Want to learn more?

A public information session on the North Shore Road will be held Tuesday, Jan. 22, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Swain County High School in Bryson City.

Results of the biological survey, as well as cultural and historic surveys, cost estimates and economic impacts of the potential alternatives will be presented. Alternatives include the full 26-mile road, a cash settlement of $52 million for Swain County in lieu of building the road or a four-mile road dead-ending at a visitor center, campground and picnic area. Public comments can be submitted at the meeting.

Martha Register spent most of 2004 trying to adopt the mindset of shrews, salamanders, bats, fish, snails and even plants.

“If I was an Appalachian elk toe mussel, where would I live?” she pondered on a regular basis. Or “If I was a Virginia Spirea, where would I grow?” Register was the project leader with Arcadis, a biological consulting firm charged with surveying a remote area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along the shore of Lake Fontana for endangered, rare and special species. The largely inaccessible area is being considered for a controversial 26-mile road from Bryson City to Tennessee, but first the park had to determine what lived there.

Surveying every inch of the proposed route wasn’t an option in the few months the firm had been given to complete the survey. Instead, they had to pick ideal habitats for each of the nearly 100 plant, animal and insect species on their list and do spot checks.

Bat biologists picked what they considered the prime bat habitats for their all-night stakeouts trying to snag bats out of the air with big nets. Salamander specialists picked the most optimum salamander wetlands in which to set their traps — the unsophisticated yet efficient coffee cup trick. The coffee cup is set down into the ground allowing the salamander to fall down in, but unable to climb out the slippery sides. Shrew hunters flagged what they considered the five-star shrew habitat along the 26-mile corridor and inundated a few acres with upwards of 100 traps.

“We selected samples sites that would provide the best opportunity for finding those species. We were trying to maximize the probability of collecting the ones we were after,” Register said.

Any given week between May and September of last year, there were up to a dozen biologists combing the North Shore area for their particular species of interest.

“We had a blast. For a group of biologists, this is a dream project. You get to spend the summer hiking in the woods in a remote area doing what biologists love to do most — to roll over logs to see what was underneath, to play in streams and look for salamanders,” Register said.

Eureka!

They found many of the special species on their list, they also found species they weren’t looking for — species new to science and species not previously known to dwell in the park.

It’s not surprising, given the astounding results of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, an ongoing project to document every living species in the park. Just a few years into the project that is expected to span two decades, more than 525 species new to science have been discovered and another 3,314 species have been found that previously were not known to exist in the park.

The Arcadis data collected along the North Shore will be turned over to the ATBI, augmenting the database for an area that so far has not been a prime target in the inventory due to its remoteness.

“It has been harder to get to, so the knowledge coming from there certainly is interesting. Any knowledge we obtain from the scientific work is extremely beneficial to letting us know what creatures are in the park, what their distributions are and how we can take care of them,” said Jeanie Hilton, director of Discover Life in America, the group coordinating the ATBI. “We are really racing against time. There are all these pressures on the park and we have to find out what lives there so we know how to protect it.”

Ready, set, survey

While Arcadis conducted general surveys — simply walking the proposed corridor and taking notes on what they saw — the bulk of the research required experts on specific species. Specialists rotated on and off the project all summer, timed to coincide with the best month for observing their given species.

For Register, a botanist, her timetable revolved around bloom times.

“You literally do plants during their flowering season because that’s when they are most conspicuous,” said Register. “We broke them into blocks of survey windows. We looked at all the flowering seasons and where they overlapped is where we tried to go out there and do surveys.”

Base camp for the biologists was Fontana Village, where they rented a block of cabins all summer and rode boats back and forth across the lake to the area they were studying.

Since the group only had two boats to work with, coordinating schedules was difficult. The birders had to be out in the woods at 4 a.m. to catch the birds’ most active song period, largely between pre-dawn and 10 a.m. Nocturnal mammal trappers had to set up their traps just before dusk and return bright and early in the morning to check them. Bat people had the most convoluted schedule, beginning their day at 5 p.m. and sitting up all night with their nets.

Roger ...

Each team carried a radio, but the signal had trouble navigating the terrain of coves and hollows. So the biologists set up regular times to check in with each other, allowing them to climb up on a berm or rise before trying to use the radio. Even then, they couldn’t always make contact with the team they were assigned to check in with. Instead, they employed a radio chain.

“We had so many people out there in addition to biologists. There were cultural resource people out there, there were surveyors out there putting up flagging. Maybe I couldn’t hear person A on the radio, but I could hear person B and maybe person B could hear person A and could tell me they were OK,” Register said.

As an extra precaution, the entire team had to check in nightly with an Arcadis team member at their home office in Raleigh.

“If we were all on a boat coming back across the lake and the boat broke down and we didn’t make it back, who would know?” Register asked. If the team hadn’t deployed the Raleigh buddy system by 8:30 p.m., the buddy back in Arcadis had firm protocols for the field workers. They filed daily itineraries of where the area they were scouting.

“If someone didn’t show up at a pick-up site, we knew from a map that had been discussed the night before or that morning where they were planning on going,” Register said.

Researchers traveled in pairs at all times and carried standard safety equipment: waterproof matches, a lamp and extra batteries, a tarp to fend off hypothermia in the event someone got lost and had to spend the night in the woods, compass, topo map, food, water, first aid kit, etc. Other required supplies were procured during regular excursions to the Bryson City grocery store.

“There was a run all summer on things like peanut butter and jelly and cans of tuna fish,” Register said.