Wildlife

What kinds of wild animals are in the woods, and what are they up to? The Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have set up cameras to find out. Scroll below for a photo gallery of animal images captured as part of the eMammal project. This summer, as part of my […]

The Rocky River begins in Iredell County and flows through Cabarrus, Stanly, Anson and Union counties. This part of our region is very close to South Carolina and you find some interesting critters here you don’t see in other parts of the central N.C. Piedmont. One distinctive species is the Gulf Coast spiny softshell turtle […]

Although some folks find snakes incredibly fascinating, and others shriek in terror and run from them, most people are somewhere in the middle – either casually interested or coolly indifferent. If I see a snake in the woods, I’ll likely get close enough to take a picture and identify it, and then carry on my […]

Several years ago, when we were planning to change the way we manage some of our land, I happened to meet Bob Askins, a biology professor at Connecticut College and author of Restoring North America’s Birds: Lessons from Landscape Ecology. As we discussed my projects, he encouraged me to do a baseline inventory before we […]

What better summertime activity for a kid in the country than playing in a creek? There is really nothing better than sticking your feet in a cool stream under the forest canopy where it feels 10 degrees cooler than in the sun. And whenever I walk in the woods and come up to a rocky […]

If you could travel back in time to the Carolinas Piedmont before European settlement, some of the landscape might look a bit like this clearing in northwestern Mecklenburg County, tucked under swooping Duke Energy power lines. Here, a spring breeze whispers through slim brown stalks of last season’s little bluestem and Indian grass. Wild quinine […]

The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington bears a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Given the sticker shock many of us received when we opened our property revaluation notices, I imagine plenty of folks wouldn’t mind our society being a […]

If you’ve driven by the Low Water Bridge recently, you probably have seen a good bit of bulldozer activity and wondered what exactly was happening to this beautiful natural area. The work is being undertaken with a promising objective in mind. The LandTrust of Central N.C. is partnering with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to […]

Last week while surveying one of our properties, a natural heritage field biologist found an interesting species never before documented this far south – the eastern gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor). The gray tree frog found widely across the state is the Cope’s gray tree frog (Hyla chrysoscelis). The eastern gray tree frog was documented […]

My mom was putting out mulch about this time last year when she noticed a box turtle digging a hole in the dry, red clay under the eaves of the house. Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) appear in many types of habitat, making them a natural choice for our state reptile. Since they’re most […]