The Calling of the Mighty Hellbender
A Monthly Trash Pickup Festival
Trade Trash for Treasure, The Final Sunday of Each Month at Sunset
This is a civic ceremony - a small and short festival to honor the land, in the form of Pennsylvania’s State Amphibian, the Hellbender, and do something nice for the creeks and parkland which really define Pittsburgh (and America). We will trade trash for treasures, and celebrate the hidden gills of the city.
The Hellbender spirit is fed by trash and recycling, collected from within your local watershed. Bring a bag, wear High Visibility clothing, and perhaps you will receive the spirit's blessings!
Hellbender Callings happen on the last Sunday of each fairweather month, typically April thru October.
No need to RSVP, but attendees must dress appropriately, and bring proper gifts.
Appropriate dress: All attendees must wear glow-in-the-dark or high visibility material, from mesh vests to dazzle camouflage. Costumes, face paint, and hi-viz formal-wear are encouraged. There will be music. Many salamander species are aposematic - they use bright colors to warn would-be-predators of their dangerousness. Here, our bright colors will alert the Great Hellbender to our calls, as well as keep us visible to traffic.
Proper Gifts: The Great Hellbender can only be summoned by creating a clean environment. To receive the blessings of the Great Hellbender (one blessing per person), bring a bag of trash, recycling, or compost, collected from somewhere in their local watershed.
Citizens of special merit often bring appetizers to pass out to their neighbors. Some bring dim, portable mood lights, like lanterns, fairy lights, or glow sticks.
Welcome the state amphibian to your watershed. (Mine is Pittsburgh’s own A-22/23 Combined Sewer Overflow (formerly Skunk Run)) Gather near moving water, an hour or two before sundown, and use buckets and bags to pick up trash and recycling all around the public space in your watershed. Play music, sing, have fun.
Around sunset, convene again down by your local riverfront, creekside, or as close to water as possible.
Pause, allow the spirit time to see your gathered trash-mass, and sing oracular tunes back.
You’ll be able to download and print oracular cards each month using the pdf links below, always activated by the Saturday before the intended Sunday.
The Hellbender summoning should take no more than half an hour of music, contemplation, and community. Follow it up with a short walk of lights.
The hellbender will eat the egg we call the sun, and perhaps transform our trash into glowing treasure!
Across the whole world, in your own lands, healing your own waters, I hope many of you and your families join me for this short festival - the more voices that call, the higher the chance that the Great Hellbender may appear, in all of our watersheds. Especially if we appease the amphibian, by bringing great mountains of trash and recycling!
2023 Dates & PDF Download Links
(Activated a day or two before each date listed)
Chorus from the Forest
Our living neighbors, the animals and plants that share our watersheds.
A few creatures to watch for, who have had songs sung to them month by month, and who sing back to the Hellbender.
April: Knotweed // Skunk Cabbage // Mourning Dove // Eastern Cottontail // American Robin // Indoor Plants
May: Common Grackle // Common Garter Snake // Allegheny Crayfish // American Toad // White-Tailed Deer // Nor. 2 Line Salamander
June: Groundhog // PA Lightning Bug // Eastern Cottontail // American Robin // Marestail // Urban Rock Dove (Pigeon)
July: White-Tailed Deer // Carolina Wren // Tufted Titmouse // Wild Bergamot // Dame’s Rocket // Northern Red Oak
August: E. Tiger Swallowtail // Tall Ironweed // Blue Jay // Hollow Joe-Pie Weed // E. Bumblebee // Spined Micrathena Spider
September: Large Milkweed Bug // Fox Squirrel // Monarch Butterfly // New England Aster // White Breasted Nuthatch // Jewelweed
October: Virginia Creeper // Killdeer // Common Raccoon // White Snakeroot // Wild Turkey // American Sycamore
My Watersheds - Observatory Hill
o-25 Jack’s Run Basin // o-27 Wood’s Run Basin // A-58 East Creek (former)
The valley here is called Skunk Hollow on the old maps. The road in the bottom right is Neville St, until it jogs north and becomes Sassafras St.
Beneath both streets, huge pipes carry the combined waterload from from Polish Hill, the Upper Hill District, North Oakland, and the parts of Bloomfield south of Liberty Ave.
All of these torrents converge underground and flow towards the 32nd St & 33rd St Outflows.
The warehouse district beyond the valley entrance is the Skunk Hollow Floodplain. The floodplain spans a neighborhood boundary - the lowest part of Lower Lawrenceville and the highest part of the Upper Strip District.
The view north from the Bloomfield Bridge.
Neighbor Loretta Millender provided a wonderful, detailed, and intense oral history in Steel This Magazine, all about this valley. She grew up in the Lower Lawrenceville area, and as a trustworthy and enterprising young woman, became entangled with all sorts of neighbors. To whit:
I asked the man what his name was. “Skunk Hollow Red,” was his answer. I said, “What?” Again he said, “Skunk Hollow Red.” He had reddish hair. I said, “They call you Skunk?” he said, “No. Skunk Hollow Red.” I said, “Ok Mr. Skunk Hollow Red.” He said, “You don’t have to call me, ‘Mr.’, just call me—,” and I told him no, I had to call him mister. My mother had taught me that.
I asked how much I could make and he told me three dollars, six dollars, maybe even eight dollars if I was good at running. “What’s running?” I asked. Skunk Hollow Red told me, “You’re going to be a number runner. But the police ain’t gonna suspect you because you’re young, and you got the wagon and the pop bottles. The police are watching me, but they ain’t watching you.”
My watershed now drains at 32nd Street, usually towards ALCOSAN (our sewer plant), but also overflowing directly into the river, to the tune of 580 million overflow gallons annually. This is the legacy Pittsburghers send downriver, from Neville Island, to New Orleans, and on, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Your Watershed
You can find out what watershed you live in using this handy tool from the EPA, or this Pittsburgh-local tool from PgH2O.
Water arrives from atmosphere or onto every piece of the earth, and in some places emerges from geology, land, or other methods. Now, we pump it where we humans think it is needed. It always seeks to move further down. From highlands - hilltops and mountain ranges and mesas - streams form and channel many smaller rivulettes into larger and larger creeks, and eventually rivers. This whole system, from source to outlet (and eventually, out to sea), is called a watershed, and each one of us lives in one.
Take care of yours, and perhaps Pennsyvania’s own water spirit may visit you!
The Hellbender: Pennsylvania State Amphibian 2019 - present
A Lycoming College salamander suit, on loan to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for the hellbender's signing ceremony as the State Amphibian, April 23, 2019. Photo credit Angela Couloumbis
Our amphibian friends have been quite newsworthy lately, and rightly so! These creatures are unique and vital predators in our Appalachian ecosystem, and a sign of healthy forests and streams ("lotic" ecosystems).
In Harrisburg, state lawmakers adopted the hellbender (cryptobranchus alleganiensis) as the official state amphibian. Per an article about hellbender survey-work here in Allegheny County:
The hellbender is an oddly charismatic animal. The flat-bodied salamander’s tiny eyes and folded skin on its sides inspired yet another nickname “the lasagna lizard.” The hellbender is largest salamander in the country at about 2 feet in length and can live to about 50 years of age.
“They’re tanks, weighing almost 4 pounds,” said [Eric] Chapman, who has been surveying for hellbenders since 2007.
I love the name cryptobranchus - hidden gills. It reminds me of the phrase used about urban parks - "the lungs of the city". What hidden gills are in your neighborhood?
Pennsylvania's state amphibian, the Hellbender, and the youth movement to save it, were the subject of an Atlas Obscura writeup by Ashley Stimpson. It's a rousing story, but it isn't over.
While the state amphibian designation was a major victory, Thorpe is quick to point out that it brings with it no special status or state protections. The fight to help the Eastern hellbender must continue. “We can do better, and we can do more,” she says.
A population of hellbenders was discovered in Butler County this year, in a creek we had not found hellbenders in before. May they continue to return, as we clean up our waterways.
Mudpuppies Rock!
Other, positive, salamander news:
WESA's Wild Pennsylvania covered the 2019 surveying of the Ohio and Allegheny rivers for mudpuppies (necturus maculosus) and salamander mussels (simpsonaias ambigua). These two species have a unique bond - the salamanders steward the mussel shoals.
Simpsonaias ambigua, like most freshwater bivalves, spawn small larval child-mussels, called glochidium, as their method of reproduction. While in their glochidal phase, these baby mussels have rigid hooks sticking out from their bodies, which snag on the gills of passing fish, hitching the glochidium a ride to other parts of the river. Salamander mussels are unique in that their glochidal hosts are mudpuppies (amphibians) rather than fish.
Mudpuppies don't metamorphose into an adult phase - they are as juvenile as the name says. In salamander species, juveniles have external gills. Mudpuppies never lose these, and it is to these external gills that the mussel glochidia hook. A few weeks later, the baby mussels drop off the wandering mudpuppy, and establish themselves on some new silt territory at the bottom of the river.
(There used to be millions of mussels in the river system, as well as almost 100 fish species which fed upon them. It's hard to imagine these days, but the three rivers once had so many banks of mussels filtering the water that they ran crystal clear.)
For Organizers
To get each Hellbender calling going, pack a bag with trash bags (3 mil contractor bags are great), gloves, snacks, bottled water, and portable speakers. Invite friends and neighbors, and get outside and gather some trash! Wikihow has a complete writeup.
The pdfs print double-sided, and can be cut into six cards of equal size. A few copies of these cut up and randomized will provide take-home oracular advice for every attendee! I like to print them on high visibility paper, orange, yellow, or green, typically from a vendor with a celestial luminosity name.
Figure out a disposal strategy for the trash before you collect it. Here in Pittsburgh, Allegheny Cleanways can give more info. In your own community, elected representatives, church coordinators, and environmental stewards surely have tips for you.