This spring, there’s a different kind of egg hunt happening on Bainbridge Island — and anyone can join — as long as they know the difference between snail jelly and newt eggs.

Three environmental nonprofits on BI have joined a citizen-science project run by the Woodland Park Zoo to shed light on the little-studied population dynamics of amphibian species in the Pacific Northwest.

The Bloedel Reserve, the BI Land Trust and Islandwood have each mustered trained volunteers to count frogs, salamanders, toads and newts, along with signs of their presence, like egg masses, in ponds on each organization’s land.

The project is the first time amphibian population data has been recorded in Kitsap County for modern science, but it’s not just about filling in the blanks on local species. The information could be crucial to understanding BI’s watershed, and its resilience or weakness to climate change.

Due to their permeable skin, amphibians are particularly susceptible to environmental pollutants, which means many have borne the brunt of human environmental damage on freshwater ecosystems — “they’re the canaries in the coal mine,” said Christina Woolf, senior naturalist at Islandwood.

In the past several decades, amphibians have experienced the steepest rate of species decline among all other vertebrates — but it’s still unclear which species are suffering in Western Washington.

By monitoring amphibians in King, Snohomish and now Kitsap counties, the zoo hopes to study the impacts of wetland loss, diseases, pollutants, invasive species and climate change on freshwater sources around Puget Sound. Keeping track of factors like beaver activity, presence of rare species, which species are breeding where and whether common species are staying common helps paint a picture of the overall quality of habitat.

“Robust populations of salamanders and frogs provide strong evidence that an area has high-quality, functional habitat,” said Haley Wiggins, Bloedel Gardens manager. “Declining amphibian populations suggest that environmental conditions are also in decline, and understanding those dynamics can help prioritize conservation efforts within an area.”

In 2024, Bloedel was the first Kitsap organization to join the zoo’s project, and its data made a huge splash.

Once a month between January and June, four volunteers and two Bloedel staff searched the Buxton Bird Marsh and the Reflection Pool for three hours, looking for egg masses, larvae, tadpoles and adult amphibians. Any specimens got their picture taken, and observers recorded details like size, quantity and color.

The BI team had its hands full. Blodel tied the Redmond Watershed Preserve in east King County for the highest number of native amphibians observed during surveys, each identifying 198 critters down to the species. While Redmond beat Bloedel in the raw count by a toe — it also found two invasive American Bullfrogs — the Bloedel team took the cake for species diversity and abundance.

Bloedel’s volunteer survey teams found 100 Pacific Tree Frogs, 35 Northwestern Salamanders, 57 Long-toed Salamanders and six Northern Red-legged Frogs — one of three sites to record a significant population of four or more native species, and the only site to record so many of each.

“We had great success and interesting findings in 2024. Finding more native amphibians than any of the teams on the Seattle side of the water was not very surprising, because we have high-quality wildlife habitat across the grounds and most of the other sites are closer to and more impacted by urban development,” Wiggins said.

Some findings were surprising. The Reflection Pool at Bloedel, an artificial pond without much planting, had more observations than the recently restored Buxton Bird Marsh, an area filled with native vegetation. “One hypothesis we have for this finding is that the bird marsh is wilder and probably has a greater density of predators,” Wiggins said.

Discoveries are already being made. Rough-skinned Newts, a relatively common salamander, were absent from Bloedel’s ponds but are “crawling all over Islandwood,” Woolf said. “The most exciting part of this work is that we work together to share this data, versus doing all this in siloes. When we know what we have, we can make informed decisions about conservation as a collective.”

Wiggins said the hope is more groups will join the project along with Islandwood and BILT, because the relatively undisturbed forested areas of Bainbridge and Kitsap are a wealth of data.

That’s an exciting possibility, but it’s dependent on community resources, said BILT community education coordinator Megan Rohrssen. BILT has a strong relationship with the BI Metro Parks and Recreation District, which could pave the way for amphibian monitoring in public ponds — provided there’s enough muddy hands to help.

“[We] would like to keep an eye on amphibian populations to help us steward these systems but only have so much capacity to do so. At the same time, community members are interested in amphibians, concerned about the pressures these fascinating creatures face, and want to help take care of them while enjoying time outside. So, this volunteer work is both fun — sometimes cold & wet! — and valuable,” Rohrssen said. “Engaging [the park district] would be less a lobbying effort and more of a conversation about appropriate use of their budget, staff time, and volunteers for an amphibian monitoring program, and amount of support Bloedel, Islandwood, and BILT could bring to expanding surveys to ponds in BIMPRD’s natural areas.”

Wading into ponds and creeks and scooping out gelatinous clumps of peppercorn-sized eggs is one of Woolf’s favorite activities. There’s an awe and wonder to exploring ecology up close, but she acknowledged that it’s not for everyone. Those who want to support amphibians but prefer to stay dry have options too, typically closer to home.

“When you start to look into tannic waters of marshes and ponds, happy freshwater, and you look past the reflection of the branches around you, you can see this whole world. That is a nursery.

“I think about the little slough behind my house in Fort Ward that holds all the water from my neighborhood that runs off and goes through culverts. We didn’t make it; it’s a bioswale, and it’s performing a really important function for our neighborhood,” Woolf said.

“These little pockets of freshwater on Bainbridge are really important, and it’s crucial that we don’t fill them in or clean them up too much — they need to have sticks and debris in order for animals to want to go there.”

Woolf courtesy photo Field practicum at the Reflection Pool with volunteers from BILT, IslandWood and Bloedel Reserve Jan. 29.