Southern Appalachian Creature Feature

Recently the president of a local caving club sat in my office, dressed in rugged Carharts, seeming like he was on his way to a cave. He was lamenting a picture he had brought to share. Taken in an East Tennessee cave, it showed a bat with a white tuft on its nose, an indicator of white nose syndrome.

The arctic tern migrates from the North to the South Pole and back again every year, the longest migration of any bird. Conserving migratory birds is fraught with challenges stemming from the fact they often depend upon a variety of habitats spread across multiple countries – it isn’t enough to protect habitat here in the U.S., but it also has to be done in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, or any other country a bird uses on its migration.

In a mountain-top snow-covered parking area, a team of federal, state, and tribal wildlife biologists grab a ladder and begin marching through the snow and over frozen streams into the forest.

The common name ginseng refers to several species in the Panax genus, including Panax ginseng, found in east Asia, and Panax quinquefolius, often called American ginseng, found here in the United States. Both are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

As a small crowd watched, a hydraulic hammer recently knocked away the first chunk of stone and concrete from Dillsboro Dam. Within weeks, the entire 12-foot high dam will be gone.

Wildlife conservation has faced a string of challenges over the past 150 years. Overhunting led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon and nearly the bison. Hunting seasons and bag limits did an excellent job of addressing over-consumption problems. Habitat destruction became an issue as wetlands were drained and forests cleared – an issue which helped encourage the development of our national wildlife refuge and national forest systems, yet remains an important issue today. Then contaminants fouled our water and air, leading to the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and the control of pesticides. Today, in addition to those challenges we are faced with new issues like invasive species and climate change.

The Carolina heelsplitter mussel is one of the rarest animals in the country – with shrinking numbers found in only a handful of stream reaches across the Carolina piedmont. A conservation challenge, the mussel has declined as the piedmont, especially the area around Charlotte, has rapidly developed and streams have correspondingly degraded.

In a massive basement in downtown Asheville, millions of sheets of paper are shelved, row upon row, upon row – a place not unlike the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is stored in Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, instead of religious artifacts, these shelves contain centuries of weather data ranging from weather reports recorded at frontier forts, to Pacific weather data collected during World War Two to sheets filled out and submitted by farmers across America.

As winter sets in, biologists in North Carolina are busy preparing for the possible arrival of White-Nose Syndrome, or WNS. WNS is a mysterious affliction that is nearly always fatal to bats. It was first documented in a New York cave in 2006 and has since spread north and south, killing hundreds of thousands of bats. The affliction is associated with a newly described fungus which often forms white tufts on the muzzles of infected bats.

We take for granted that each spring trees leaf out, flowers begin to bloom, birds return from their wintering grounds and animals come out of hibernation. What we often don’t think about is the complex interplay between warming temperature, lengthening days, and plant and animal life cycles.