The Wild Side of Iron Mountain

White-tailed deer almost disappeared from Georgia. By the early 1900s, heavy hunting and habitat loss had driven their numbers down. Restocking and wildlife management helped the herd recover statewide.

Georgia deer management plan

A muddy puddle can be a gathering spot for swallowtails. Males often cluster on damp soil or along creek banks to sip water and take in dissolved salts and minerals. This behavior is called puddling.

Black bears made a comeback in Georgia. By the 1930s, unregulated hunting and widespread habitat loss had nearly wiped them out. Conservation and wildlife management helped them recover, and the North Georgia mountains remain one of their strongholds.

Georgia DNR

Wild turkey hens nest right on the ground. A hen scrapes a shallow hollow, often under brush or among leaves, and incubates her eggs for about four weeks.

The gray fox is a native woodland fox. It favors woods and brushy cover, while red foxes are more often associated with open fields and farmland.

North Georgia has a rare cottontail look-alike. The Appalachian cottontail lives in high mountain habitats and closely resembles the eastern cottontail. Georgia wildlife biologists have used DNA to confirm sightings.

Georgia DNR wildlife report

A spotted skunk can do a handstand before it sprays. It balances on its front paws with its tail in the air, and it may even take a few steps as a warning.

The name raccoon comes from a Powhatan word roughly meaning “one who scratches with its hands.” Its sensitive front paws help it recognize objects by touch, even when it can’t see them.

Virginia Cooperative Extension

Georgia’s armadillos came from two expanding populations. One moved into Texas from Mexico, while another got started in Florida, likely from released or escaped animals. Their ranges eventually met, and armadillos have continued spreading north into Georgia. Frozen ground makes it harder for them to dig for insects.

Gray squirrels sometimes fake a burial to fool would-be thieves. Researchers watched eastern gray squirrels dig and cover empty holes when other squirrels were nearby.

Squirrel caching study

Red foxes may use Earth’s magnetic field to hunt. In one study, foxes often pounced toward the northeast and caught hidden prey more successfully in that direction. Researchers suggest the magnetic field may help them judge distance.

Fox hunting study

Some bats spend summer days in trees. Different species tuck under loose bark, shelter in cavities, or hang among leaves. An eastern red bat hanging from a branch can look like a curled dead leaf.

Loblolly pines end up in everyday products. Southern pines are a major source of pulp for paper, cardboard, paper bags, towels, and tissue. Their long, strong fibers help make tough kraft paper, the brown paper often used in shipping boxes and grocery bags.

NC State Extension · USDA Forest Service

Young shortleaf pines can come back from the ground up. A bend near the base of the trunk protects dormant buds. If fire kills the top, those buds can send up new shoots, a trick few Southern pines can pull off.

USDA Forest Service

Mountain laurel can grow into Appalachian thickets so dense they’re called “laurel hells.” They’re hard for people to get through, but the tangled branches provide cover for wildlife.

USDA Forest Service

Its acorns are winter backup food for wildlife. They take two growing seasons to mature and stay dormant until spring. Because they’re more bitter than white oak acorns, wildlife often turns to them later in winter. Some acorns buried by squirrels are never retrieved and sprout in spring.

Georgia Forestry Commission

Red maples feed bees before most trees leaf out. In Georgia, their flowers can offer pollen and nectar in late winter. The winged “helicopter” seeds follow in spring and provide food for wildlife.

University of Georgia

River birch is the birch that likes the heat. It thrives in the warm, humid Southeast, and its bark peels in papery curls of salmon, pink, and cinnamon brown. Look for those curls along creeks and riverbanks.

NC State Extension

One tree feeds both butterflies and honeybees. Eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillars eat tulip tree leaves, while honeybees gather nectar from its green-and-orange spring flowers.

Georgia DNR

A tree once sparked a rebellion. The British Crown reserved tall white pines in colonial New England for Royal Navy masts and marked them with the King’s Broad Arrow. Resistance to that rule led to New Hampshire’s Pine Tree Riot of 1772.

New Hampshire Historical Society

Its pink-purple flowers can grow right out of the trunk. That habit, called cauliflory, is unusual among trees in temperate climates. Look for blossoms along older branches as well as on the trunk.

USDA Forest Service

A sugar maple can move water uphill through its roots at night. When surface soil is dry, water from deeper soil can travel through the roots and seep into shallower soil. Scientists call it hydraulic lift.

Emerman and Dawson study

White oak acorns are often the first choice for wildlife. They contain fewer bitter tannins than red oak acorns. In a big crop year, called a mast year, a heavy acorn drop can draw deer, turkeys, bears, and squirrels to the same patch of woods.

Georgia DNR

A hollow blackgum trunk can become a beehive. Mountain beekeepers used sections of hollow trunks to make hives known as “bee gums.” In the woods, those hollow trunks also offer shelter to wildlife.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Christmas fern stays green through winter, when much of the forest floor turns brown. Its fronds were traditionally used for holiday greenery. Look closely and each leaflet has a little toe that makes it look like a tiny stocking.

NC State Extension

Muscadine is the South’s own wild grape. Native to the Southeast, it has natural resistance to Pierce’s disease, a bacterial disease that can kill European grapevines.

UF/IFAS Extension

Swallowtails can carry flame azalea pollen on their wings. As a large butterfly reaches for nectar, its wings brush against the flower’s long stamens and pick up pollen for the next bloom. The eastern tiger swallowtail is one butterfly that does this.

The American Naturalist study

Those glossy leaves once helped Appalachian families earn cash. Gatherers sold galax to florists because the leaves stay attractive long after picking. Galax, Virginia, takes its name from the plant.

USDA Forest Service

A blackberry thicket is both a hiding place and a food stop. The tangled canes give rabbits and small birds cover, the flowers draw pollinators, and the ripe fruit feeds birds and mammals.

NC State Extension

Ants help plant the next generation of trilliums. They carry seeds away to eat the small, fatty attachment and leave the seed behind, where it may sprout.

Trillium seed dispersal study

Greenbrier can be a winter pantry for wildlife. Deer browse the leaves and shoots, and berries that stay on the vine can feed birds when other food is scarce.

A buckeye in your pocket was once considered a good-luck charm. The shiny seed has a pale spot that looks like the eye of a deer. Buckeye seeds are poisonous to eat.

University of Missouri Extension

Catawba rhododendron leaves act like a rough woodland thermometer. In freezing weather they droop and roll inward, sometimes curling as tightly as cigars. When the air warms, they open back up. Scientists call this response thermonasty.

American Journal of Botany study

Only female American hollies grow berries. Male trees provide pollen, and a female needs to be pollinated to set fruit. A holly without berries could be male or a female that wasn’t pollinated.

NC State Extension

A caterpillar on spicebush can look like a tiny snake. The spicebush swallowtail caterpillar has oversized fake eyespots and hides inside a folded leaf held shut with silk.

NC State Extension

Small beetles do the pollinating. They crawl inside sweetshrub’s fragrant flowers and can carry pollen from bloom to bloom. Beetle pollination is an ancient partnership between insects and flowering plants.

UGA Extension