Southern Appalachian Creature Feature

With a rash of media reports of bear sightings across North Carolina, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission reminds residents not to panic and to remain calm if you see a black bear. Bears are not inherently dangerous and seeing a bear can be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for residents to appreciate from a safe distance.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission is asking for your help determining who and why someone dumped a bear carcass marked in white paint onto a Buncombe County, North Carolina road.

Three Jackson County, North Carolina towns — Sylva, Webster and Dillsboro — recently joined the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s Mountain Heritage Trout Waters Program

Young wildlife may be cute — and it may be tempting to bring a fawn, cub, or chick home — but tiny animals are not pets. Human encounters with young animals often increase in the spring, when many wildlife species bear young, but touching or feeding them can hurt wildlife and jeopardize human health.

In a building at a state fish hatchery in Marion, North Carolina are a series of tubs with an elaborate piping network leading in and out. Within these tubs the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission is working to rear some of North Carolina’s most endangered freshwater mussels in captivity, including the Appalachian elktoe mussel.

The Little Tennessee River runs wide and deep just below Emory Dam, outside Franklin North Carolina. In the late-morning sun on an April day, a jon boat plied the water back and forth. Protruding from the bow and dropping into the water was a pair of electrodes wired to an on-board generator. Perched in the bow was a biologist with a long-handled net waiting to scoop up fish stunned by the electric current flowing through the water.

The biologists eyed the bat box on the banks of the Tuckasegee River. Counter in hand, they tallied how many bats were using the box. This is the fourth year they’ve done these counts at a string of bat roosting boxes along the river. And this spring they witnessed a precipitous decline in the number of bats using the sites from past years. The suspected culprit is white-nosed syndrome, the bat disease that has decimated bat populations across Eastern North America.

The Southern Appalachians are home to three species of endangered bats – Indiana, gray, and Virginia big-eared. Indiana and gray bats have already seen declines from white nose syndrome.

For wildlife biologists, winter is often the down time of the year – a time to compile data from the year’s field work and set about the laborious, and indoor, task of writing reports. However, for people who track a handful of animals, winter is time to get out and about.

Japanese honeysuckle – for many, those yellow and white blooms are as indicative of summer as fireflies, watermelon, and baseball. All of us probably have memories of plucking the flowers and pulling the pistil through the flower’s base to capture that drop of nectar.