This summer’s West Nile virus numbers are up. What better time to take a closer look at the vector for this disease – mosquitoes.

A pair of biologists sat patiently beside the Tuckasegee River, staring at a set of wooden boxes mounted on a wooden pole on the rivers’ bank, waiting for the sun to go down.

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission wants your help.

Commission biologists noticed an unusually high number of cases of hemorrhagic disease in white-tailed deer in Wilkes and Surry counties, and are asking the public to report sightings of sick or diseased animals.

Elk once roamed the southern Appalachian Mountains and the eastern United States before over-harvesting extirpated them from the area in the late 1700’s. The experimental release of elk into the Great Smoky Mountains, which began in 2001 with a population of 25 elk, has been successful. To this point, the population has been growing and the park has been monitoring the herd with the assistance of radio collars.

Though the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service currently proposes creating a National Wildlife Refuge to protect rare Southern Appalachian Mountain Bogs, efforts to conserve these areas have been going on for decades, with farmers playing a key role.

White-nose syndrome, the disease responsible for killing millions of North American bats continues to spread in Western North Carolina. Earlier this spring the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission confirmed the disease in Haywood County, the fifth North Carolina county where the disease has been discovered.

As the bat disease white nose syndrome continues to spread in the Southern Appalachians, the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service recently announced 1.4 million dollars to fund research into the disease and ways to control it. Funding for the grants was provided under the Endangered Species Act.

A standard tool for biologists working to recover endangered species is either breeding rare plants or animals in captivity or raising them in captivity to increase their likelihood of survival. This can be quite complicated, as it involves plants or animals that are extremely rare, and for which we know little about their life cycles.

We came to a stop on the shoulder of the dirt road, got out of the car, crossed the road, and the driver pointed to a spot near the top of a rocky cliff. It was a golden eagle nest, and on it was the first golden eagle I had ever seen. But that was Montana.

This tiny olive dater is a fish is rare enough to get the attention of state and federal wildlife biologists, so any help it gets is welcome. The fish had never been found upstream of Dillsboro Dam in North Carolina’s Tuckasegee River. However, that dam was removed two years ago, and biologists have since discovered one of the darters upstream of the former dam site, hopefully expanding a range previously limited by a massive stone wall.