really cool species that needs those cold, clear streams, and we found them in three localities in the county.
Miller: What about some of the newly identified, introduced ones?
Hakim: The most remarkable one is the green frog. The green frog is a species of frog from the Eastern United States. They’re fairly similar to a bullfrog, but smaller – bullfrogs are also introduced, but they’ve been well known here. But there had previously not been any green frog populations ever found in Oregon. So it was pretty remarkable that we found one in Columbia County.
And it is worrisome too because it has spread. We found them across an area of about five kilometers, so they’ve clearly been reproducing, they’ve clearly been spreading out. I’m actually in conversation right now with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife about an attempt to see if they can, maybe not eradicate them because that’s quite difficult, but at least limit their spread.
Miller: All right, you used the word worrisome there. Again, that’s one of the ones that was in that Columbia Insight article by Steve Lundeberg. He said that some of these results are alarming and worrisome. So what else did you find that really is cause for alarm?
Hakim: We don’t have a full baseline survey. This is the first survey that was ever done in Columbia County. So we can’t really fully compare it to historical results. But from what we did see of the past results, it seems like several species have seen the range limited a lot. The two species I just named, the coastal tailed frog and the Cope’s giant salamander, quite likely, used to range at least across the entire coast range area of Columbia County. Now they’re limited to just a couple localities.
The Western toad is another species that, when you talk to people who were here in the county a long time ago, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they saw them in St. Helens, they saw them in Rainier, they were pretty much across the county. Now they’re limited to a very narrow band along the Nehalem River. So, probably about a third to 40% of the species that we surveyed seem to have had their range reduced from what it likely used to be. And that is worrisome that we’re seeing that land use is affecting their populations.
Miller: What else might be affecting reptiles or amphibians? Habitat loss seems like it’s the big one. That’s the one that you’ve emphasized so far. Are there other reasons for the decline in populations?
Hakim: It’s quite difficult to answer all the reasons that these species are declining. With Western toads especially, that’s been investigated quite thoroughly because they’re disappearing from a lot of places in their range. People have investigated whether climate change is partially responsible, whether shifts in precipitation are responsible, but really for most of these species, it seems that land use is by far the overwhelming, overriding reason. This goes for water use and for terrestrial use as well. Basically, we’re impacting the places that they need to be, when they’re on land. We’re impacting how they’re able to survive when they’re in the water. That habitat use is really far and away the number one cause between the drops in populations.
Miller: Can you describe what this work actually entailed? How you and a team of intrepid volunteers actually fanned out and looked for these creatures?
Hakim: It started out with me and my good friend Matt D’Agrosa. We grew up together in Columbia County and have been friends for 35 years now. He’s a wildlife surveyor by profession, and I’m an environmental scientist and a herpetologist on the side. So we both had quite an interest in these animals and we knew that there’s a lot of stuff in the county that hadn’t been surveyed, places that hadn’t been seen, animals that hadn’t been recorded yet. So we decided to divide up the county into 100 sectors to make it systematic. We spent time surveying in every single one of those sectors. The vast majority of the surveys were done by us, but we were able to get some really great volunteers who helped us out as well.
We’d look at a sector, we’d find out where there was any public land there, where there were available places we could go. We’d look on the maps for habitat we really liked, that wasn’t on public land. We’d find out the landowners who lived there and asked for permission to go on their properties and survey there as well, and then just tried to survey every possible way we knew how. We made sure for every population we were going part of the time in the summer when it was warm and part of the time in the spring and fall when it was rainy.
We were making sure to hit every waterway, to hit the densest forests. We were trying to look underneath cover objects, around the periphery of waterways, and going out in the rain. We’re driving the roads in the rain to see frogs and salamanders crossing. Basically, using all the skills we developed over a long time, we wanted to spend at least five to 10 hours in every single one of those 100 sectors and see if we could record, at least as thoroughly as we personally could, every single reptile and amphibian there. I think at the end it totaled approximately 1,240 hours of surveys.
Miller: Literally at times, tromping around in the wet woods, looking under rocks?
Hakim: Oh yeah. We would sometimes get out of the car, and especially if there is a sort of difficult path to get where we were going, we wouldn’t get back to the car for 12 hours.
Miller: The vast majority of Columbia County is private land – 92%, I’ve read. What kinds of conversations did you have with those private landowners?
Hakim: The conversations were pretty easy because we try to just keep stuff simple. If somebody wanted us to come on their property, we were happy to do it, and if somebody was hesitant, then we didn’t really force the issue. So, basically, a number of people in the county, who have connections, spread the word out about us. So a lot of landowners actually proactively contacted us. They’d say, “I have a lake on my property, I have a swamp, I have a forest. You can come out and survey it.” A lot of people found our website, which is wildcolumbia.org. They messaged us saying, “hey, we have this cool property, we’d love for you to take a look at it.” So that was the easiest one, people contacted us.
Other times, I just would show up at a door and knock on the door and say, “hey, I’m doing this survey and I’m just trying to count all the frogs, salamanders, turtles, snakes and lizards that are in our county, and I’d love to look around your land.” And if people said no, we just moved on, because although it’s 92% private land that’s split up between a lot of different people, we always knew there were more opportunities somewhere else.
Miller: So is there any corner pocket of Columbia County that you feel you wish you’d gotten a better look at, but you just couldn’t because of private land ownership issues?
Hakim: Yeah, if you look at biogeographically in Columbia County, there’s an area called the Willapa Hills region, which is sort of in the northeastern part of the county. There’s very little public land up there, so we got in on a few different people’s properties, but there’s a lot of land up there. So we could have gotten into there a lot more.
In the Vernonia area, there’s a lot of waterways. A lot of people have private ponds. There’s the Nehalem River, there’s Rock Creek. I feel like we could have surveyed those waterways better, especially for the Western pond turtle, which was a species we had trouble finding. So there’s a chance that some of them are still hanging out in private property here and there in the Vernonia area.
Miller: When did you first fall in love with reptiles and amphibians, with lizards, salamanders, frogs, toads and snakes?
Hakim: That has to go back to before I can remember. There’s pictures of me when I’m a baby and I’m holding snakes. My dad was actually a zookeeper. He worked at the Washington Park Zoo, which is now the Oregon Zoo in Portland. We basically had a home zoo ourselves. We had yellow anacondas, boa constrictors. My dad was a falconer so we had a red-tailed hawk. I was always deeply involved with that from a very, very, very young age.
Miller: So is it even possible, at this point, to explain what you love about these animals, or if you grew up with them, they’re just a part of your life so it’s like talking about, I don’t know, love of a family member or something?
Hakim: No, I think it’s pretty logical too. For me, I have a very analytical mind. I got my original degree in biophysics, so I like solving problems. And the thing about reptiles and amphibians is every time you want to find them, it’s sort of a little experiment. It’s a little problem solving endeavor.
You have to look at the landscape, figure out which part of the landscape they’re going to be in. You have to figure out in exactly which particular weather conditions you’re likely to see them. You get to the place and you have to look around, and there’s just acres and acres of land in front of you. You have to figure out which little microhabitat you’re going to hit, which rock you’re going to flip over. So for me, I really like the problem-solving methodology of it.
The average person, they go outside, they don’t see very many snakes a year. And it’s because it takes a lot of that extra work to find each one. Whereas, in this study, we saw over 1,000 snakes. I really like the thinking that goes into really finding where each one of these things is.
Miller: You’d previously done wildlife surveys in Bangladesh and in India, but not in Columbia County where you grew up. What did it mean to do this in your homeland?
Hakim: It was sort of a dream come true. In the work that we did overseas, there were projects that we sort of fell into. There were things that I joined after the fact or things that I joined because of a certain need. So I ran these surveys because I was good at it and somebody wanted it to happen. But here in Columbia County, Matt and I started the survey because we really wanted to do it, and every single aspect of the survey we planned ourselves.
I guess the best way to explain it is somebody once told me, when I asked them about designing a study for yourself, they said, “design the perfect study that you would want to read.” So every part of the survey, Matt and I did in a way that was like, what would be the perfect thing that we would want to read about our county? What would we want to know? And yeah, that made it really beautiful for us, to really feel like we had full ownership of what we were doing.
Miller: What do you most want Columbia County residents to know about their reptilian and amphibian neighbors?
Hakim: I think the manner in which every single one of the plants and animals in our ecosystem relies on each other to survive. It’s not the sort of thing where you could just subtract stuff and think things are gonna be the same. The salamanders, for example, most people don’t see salamanders. They don’t think about them very much. But in terms of biomass in a lot of places, salamanders have the highest vertebrate biomass in the area. And they’re heavily responsible for moving nutrients back and forth between the streams and ponds, and the land habitats around them.
Miller: Wait, let me stop you there. So in some areas in Columbia County, if you take all the salamanders and put them on a scale, they weigh more than all the elk or deer?
Hakim: Well, this sort of study has never been done in Columbia County. But in other places with similar habitats to Columbia County, they have indeed shown that the salamanders which are there, you don’t see them, but if you take one square meter of land, there could easily be three or four salamanders in every square meter hidden down below the ground. And you add that all up, and yeah, it’s greater than the deer.
Miller: And what role do they play, just those salamanders alone, in the ecosystem?
Hakim: A lot of the salamanders, not all of them but a lot of them, have this amphibious lifestyle where they spend part of their time in the water and part of their time on land. And that means that they’re constantly moving nutrients back and forth between the water and the land. So, for example, if it’s spending its adult life eating a bunch of bugs and such, crawling around on the ground, it’s eventually going to go into the water and lay eggs. And all those eggs are going to form a big egg mass in the water, and they’re going to get eaten, in large scale, by insects in the water, by fish in the water. So it’s a way of basically they’ve just transferred nutrients from the land to the water.
Whereas, at the same time, you’ll have these amphibians that will grow up in the water, they’ll be eating bugs in the water, and they’ll grow larger and larger, and they’ll eventually come up and go onto land. And then some of them will poop on land, some of them will eventually die on land. So they’ve moved some of those nutrients from the water to the land. So it’s one of the ways that our nutrient cycles, our nitrogen cycles, our phosphorus cycles, our carbon cycles, they’re able to move nutrients back and forth. It’s very similar to turtles as well. Turtles have a role in that as well, as they move back and forth between land and water.
So that helps keep the forests around these waterways healthy, because they keep that nutrient cycling; as opposed to a forest that doesn’t have that sort of cycling, the trees end up exhausting all the nutrients. You cut down the trees, there’s no nutrients to replenish them, and the growth just gets less and less in each generation.
Miller: You mentioned that growing up, it was as if your house was a little zoo. You’re a science teacher in Georgia now. Do you have a mini zoo in your classroom?
Hakim: Yeah, I just moved to Georgia last year, so it’s hard to be away from Oregon. It’s hard to be moved from the West Coast. But we have a lot of animals here. I have a snake, eight frogs, three lizards, four salamanders and a scorpion in the room.
Miller: Do you have kids who are afraid of any of the animals you’ve just mentioned?
Hakim: Oh yeah, of course. Everyone knows that when you work with the kids, they come from all sorts of backgrounds. They come from all sorts of family histories, and so some of them are quite afraid of snakes. But exposure’s great. Exposure really makes a difference. We had a great breakthrough last year. I brought in a local snake breeder to bring some of his snakes in here, some of his pythons and boas, and that sort of thing. And in the lead up to him coming, I took my little king snake, which is quite small, and I had as many kids hold it as possible. And then later on, more kids got comfortable and they held it.
By the day that the snake breeder came in and shared his animals, every single person in my third period class held the snake. And that was just awesome to see. To think that a lot of these kids, probably the majority of them, had never held a snake in their life, and by the time we actually had the event, every single person in that room. Now that doesn’t happen in every room. Sometimes you get classes where there’s one, two or three kids who will never ever hold it no matter what. But to get that sort of full participation in a class was really enjoyable.
Miller: I’m curious about the opposite end of the spectrum too. If there are folks listening now who want to see more reptiles and amphibians in their backyard or in the woods where they tromp around, what’s some beginning advice you’d give for would-be surveyors?
Hakim: I’d say that the top two things we really want people to focus on if they’re looking for stuff, is you focus on waterways and you focus on edge habitats. By edge habitats, I mean any place where two different kinds of habitats meet each other. So the spot where the forest hits a meadow or the spot where the road cuts through a field. The spot where the marsh goes up against the forest, is often one of the easiest places to find things.
Because you have the animals that like the forest, but they want some sort of exposure to that sunlight, so they’re hanging out there on the edge. You have the forest, the animals that like the meadow, but they need to hide in the forest on occasion or they’re getting certain prey animals that are coming out of the forest. So walking those meadow edges, walking those forest edges, walking waterways like streams, lakes and ponds, is the best place to find stuff.
Then in terms of conditions, you really got to think about temperature and you gotta think about humidity. So when it’s really nice, 65 degrees out and maybe a little bit humid, you’ll see a lot of stuff that’s just out in the open. And that’s when you see snakes actually out in the open. But if it’s hotter than that, or if it’s drier than that, then they’re gonna be undercover. If it’s colder than that, then they’re gonna be down deep. So, if you get in a situation where let’s say it’s only 50 degrees, you’ll think, well, what kind of rock would be out in the sun that’s warming up right now that something might be under? Or if it’s really dry, you’re thinking, where is there gonna be moisture under a log? So meeting those two conditions of temperature and humidity are the ideal way to find reptiles and amphibians.
Miller: Jon, thanks so much. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Hakim: Thank you very much.
Miller: Jon Hakim is a herpetologist and environmental science teacher who recently completed a survey of the amphibians and reptiles of Columbia County.
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