Where eagles dare

Last Saturday 30 or so outdoor aficionados enjoyed a soggy walk in Waynesville’s watershed. Fifty people had originally signed up for the hike but threatening weather changed a few minds. This was the first hike the town organized in 2008. Last year there were four public guided hikes in the watershed. The town is sponsoring these hikes to introduce Waynesville residents and other interested parties to this wonderful 8,600-acre natural resource that has recently been placed in conservation easements to ensure that it retains its “wild” undeveloped nature and provides ample high-quality drinking water for Waynesville into the foreseeable future.

Nearly 700 acres of the watershed are in a “forever wild” easement that precludes management of any type. Approximately 7,400 acres are in “working forest” easement, which allows for practices that “create and maintain a vigorous, healthy, and diverse forest that will ensure the production of high quality drinking water from the Waynesville watershed land area”.

The town contracted with Dr. Peter Bates, natural resources professor at Western Carolina University and the Western Carolina Forest Sustainability Initiative to create a management plan for the working forest easement. There is a copy of the draft plan on the Town of Waynesville’s Web site — www.townofwaynesville.org/ — and a copy is available for review at Town Hall.

Dr. Bates generally heads up the watershed hikes and it offers a great opportunity for people to see areas that he and his team feel could benefit from practiced forest stewardship applications and to learn what those applications are and how they would be implemented. Bates and his team with partners from Duke University, Manomet Center for Conservation Science, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and others have worked hard to create a management plan that he is confident will create a healthier more diverse forest in the watershed while protecting the high-quality drinking water.

I have had the great fortune of being able to join in on most of these hikes to assist to what degree I can, with wildflower and bird identification. Last Saturday we had even more resources to fall back on as we were joined by Blair Ogburn, senior naturalist at Balsam Mountain Trust and one of the region’s best birders, Bob Olthoff.

The Waynesville watershed, like all forests, always offers something new and different on each hike, depending on which trail we take; the time of year; and/or weather conditions. And like all forests it always offers something that’s always the same — that cool invitation to come inside, leave your stresses and your worries back in the asphalt jungle and connect to that part of you that still cleaves to Mother Nature.

Because of the large number of hikers for last Saturday’s jaunt it took a couple of shuttles to get everyone up to the trailhead. Those of us on the first shuttle got a little lagniappe in the form of a white-tailed deer and a ruffed grouse in the road.

In case you forgot, there was a big freeze last spring and our spring hikes in the watershed were a little drab and a little muted. That wasn’t the case this spring. As the first group waited for the shuttle to return we were serenaded by black-throated green warblers, black-throated blue warblers, ovenbirds, red-eyed and blue-headed vireos and towhees. We wound up with just over 30 species of birds for the trip including seven species of warblers along with rose-breasted grosbeaks and scarlet tanagers.

We also identified close to 70 species of plants including wildflowers, trees, ferns and lianas. We found at least two species of bellwort, there were several species of violets in bloom, foamflower and early meadow rue were common and we had at least two species of trillium. At one site we found maroon and white wake robin, Trillium erectum, growing side by side. There were a number of showy orchis in various stage of bloom along the trail and we got to play “stump the naturalist” when we found a small herbaceous parasite growing in the trail. Thanks to great photos by Craig Linger I was able to later ID the plant as Orobanche uniflora, one-flowered broomrape.

The trip also ended with a little lagniappe as the last group on the dam was treated to a flyby, by an immature bald eagle and a merlin.

Don Hendershot can be reached at ddihen1@bellsouth.net