Ga. community works to save rare hellbender salamander - Entrepreneur Generations

The eastern hellbender
(USFWS photo by Gary Peeples)

In a rural Georgia community in the southern Appalachian mountains, private landowners along Betty's Creek are pitching in to restore it and the at-risk hellbender salamander that calls it home, Dan Chapman reports for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The USFWS is considering adding the hellbender to its threatened or endangered species list later this year, which landowners would like to avoid since such an action would tighten rules about how they can use their land, increasing costs.

One of those landowners is Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, one of the largest college prep boarding schools in the south. It's more famous for spearheading the Foxfire project in the 1960s to preserve Appalachian culture, but with the hellbender project their preservation efforts are even closer to home. Betty's Creek is an important part of science education for the students: "Students from sixth grade through high school monitor the hellbender’s habitat, test water quality, analyze the food chain and restore streambanks," Chapman reports. "Their labor of love is also reflected in their grades and presented to the public in an end-of-year science fair. They, as much as adjoining farmers, have a significant stake in the hellbender’s health."

The slime-covered "homely hellbender" is the largest amphibian in the nation and can reach two feet in length. Its habitat once stretched from upstate New York to northern Georgia, but sightings are rare these days. Betty's Creek and others in northeast Ga., western N.C. and eastern Tenn. are also promising hellbender habitats. It needs cold, clear, moving water and big rocks to burrow under, but fertilizer and chemical run-off from nearby farms, and dirt from construction and road sites have muddied up Betty's Creek, filling the crevices hellbenders like to hide and breed in, Chapman reports.

The school is doing its part to keep the creek clean: it only allows its cows to cross the stream at one spot, keeping them from kicking up mud, and switched its drinking water source from a creek tributary to the county system. That's resulted in about 200,000 extra gallons of water flowing daily into Betty's Creek.

Seventh grader Claren Spivey said: "As a school, and a community, we are a very important part of the watershed and we want to keep it safe because it impacts so many other things in society and nature . . . As private citizens we should really try to preserve what we have instead of ruining it."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2HHtReD Ga. community works to save rare hellbender salamander - Entrepreneur Generations

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