Summertime is upon us. Grab the sunscreen, grab the fishing pole, grab the digital camera. As part of an ongoing and widespread effort to encourage people to spend more time outside, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service invites you to submit your summer photos of friends and family enjoying the outdoors to become part of a photomosaic of nearly 10,000 images.

It’s the telephone call a biologist never wants to get – the chemical spill, the fish kill, the accident that makes you stop everything else. The most recent was a train wreck along the North Toe River in Mitchell County. Fortunately no one was hurt.

The chucky madtom is one of Southern Appalachia’s rarest fish, found only from a single stream in a single county in Eastern Tennessee. Only 14 specimens of the fish have ever been documented, the last sighting in 2004. This comes despite regular, and sometimes exhaustive, searches by biologists.

If anyone has first hand experience with a reptile, it’s probably a box turtle, the state reptile of North Carolina. While box turtles may grace numerous classrooms or home terrariums, the truth is scientists don’t know a lot about the status of box turtle populations and fear they may be declining.

The death of hemlock trees from the hemlock woolly adelgid is an increasingly widespread and well-known phenomena, but what remains a mystery is exactly how this will impact the future of Southern Appalachian forests.

The children on our street often congregate in the yard with the best play set, but recently the bright yellow slide in the yard was ruled off limits. Not because it isn’t safe, rather a chickadee made a nest in a birch stump next to the base of the slide.

White nose syndrome, an affliction of unknown origin that is fatal to bats, has been confirmed in two Virginia counties, the first cases in the Southern Appalachians. First documented in New York in 2006, WNS has killed tens of thousands of bats as it spread north and south.

The Rafinesque's big-eared bat is the subject of concern for biologists. State biologists in North Carolina are looking at innovative ways to provide shelter for them.

Warblers are a popular group of birds among bird watchers, what makes them so special?

The Eastern small-footed bat is one of the smallest in the U.S., how is this uncommon bat doing in Western North Carolina?