Southern Appalachian Creature Feature

“This is not the same animal I saw flying around this morning, is it?” asked one teacher, standing knee-deep in the South Toe River, looking at an insect crawling around an ice cube tray.

The animal in question was a dragonfly. Nearly all of us have seen a dragonfly, but what most of us probably don’t know is that large flying insect lived the early part of its life looking entirely different and crawling along the bottom of a stream or pond.

The North Mills River, in North Carolina’s Henderson County, is one of Western North Carolina’s most popular trout rivers. I took some time one Friday to enjoy the river and as I was getting ready to head home, I struck up a conversation with another man in the parking area who was arriving. The man was from Texas. His wife had come to the area on business, and when he saw you could trout fish here, he decided to tag along with her.

Having studied a little photojournalism in college, photography has become a resurgent interest of mine and I was caught by a recent cover of the Mountain Xpress, Asheville’s alternative weekly newspaper. It has a striking image of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, taken by George Masa.

The view from Jane Bald is impressive. On a good day. The day I was there, the fog was socked in, accompanied by a constant strong wind. Although the beautiful views were missing, we were able to watch the wind rush the fog through the neighboring gap as if we were watching a stream squeeze between a pair of rocks. Jane Bald is one of the peaks of Roan Mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee state line - one of the most biologically important areas in the Southern Appalachians.

For several years biologists were noticing fairly widespread malformations among amphibians - frogs missing legs or having extra legs. There was much speculation about the cause of this disfigurement, including heightened suspicion of pesticides and other chemicals.

Researchers have recently uncovered what may be at least part of the explanation for legless frogs – dragonflies.

The Southern Appalachians is a region known for its salamander diversity, the most famous of which is probably the hellbender, North America’s largest salamander, occasionally reaching lengths greater than 30 inches. However, it’s a very small salamander that has been getting some recent attention.

A little bit of river history was recently made in western North Carolina as a decrepit dam was removed from the North Toe River in Mitchell County.

The final leg of a birding trail across the state of North Carolina is now complete.

I’ve often spoken of white nose syndrome, the mysterious ailment killing thousands of bats in the northeast which is working its way southward. One of the myriad questions surrounding this affliction is what the death of thousands of bats means for the greater natural community, including human health, considering the volume of insects bats consume and that an impact on one part of a community can reverberate throughout, possibly with serious unforeseen consequences.

The Cradle of Forestry in America, in North Carolina’s Transylvania County, was the site of the nation’s first forestry school and you can still visit the one-room school house the students used.

It’s appropriate then, that beside this schoolhouse is planted a young chestnut tree. The American chestnut was once the most abundant tree in Eastern hardwood forests, and was functionally eliminated by an Asian fungus, the chestnut blight. The tree beside the schoolhouse isn’t a pure American chestnut, but a hybrid – 15/16ths American chestnut, and 1/16th Chinese chestnut, which affords it resistance to the blight. There’s hope this hybrid is the key to returning the chestnut to Eastern forests.