After visiting at least ten different Civil War battlefields in Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia last summer (which you can read about here), Eric and I headed even farther east to spend a few days in beautiful Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I visited this park 15 years ago, and I was eager to see it again - especially one of my favorite places, Cade's Cove.
A hotspot of biodiversity in the Southeastern United States, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a naturalist's delight. We did some birding during our visit to the park, but most of our time was spent hiking through lush forests and rambling around the many old cabins and homesteads that have been carefully preserved by the National Park Service.
 |
| A handsome American Black Bear: easy to see why these guys are everyone's favorite North American mammal! |
The most noteworthy mammals we encountered on our visit were, without contest, all the bears! American Black Bears are abundant in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, especially in the area of Cade's Cove. We saw so many during our visit that we actually lost count! (But we'd gotten well into the double-digits.) The National Park Service estimates that there are currently around 1,900 bears in the park, which works out to a population density of two bears per square mile. For such a large mammal, that is quite high! The meadows and fields of Cade's Cove also support sizable populations of white-tailed deer and Wild Turkeys, both classic species of Southeastern hardwood forests.
 |
| An American Black Bear approaches a historic homestead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Not pictured: Volunteer rangers who patrol Cade's Cove all day to manage the hoards of tourists who stop to gawk at roadside bears. |
American Black Bears once ranged across most of North America, though today their range has shrunken considerably; Great Smoky Mountains National Park remains as one of the largest protected areas in the eastern United States where black bears can still roam freely. The wild, protected lands within park boundaries are home to an incredibly diverse array of native flora, including many nut- and berry-bearing plants that provide food for black bears. Though omnivorous, as much as 85% of the diet of the American Black Bear consists of nuts and berries.
 |
| Remember: Despite his lovable and admittedly somewhat dopey face, this American Black Bear is a wild animal and must not be fed or approached. There are more than enough natural food sources available to bears in the lush forests of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. |
Yet, the bears of Great Smoky Mountain National Park are still at risk, not so much from habitat loss or the other factors that usually threaten species, but from humans themselves! Not destructive humans, but doting humans and careless humans, who are tempted to either deliberately feed the bears (a massive no-no anywhere) or carelessly leave food out where bears can get to it (another big mistake). This carelessness on the part of people who generally like bears can lead bears to become habituated to humans and trained to recognize human sources of food: picnic areas, coolers, tents, garbage cans, etc. Bears that frequent these areas may become nuisance bears that must be relocated or, in the worst cases, destroyed if they become aggressive toward humans.
The National Park Service website has more information on how they have managed bears (and people) over the years to improve the situation, and what you, as a visitor to the bears' home, can do to help protect this fan-favorite species.
And now for a fun fact: Great Smoky Mountain National Park is home to over 100 species of trees - which is more species than is found in all of Europe! - and somewhere around an additional 1,500 species of flowering plants. How's that for incredible biodiversity?!
 |
| American Black Bears are excellent climbers. This one is scaling one of those 100+ species of tree to reach some tasty berries toward the top. |
While exploring some of the old homesteads that have been preserved in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, I was excited to discover these little furry, flying mammals, tucked in for the day at their roost: Bats!
Bats are an essential, though often unseen and underappreciated, part of many ecosystems. In addition to being valuable pollinators, bats also consume around half of their own body weight in flying insects every night, and many of those insects are pests - like mosquitoes!
Several species of bats use the historic buildings in the park as roost sites, but my guess is that these are Big Brown Bats.
 |
| Big Brown Bats (open to correction on the species), roosting in an old cabin in Cade's Cove. |
Currently, white-nose syndrome, a fungus found in caves, is devastating North American populations of bats, especially the social, cave-dwelling Little Brown Bat. The rapidly-spreading fungus grows on the nose, toes and wing webbing while the bats are hibernating, and survival of infected bats is almost nil.
White-nose syndrome first showed up in New York in 2006, and has since spread quickly across the U.S., reaching California in 2022.
According to the White Nose Syndrome Response Team, "Pd [the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome] was unknown to science until it was found on North American bats. After that, researchers began looking for it elsewhere and found it on bats in Europe and Asia, where bats do not appear to get as sick from the fungus as they do in North America. We don't know how Pd got here or where it’s from. Pd spores can last a long time on surfaces such as clothes, shoes and outdoor gear, so even though people do not get white-nose syndrome, we can unknowingly move the fungus from one place to another – the most likely way that Pd found its way to North America."
As there is no cure for white-nose syndrome at this time, Little Brown Bats could be extinct due to the fungus within the next few decades. Scientists continue to study the disease, how it spreads, and what can be done to slow or stop the spread of the fungus and save our bats!
 |
| Beautiful, fragrant milkweed flowers in Cade's Cove. |
The best birding spot I found in the park was Cade Cove's Hyatt Lane, one of the two unpaved roads that bisect the Cove's eleven-mile one-way paved loop road. These roads are
much less frequented by tourists than the popular loop road, with less traffic and plenty of places to stop and pull over to bird. Hyatt Lane skirts stands of woods and crosses open meadow habitat, affording good opportunities to see a variety of species.
A star of the southeast, singing enthusiastically seemingly everywhere we went, was the Indigo Bunting, and they were present here as well.
 |
| Beautifully blue Indigo Bunting |
For higher elevation species, like Red-breasted Nuthatches and Golden-crowned Kinglets, birders also enjoy the area around Clingman's Dome, a 6,600-foot mountain on the border of North Carolina that holds the distinction of being the highest peak in the Smokies, and has recently been restored to its original Cherokee name, Kuwohi.
 |
| Walking to the top of Kuwohi (formerly Clingman's Dome) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park |
We enjoyed our morning trip up the mountain and into the "boreal forest," but the birds were pretty quiet on Kuwohi - and the tourists were out en masse on this late July day! We did eventually find peaceful solitude (more or less) on the short Spruce-Fir Nature Trail, which, at 5,600 feet above sea level on the Tennessee-North Carolina state line, felt remarkably like forests we visited in
Acadia National Park, near sea level in Maine!
 |
| The quiet, damp and mossy Spruce-Fir Nature Trail |
But birds aren't the only winged wonders in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the southeastern United States: Butterflies and moths are abundant in great profusion as well, and we spotted quite a few of these beauties while out and about.
 |
| Pipevine Swallowtail |
 |
| Imperial Moth (we're not used to insects quite this large in California!) |
Comments
Post a Comment