Stick Bugs

Nature’s most terrifying creatures can sneak up on us, and a perfect example showed up days ago in a photo shared by Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

A large bug is prominent in the photo, but finding it quickly wasn’t easy.

“Camouflage is a marvelous adaptation that allows some critters to exist practically undetected,” the park wrote.

“As September days grow cooler and shorter, a variety of critters still scuttle around in the undergrowth. Whether or not you can find them, however, is another story!”

So where was the bug in the photo?

Right in the middle, apparently. It’s the dead stick — with legs, park rangers said.

Known as a stick bug, the insects are infamous for not only looking like sticks, but they also “may even sway back and forth to more closely resemble a twig moving in the wind,” according to the National Wildlife Federation.

“Depending on the species, walking sticks can grow from 1 to 12 inches (2.5 to 30 centimeters) long,” the federation says. “Stick insects are the biggest insects in the world — one species measures over 20 inches (51 centimeters) long with its legs outstretched.”

The park’s photo has gotten hundreds of reactions, including some who wanted to know if they could get stung by a stick in the park.  READ MORE...

Returning Elk

In the not-so-distant past, red wolves and bison roamed the Great Smoky Mountains, passenger pigeons flew en masse overhead, and Carolina parakeets chattered in the welcoming branches of American chestnut trees. 

Today, every one of those species has disappeared from the Southern Appalachian landscape — hastened along the way by the arrival of European settlers, new diseases, and new hunting and farming practices that dramatically reshaped the region’s flora and fauna.

Among the largest and most conspicuous species lost to human activity were eastern elk, a regional subspecies that vanished in the 1800s. 

But now, thanks to an ambitious project launched 20 years ago in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the resonant bugling calls of elk can be heard echoing across North Carolina’s Cataloochee Valley.

“The great pie in the sky would be to have one large, contiguous population throughout the East Coast again,” said Wildlife Biologist Joseph Yarkovich. “But that’s still way, way down the road.”

Yarkovich has spent much of his career with the National Park Service working to ensure the success of the elk’s reintroduction to the Smokies, mostly on the North Carolina side of the national park. 

After two decades of accumulating small wins, the park service is now looking to make the new herd more resilient and improve standard practices for tracking and managing reintroduced wildlife.  READ MORE