Salamander people are special people. Consider Tom and Debora Mann, biologists in their early 60s who live in a little town near Jackson, Miss.

When it rains hard at night, they rush to a dark stretch of the Natchez Trace Parkway and start scooping salamanders into quart-size freezer containers.

Then (and this is not the premise for a joke), they help them cross the road.

Most rainy nights during the late winter and early spring, dozens — sometimes even hundreds — of salamanders, generally three to nine inches long, try to get from their burrows on one side of the road to seasonal ponds on the other to mate. The salamanders, some of which can live up to 30 years, procreate only once a year. The compulsion to get across that road is unyielding.

Unfortunately, so is the traffic. So the Manns, along with a handful of volunteers, have made it their scientific and personal mission to help. They are out there for hours in the rain at night, cajoling the slimy-skinned amphibians across the wet pavement. The nocturnal animals need moisture to travel and spend most of their days safely tucked in their forest habitat.