A weekend surprise

I have two compost bins full of Bermuda grass that may never decompose.  (Seriously, I have started thinking of Bermuda grass as either one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or perhaps the most durable building material on earth if it were compressed into some sort of particle board). I was going to turn the compost, but after removing the bin and lifting off the top of the pile, I was surprised to find a nest of salamanders.  I thought I'd turn the compost in the other bin, but there was a nest of salamanders in there too.  So, I have two unturned piles of Bermuda grass waiting to either decompose, or for the salamanders to leave.  I am not sure which will happen first.  That's okay though.

For me, finding two nests of salamanders ranks up there with seeing fireflies for the first time, finding a wild orchid in New Hampshire, walking through a cypress swamp in Louisiana and listening to golden toads croaking, and finding an endangered abalone attached to a rock in Bodega Bay.  I have heard a great deal about Salamanders, but have never actually seen them in real life.  The last thing that I heard about salamanders was that they are all going extinct, along with most other amphibians as well, and though I have always wanted to see them, I thought I might never get to.

Right now, about a third of amphibian species are endangered and that number keeps increasing every year. The culprit driving the extinction of amphibians is the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which infects the skin of amphibians and makes it so they can't breathe through their skin.  The spread of the fungus has been blamed on global warming and on frogs grown agriculturally (for their legs) which are resistant carriers of the fungus (a good excuse, if you need one, to not eat frog legs).  While both of these hypotheses are plausable, scientific evidence apparently doesn't support either explanation.   Got any better ideas and a good way of testing them?  Apparently there is a need.