The WNC Nature Center will reopen to the public March 17, five and a half months after closing due to the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene, which caused significant flooding that destroyed roads and the main bridge to the Nature Center. 

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation supplied funding to help a collaborative partnership conserve 406 acres of habitat for elk, whitetail deer, wild turkey, grouse and other wildlife in Western North Carolina.

Watching birds is a year-round pleasure for Becky and me — daily to see their beauty and vitality, their aerial acrobatics, their antics and doings that reveal their native smarts. And to make sure there are birds to watch we bait the yard.

As part of the Great Backyard Bird Count initiative, a global community science project that helps researchers understand how birds are doing before they undertake their great spring migration, Mainspring Conservation Trust is hosting its own event. 

Inside Keith Gibbs’ office hangs an imprint of a sicklefin redhorse, a sucker fish that the Western Carolina University assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources takes great interest in. 

Visitors to The North Carolina Arboretum can witness some of the most surprising animal behavior in the new National Geographic exhibition, “The Greatest Wildlife Photographs.” 

With wrinkly skin that comes in various shades of brown, eastern hellbenders aren’t easy to spot. These giant salamanders, which average 20 inches in length, spend most of their lives nearly invisible under rocks on the bottom of cool, fast-flowing streams.

The Conservation Fund announced that a critical property in the Great Balsam Mountains is protected as forest and natural land.

By now, the story of Hurricane Helene is a tragically familiar one: the endless rain, the swollen rivers, the angry water indiscriminately destroying lives and homes. The storm killed more than 230 people across five states, including 104 confirmed dead in North Carolina and 18 in Tennessee. 

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) advises the public that black bears in North Carolina are in their “winter homes,” which could be anything from a pile of brush, a hollowed-out tree, a rock cavity, an excavation under a fallen tree or even under the deck or in the crawl space of your home.