Visiting Our Past: The history of our animal friends – Citizen Times

The bees are disappearing, but at least the ticks are on the rise.
And just in case you want to make a tick a pet, I warn you, they’re very clingy.
Is this history? To say human and animal history are intertwined is to state the obvious. Here are some of the animals that have made big news here, long ago and today:
Buffalo, red wolf, beetle, hog; panther, rattler, elk, wild dog; coyote, mussel, trout, flying squirrel; wooly adelgid, pigeon, cat, owl; hellbender, beaver, bee, bat, bear; and armadillo, deer, monarch, heron; and ditto kinds found on farms, and new finds, such as the giant earthworm.
One of the most popular columns ever to appear in this space was one on the panther, locally, the “painter,” taxonomically, the eastern cougar.
I cited a 2001 “Science News” report that quoted Wib Owen, of the N.C. Division of Wildlife Management, saying that in 22 years, he’s never seen one. Fred Bonner, editor of “Carolina Adventure,” said, “The panther is wildlife’s equivalent to a UFO or Loch Ness monster.”
Eyewitness readers disagreed.
It makes us think of bobcat sightings in the news, and that makes me think of the time, 13 years ago, when I went on an assignment to Jupiter and encountered a slain bobcat hanging from a car repair shop’s rafter.
Certain creatures fare badly in the brave new world; others flourish, being adaptable to new food supplies and killing agents.
If the extinction and extirpation of such species as the passenger pigeon, cougar and buffalo seem like ancient history, history must be speeding up, for I can look back on my few decades in Western North Carolina and sense eras passing.
I remember looking down at the lake at Grandfather Mountain with the late Hugh Morton and hearing him talk about incremental climate change and the fate of trout, unable to survive in water above a certain temperature.
Trout have had other problems through the years.
At the turn of the 20th century, logging operations raised water temperatures by removing shade trees, clogged spawning grounds with sediment and dislodged habitats.
Brook trout headed upstream. Logging companies restocked the streams with trout — not brook, but rainbow and brown.
“The rainbows proved incredibly popular as a game fish and were successful at taking over former brookie streams,” Rose Houk wrote in “Great Smokies National Park: A Natural History Guide.” “But the fish played a couple of tricks on the biologists.”
Rainbow trout hatch later than brook, but grow larger. They took over from the natives. In 1976, the Park Service began electro-stunning rainbows and carrying them downstream past constructed barriers.
That didn’t entirely work. In 2008, park officials added Antimycin to trout streams, killing the rainbow and brown trout; and then followed up with a counteragent before re-introducing the native fish.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t care about the newcomer trout. In places where brown trout continued to thrive, such as Abrams Creek, they have disappeared.
“There is a striking coincidence,” Jim Casada writes in “Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” between that phenomenon and “the reintroduction of otters. … The preferred habitat and habits of browns make them more vulnerable to otters than is the case with rainbows and specks.”
If fish could talk.
According to Cherokee lore, animals once talked.
“In the old days, the beasts, birds, fishes, insects and plants could all talk, and they and the people lived together in peace and friendship,” the Cherokee myth, “The Origin of Disease and Medicine” begins.
Humans, however overpopulated, developed unfair weapons and, according to the deer, stopped saying the prayers for pardon before killing game animals.
That had been part of the deal, as evidenced by the myth, “The Origin of the Bears.”
The first bears — humans who resisted urbanized life and advocated woodland living — said as they left their settlement and transformed into their new forms (and I paraphrase):
“Hey, people, living is easier in the woods. Stay in your villages if you wish, and if you’re ever starving, come say the sacred words and we’ll sacrifice one of our kind.”
If you look to the historical Cherokee for a guide, history can be seen as a dynamic interplay of the sacred and profane. Both tendencies are at work today.
Author Ron Rash, in his essay, “Fishing Lessons,” published in “Garden and Gun,” reveals an experience he had as a 14-year-old, seeking trout along Goshen Creek in Watauga County.
“The most beautiful” trout, found once one climbed past rainbow trout waters, were the brook, “their flanks dotted with olive, gold and red — dorsal fins as orange as fireweed. As I got older, I felt guilty about taking them from the creek to eat. By my mid-teens I no longer did.”
Yet, we also witness, in our modern morality tale, how bees will not be pollinating flowers; bats won’t eat bugs; the red wolf, rattlesnake and elk won’t tell us if they’re grateful to have secured a place on the ark; and I have resorted to irony and sarcasm in my history article.
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Aug. 26, 2013.

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