WILTON – Every spring the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock counts amphibians during their migrations to breeding areas. Volunteers gather at roads to help them cross safely.

This year, the Wilton Community Center joined in the effort as a family activity. On seven nights between March 29 and April 29, between two and seven volunteers ventured out into the cold rain along Whiting Hill Road and found 12 species of frogs and salamanders.

They chose the Frog Pond-Carnival Hill area partly because parking was available, coordinator Donna Crane said, and Whiting Hill Road is not heavily traveled. The police department was involved in the project providing safety.

Crane, the president of the Community Center, said she took the offered training in Keene and decided it was an appropriate family activity. There is a little discomfort involved – “it has to be above 41 degrees and raining. But it was one of the most fun things I’ve done. You’re out there in the rain and the animals appear.”

She called it a “meditation process. You walk up and down the road. When you see one, you pick it up, determine what it is and where it’s going, and carry it over the road.”

During each of their sessions, she said, “there were 50 to 60 of them.”

The most numerous kind was the spring peepers, that noisy little frog that cheerfully signals the end of winter. The most spectacular is the yellow-spotted salamander, a fat dark gray amphibian which can reach eight inches in length. There are 11 kinds of salamanders in the area and the group found four of them.

“It shows the biodiversity on that one road,” Crane said. “In the few hours we were out there we saw what people really don’t see and run over.”

Mortality rate is very high in some places, she said, where the animals have to cross highways to reach the vernal pools where they breed.

There are ten kinds of frogs in the area. “I learned to identify all of them,” she said. “When you hold them in your hand, you connect with them. You’re helping people and the salamanders.”

The Wilton Community Center was formed about ten years when a group of residents were trying to purchase the former Sacred Heart Church for an activity center. When that project fell through, they continued to look for family-centered activities such as the annual Stone Soup dinner.

“Our next activity is kite flying,” Crane said. On June 12 and 13 they will gather on Carnival Hill with kites and information on how to make and fly one.

“We look for outdoor activities for the whole family,” she said.

Everybody should fly a kite. Think “Mary Poppins.”