Every year at this time, an alien force descends on Vermont. Stepping out into the twilight, we enter a shockingly loud soundscape of trills, peeps and otherworldly harmonies: The frogs are back.
While in some areas it’s hard not to hear these amphibian neighbors, catching a glimpse of them tends to be more challenging. Not so at North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, where 32 artists celebrate frogs, toads, salamanders, turtles, snakes and lizards in “Scaly, Slimy, Smooth, and Slithery,” on view through June 27.
Though the subject might seem niche, as the ecologists say, the show has range. In addition to great nature photography, viewers will find paintings, embroideries, metalwork and even a satirical cartoon.
Curator and North Branch communications coordinator Chelsea Clarke Sawyer said the show started with an unusual gallery proposal from artist Heidi Albright, who turns sticks into snakes in her work.
The show contains a few of Albright’s sculptures, such as the twiggy “Northern Ring Snake,” on a shelf near the entrance, and a tangle of serpents dangling from the wall and anchored at the top by the dramatically angled “Black Rat Snake.” Albright’s creations, like their subjects, are deceptively simple. She paints her smooth sticks, which are approximately life-size, with the creatures’ coloration. The wood’s natural angles and knobby twists give them dimensionality and movement that doesn’t feel planned. Since real snakes often camouflage themselves as sticks, ophidiophobes should beware: The back-and-forth mimicry results in unsettlingly real-seeming serpents.
Another slithery standout is the demure green inhabitant of Susan Bull Riley‘s “Stump With Snake,” a 15-by-32-inch graphite drawing painted with watercolor. The scene centers on a rotting stump full of dead leaves, with the rest of the forest only lightly sketched in the background. Points of green — ferns, a sprouting oak sapling and the titular snake — reinforce the circular composition, bringing the eye around and into the stump. The shape of a leaf mirrors the snake’s uplifted head. Riley’s exquisitely delicate style works both to isolate identifying details, as in a botanical illustration, and to emphasize the connections between plants and animals in a cycle of decay and germination.
Spring green pops up in a few works in the show, such as Rick Powell’s colored-pencil “Frog With Bubbles.” A northern leopard frog surfaces from a pond through a mire of slick algae, surrounded by a cloud of reflective bubbles. The pollen and ick in the water are palpable, and the artist has achieved a real sense of buoyancy and air in the bubbles rising through the pond. The adoration with which he treats his subject might make even squeamish viewers reconsider the beauty of slime.
Caitlin Gildrien veers 180 degrees on the color wheel with “Red Eft,” a 24-by-24-inch macro-view painting of the tiny newt. Vermilion, the eft slinks across the canvas to rest on a shelf of dark-green-and-purple fungus. The unusual color combination and composition render a shy critter as bold and dangerous.
A few artists bring us close enough to their subjects to make the real seem abstract. Jenni Belotserkovsky‘s painting “Orbs Beneath the Surface” is just that: clouds of amphibian eggs like a field of floating eyeballs, mysterious against a brushy green background. Likewise, in George Seiffert’s “Wood Frog Eggs From Beneath,” a photograph printed on metal, each of the squishy black dots resembles an eclipsed sun against a burst of light.
Other artists use their mediums’ strengths to emphasize the creatures’ fragility. Claire Dacey‘s ink-on-paper “Snapper Hatchlings” are two wee black turtles — they seem life-size — swimming across the white page. Blobs of ink create shadow, the white edge of a shell, the folds of a collar as one hatchling brings its head in to hide.
Beside them, Ariela Paulsen’s etching “Toad” employs a range of soft gray textures to depict a creature that’s neither fully solid nor quite of the water. Her wobbly lines in rich, dark ink trace shapes that look a lot like the black strings of eggs found at the edge of a pond post-toad orgy.
Threats of extinction and endangerment become explicit in a cartoon by O.W. Wellard about the fate of the timber rattlesnake, which was bountied in Vermont until 1971 and has been designated as endangered since 1987. It’s unclear if the quaking rattler in the picture is more afraid of being shot or of enduring the caricatured dialect of the hillbillies arguing over its extermination.
Lindsey Benton addresses the issue more obliquely with “Wood Frog,” a chalk drawing of the amphibian considering a dragonfly snack. The subject is straightforward, but rendering it in chalk on a slate-black background highlights just how easy it would be to erase this peaceful scene permanently.
The theme of a precarious future aligns well with the show’s educational goal, which is to raise awareness of North Branch’s amphibian road crossing program, Clarke Sawyer said. Every spring for the past two decades, volunteers of all ages have helped usher amphibians on perilous journeys across wet Vermont roads, on their way from winter habitats to the greener pastures and ponds where they breed.
As well as averting unfortunate squishing deaths, the creatures’ human helpers record important data on weather, location and species that have helped scientists and transportation planners in their conservation efforts. North Branch’s website has videos and instructions for anyone who wants to join in next year.
The citizen-scientists’ practice has much in common with these artists’ approach to their slimy, scaly subjects. Both combine careful observation with an openness to understanding just how much these often-unseen creatures shape the spring landscape.
The original print version of this article was headlined “It’s Not Easy Being Green | North Branch Nature Center celebrates reptiles and amphibians”
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This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
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