Local conservationists are building fences around trees in wetlands across West Virginia and beyond to protect them from beavers and promote coexistence between species.
Donning rain boots and gloves, volunteers trudged across a Charles Town wetland Tuesday to prepare the habitat for a pair of unexpected residents.
Jefferson County’s Cool Spring Preserve is currently home to at least two beavers, possibly mates, according to local conservationists. If trail camera photos did not offer proof enough, their presence is made clear through bite marks on trees and a growing number of dams in Bullskin Run, the local stream.
Beavers are native to wetlands across North America, including those in West Virginia. But they were hunted to near-extinction during the 18th century fur trade. With fewer people hunting them for their pelts, beavers are growing in population across the continent. According to many conservationists, that’s a good thing.
Alison Zak serves as founder and executive director of the Human-Beaver Coexistence Fund. The group develops nonlethal strategies to manage beaver populations across the mid-Atlantic.
Zak said that beavers play a key role in bolstering biodiversity, storing groundwater and filtering pollutants in wetland ecosystems. But they also bring what she describes as “beaver problems,” which fall into two main categories: flooding and tree damage.
When beavers build dams, they can redirect the flow of water and prompt flooding. This can disturb roadways and personal property, so conservationists often fence off culverts so beavers cannot disrupt the flow of water with their dams.
Dams have appeared along Bullskin Run, a stream that cuts through Cool Spring Preserve in Charles Town. Local conservationists say it is the work of a pair of beavers. Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Beavers can also chew trees that protect rivers from erosion, as well as saplings planted as part of reforestation efforts. In response, conservationists build wire fences around the bases of trees that need to be protected from local beavers.
That is what brought a team of volunteers onto the preserve Tuesday: to help build fences that ensure trees and beavers can coexist in West Virginia and to strengthen wetland ecosystems.
“A lot of people aren’t aware beavers are around unless, all of a sudden, they come across very obvious signs of beavers, maybe even causing problems on their property,” Zak said. “But also, we’re seeing an increase in tolerance toward beavers, and people wanting to use nonlethal management and wanting to coexist.”
Tuesday’s volunteers placed new wire frames around the bases of trees with overly tight fences or no fences at all. They took particular care to cover saplings, and to give trees enough space to grow freely.
KC Walters, associate director of conservation at Potomac Valley Audubon Society, organized Tuesday’s event. She said that coexistence strategies like these help people come together to solve environmental problems.
“It’s not just conservation, and not just about the relationship with wildlife,” she said. “It’s also about the relationships of the human organizations that exist in keeping us all working together for a common goal.”
Zak said she hopes volunteers left Tuesday’s event with a better understanding of how conservation works.
“I hope they got a little taste of how complex it can be, but how also doable it is,” she said.
Lily Davis unlinks segments of an old wire fence around the base of a tree at Cool Spring Preserve in Charles Town. Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This week on West Virginia Week we learn about improvements being made to the state’s correctional facilities. Also we learn about the issues of protecting endangered Appalachian salamanders.
This week on West Virginia Week we learn about improvements being made to the state’s correctional facilities. Also we learn about the issues of protecting endangered Appalachian salamanders.
We’ll also hear about barriers to dental care for West Virginians with disabilities.
And join us for a look at a century old glassblowing operation in the state.
Chris Schulz is our host this week. Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert.
West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week’s biggest news in the Mountain State. It’s produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe. Learn more about West Virginia Week.
On this West Virginia Morning, Blenko Glass has been making everything from stem and table ware to decorative glass figurines for more than a century and proposed federal protections for the spring salamander.
On this West Virginia Morning, Emily Rice toured the Blenko Factory in Milton where Blenko Glass has been making everything from stem and table ware to decorative glass figurines through traditional, hand-carved cherry wood molds for more than a century.
Also, Curtis Tate spoke with a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity about the spring salamander and proposed federal protections.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
They say there’s a lot of fish in the sea, but there’s also an awful lot of fish in the streams and rivers of Appalachia. A new book by fisheries research scientist, and WVU professor, Stuart Welsh showcases some of the lesser-known fish in the region. Bill Lynch spoke with Welsh about his book Hornyheads, Madtoms and Darters.
They say there’s a lot of fish in the sea, but there’s also an awful lot of fish in the streams and rivers of Appalachia. A new book by fisheries research scientist, and WVU professor, Stuart Welsh showcases some of the lesser-known fish in the region. Bill Lynch spoke with Welsh about his book Hornyheads, Madtoms and Darters.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lynch: Let’s talk about Hornyheads, Madtoms and Darters. Describe what a hornyhead or a madtom or a darter is.
Welsh: Yeah, so hornyhead is a name for a group of minnows. And these are minnows that the males develop these little pointed horns on their head during the spawning season.
They develop these horns, grow these horns, and they use them to spar. They compete for females during the spawning season. In some ways, it’s similar to a white-tailed deer with antlers, in that, a deer grows its antlers and then loses the antlers after their breeding season.
It’s same situation with these hornyhead minnows. They grow these bumps on their head. They use them during the breeding season, and then they’re lost afterwards. Then, they they regrow them the following year.
Lynch: Madtoms: what are they like?
Welsh: Madtoms is a name for a group of catfish.
Most people, when you hear the word catfish, you think of big fish like channel catfish, blue catfish, flathead catfish, but madtoms are a group of catfishes. They do not get very large.
Their maximum size, depending on the species, may range from three to six inches in length.
Most people don’t see them because it’s not a fish that you would often catch on a hook and line. But we have quite a few different species of madtoms in the Appalachians.
They’re very interesting little fish and certainly worth telling a story about.
One thing I wanted to do with the book was to tell stories about these small fish. So, people can maybe understand them and get to know them a little bit better.
Lynch: You’re an ichthyologist? Is that correct?
Welsh: That’s correct.
Lynch: When, where, how did you first start taking an interest in fish?
Welsh: I think it was when I was a young kid, you know?
I really enjoyed fishing. And so, I spent a lot of time in creeks and, not necessarily fishing all the time, but flipping rocks and looking for crayfish, aquatic salamanders, and various critters.
I think that focus at an early age kind of sparked my interest. And I was able to keep it going into a career
Lynch: Kicking over rocks and fishing is one thing but academic study is something else. What kind of path is that?
Welsh: Well, it’s a long tedious path, I guess you would say. It requires a lot of graduate work. I got a B.S, degree at West Virginia University and then I went on to get a master’s degree at Frostburg State in fisheries management. And then I came back to West Virginia University for my Ph.D. where I was focused on fisheries work.
Lynch: How diverse is the fish population in central Appalachia?
Welsh: We have a lot of different kinds of fish.
For example, in West Virginia alone, which is certainly the heart of central Appalachia, we have a lot of species – 195.
So, there’s a lot of different kinds of fishes we have. And most people are familiar with the common ones, especially ones that you catch on rod and reel, but the smaller ones, a lot of people don’t know about them very much.
So, I think that’s one of the opportunities for a book like this is to provide information about this fish: to let people learn a little bit more about them.
Lynch: Talk about the book and putting it together.
Welsh: It’s a collection of stories on central Appalachian fishes.
There are stories on some familiar fish – like the native brook trout, the smallmouth bass, the bluegill sunfish. But then there’s also several stories on fishes that people know less about, such as in the title – hornyheads, madtoms and darters.
Also, there’s some fishes that are unusual that are discussed, like, for example, the lampreys, which are a group of fishes that are pretty small, but they have kind of an eel like body. Then you’ve got a fish called the trout perch that I talked about, which is really fascinating little fish of central Appalachia.
Lynch: How did you narrow down which fish you wanted to deal with?
Welsh: Yeah, that was a challenge because I find all the fishes that we have to be fascinating and interesting and worthy of a story.
But I tried to just focus on some of the fishes that I thought would make the most interesting stories, because what I wanted to do was to write stories that would be both educational but also interesting for a wide audience.
And so, I tried to select fishes that had an interesting story to be told often that was related to a certain type of behavior or maye a certain type of feeding strategy, a certain type of spawning strategy.
It was typically some aspect of that fish that I thought was interesting that I emphasized in the story.
Lynch: What do you hope an average reader takes away from your book?
Welsh: What I would hope is that people would realize central Appalachia has a diversity of fishes. That there’s a lot to be learned. You know, often when you know more about something, you care about it. My hope, in the end, is that this book will increase the conservation of fishes in the central Appalachians by making people more aware of the diversity that we have.
Lynch: The book is called Hornyheads, Madtoms and Darters. Stuart Welsh, thank you very much.
Welsh: Thank you. I appreciate it.
A male candy darter. One of the fish featured in the book “Hornyheads, Madtoms, and Darters”
“Hornyheads, Madtoms and Darters,” from Ohio University Press is available in bookstores.
For some people, taxidermy – preserving and mounting dead animals – can seem a little bit creepy. But for others, taxidermy is a serious art form that’s growing in popularity. One expert practitioner in Yadkin County, North Carolina enjoys sharing her work with others.
This story originally aired in the May 28, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
I felt a little apprehensive as I walked up to Amy Ritchie’s workshop in Hamptonville, North Carolina. Especially after hearing the message on her voicemail.
Ritchie’s confident voice was bright and clear on the recording. “Hi! You’ve reached Amy of Amy’s Animal Arts. I’m probably skinning a bobcat or sewing up the neck of a giraffe. Please leave me a message, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can stop and pull off the rubber gloves.”
Ritchie is an award-winning taxidermist. Her studio is located in her four-bay garage. It’s large, bright and airy…with about 150 deer antlers hanging from the high ceilings. Everything is neatly organized. On one side, power tools hang on a wall next to shelves filled with paints and adhesives.
Over 150 deer antlers hang overhead in Ritchie’s studio. One by one, they will be paired with their corresponding deer capes (the head, and neck of the deer), which are stored in Ritchie’s freezer.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The other side of the studio is a veritable zoo. A few giraffes, lions, armadillos, bears, coyotes and foxes in suspended motion. They seem so vital, I couldn’t help but reach out and touch them. They felt soft and real.
“I’m really passionate about taxidermy,” Ritchie said. “I think at my core, I just love it. It’s what I was meant to do.”
Ritchie grew up in rural North Carolina, homeschooled by her mom. She said that gave her plenty of time to follow her interests.
That included animals… particularly dead ones.
“When I was 13, I found a roadkill snake and wanted to turn it into a belt,” she said. “I asked mom if I could have a knife from the kitchen to skin the snake and she said, ‘Just please wear gloves so you don’t get a disease.’”
It was a king snake with a white-chain pattern.Ritchie taught herself how to skin and tan it.
“I was able to find the information online, how to use glycerin and some different products from just the pharmacy to be able to tan that…And there I was… [wearing a] snakeskin belt,” she said.
Ritchie admitted she was an unusual child with unusual interests.
“I like being unique. I mean, why be like everyone else? And I never have been.”
Ritchie said her dad also supported her interest in taxidermy. He had a second job delivering newspapers early in the morning.
“He would find all the fresh roadkill,” Ritchie said. “So that’s how he would bring home raccoons and possums and things for me to practice skinning.”
When she was 16, Ritchie’s dad encouraged her to enter a national taxidermy competition. Her entry was a red squirrel mounted on a bed of leaves as if it was sleeping. Ritchie competed in the open division. And even though she was a novice, she walked away with third place.
She’s gone on to win many awards over the years. Now at 36, she’s a highly skilled taxidermist in demand. She makes her living mounting animals for hunters and collectors.
Ritchie continued our tour. She showed me what she was working on.
”We got some of the actual messy stuff going on. This is a wild boar someone brought in just yesterday.”
The bones and bulk of the meat had already been removed. Ritchie started by preparing and tanning the hide. She grabbed a knife.
“We have to take this meat off. And so I’ll hold the knife and work it. Down like this… it’s fascinating and kind of satisfying to slowly shave this off,” she said.
Ritchie is small, just over five feet tall. She wrapped the exposed hide tightly on the edge of her work bench and scraped the knife along the boar’s hide in rhythmic motion.
“I have to press down with this knife and shave this down,” she explained. “So, big job right here.”
At this stage, the hide was stiff and unwieldy.
“It’s hard. I can’t even fold the hide. By the time I’m done, it’ll be soft and I can. It will not take up as much space in my freezer.”
Amy Ritchie braces herself against a workbench as she shaves meat off of a wild boar hide before she wraps it tightly in a bag to store in her freezer.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The freezer. It’s the part of the tour I was most curious about. Ritchie has seven chest freezers. She opened a freezer lid, and I pulled out one of about 50 gallon-sized Ziploc bags. Inside was something called a deer cape. It was compact. It felt like a frozen roast.
“Yeah, it’s just the skin, and it’s the head and the shoulders of the deer and wrapped up really tight.”
After Ritchie treats the hide, she crafts the animal shape. She carves muscles, veins and bone mass out of a foam mold like a sculptor. She sands the mold, applies adhesives and wraps the skin around it. Then she smooths out irregularities before sewing it up with artfully hidden stitches. She uses glass eyes.
“You got to detail the eyes so that they look realistic,” Ritchie said. “So they have expression… those things that separate, you know, just hide a similar from an artistic taxidermist.”
Ritchiesays when she was starting out, she didn’t know many other women in the field. But she says that’s changed in the past few years. And she’s helping to train a new generation through her Facebook page and YouTube channel.
Ritchie is also training a new generation through an apprenticeship. Ritchie introduced me to her first apprentice, Mariah Petrea as she helped Petrea carve a foam mold with a deer mount. They’ll sand and apply adhesives before pulling a deer cape onto the form.
Mariah Petrea carves a foam mold to make the shape unique to the deer cape that she’ll wrap on the mold with adhesives.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Petrea started out as a customer. She came to Ritchie’s workshop a couple of years ago to drop off a deer to be mounted and the two hit it off. Mariah was a little uneasy with the work at first.
“Being an animal person myself, I was like, ‘Oh, my heart’s going to get in the way. Will I be able to clean this cat? Because it looks like my pet cat in a way just a little bit bigger,’ and you get to come to terms with things,” Petrea said. “What’s lying there, it can’t feel anything. And after you do it once, it’s just a motion you go through.”
Now Petrea works part-time with Ritchie and hopes to start her own taxidermy business. She says her favorite part is breathing life into her subjects.
“It has been amazing how you can make a piece of foam with some clay look realistic,” Petrea said. “And that is the start of everything, just taking something that looks lifeless and making it look realistic. When you saw it out in the woods or a picture.”
Like Mariah, most of Ritchie’s clients are hunters who bring in deer trophies or bobcats.Ritchiesays she rarely hunts — though she doesn’t have a problem with it as long as the animals are legally obtained.
“I’m here in the South where really, if you haven’t seen a deer head or know what taxidermy is, you know, how are you even a Southerner?”
ButRitchie’s most prized mounts are from a trip she made to Africa. It includes the head and neck of an adult giraffe looming over ten feet tall in her studio.
Hunting giraffes is controversial. Ritchie says the animal was an older male that was beyond breeding age and had been attacking younger giraffes. She also has a mother and baby giraffe that were donated by a zoo after they died of natural causes.
Amy Ritchie poses with a baby giraffe donated by a zoo after it died from natural causes. Ritchie enjoys sharing her animal menagerie with others, especially kids who haven’t been able to see some of the animal types before.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Ritchie enjoys sharing her collection with others, especially kids.
“They come in here and they’re like wow, mom and dad, what’s that? What’s that? And I love to tell them, it’s, you know, this animal that you’ve never seen before,” Ritchie said. “And it really gets you more up close than you would even in most zoos… And how many kids get to pet a baby giraffe?”
Ritchie says she’s constantly looking for new ways to expand her craft. More active poses, more detailed scenery. She says part of the pleasure for her is the transformation. Like when she turned that snakeskin she found on the side of the road into an eye-catching belt.
“I think the fascination with just thinking, wow, that would have just been thrown away. And I have done something with something that would have rotted. And maybe that’s why I like taxidermy so much,” she said. “The idea that you can make something from nothing.”
For Ritchie, it’s more than just preserving animals. She enjoys sharing this art form… whether it’s with her clients or with people who just stop by to marvel at her studio.
Amy Ritche’s truck reflects her enthusiasm for her art form. It is unmistakable in Hamtonville, NC, complete with a specialized license tag.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Amy Ritchie sewing a bobcat.
Credit: Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A taxidermy African Porcupine.
Margaret McLeod Leef/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
Known as “Big Cove,” The Nature Conservancy West Virginia State Director Thomas Minney said the land will improve the region’s recreation by opening up new land to the public, but also by protecting its natural beauty.
International conservation organization The Nature Conservancy has acquired close to 2,000 acres bordering the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge for protection.
Known as “Big Cove,” The Nature Conservancy West Virginia State Director Thomas Minney said the land will improve the region’s recreation by opening up new land to the public, but also by protecting its natural beauty.
“While The Nature Conservancy holds it, it’s going to be open to passive recreation. Hiking, hunting, those sorts of traditional uses that have been on the property are going to still be there and available to the public,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that’s going on in the Davis to Thomas area to look at how you create a recreational friendly and highly important place that people enjoy visiting. We hope that this comes in tandem with conserving really, really important biodiversity areas as a huge complement to those other plans.”
The Nature Conservancy is exploring how to work with the local stakeholders to improve trail access areas.
“Connecting areas such as going from A Frame Road, down Brown Mountain and into the northern ends of the current wildlife refuge,” Minney said. “We continue to think and invest.”
Big Cove sits in the northern end and is the crown of Canaan Valley, a biodiversity rich and climate resilient landscape. It expands habitat from the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge that features many rare species that occupy the forest, stream and wetland habitats in this area.
“What makes Canaan Valley and the highlands of West Virginia really interesting is what elevation does for us. When you’re looking from 3,000, to over 4,000 feet, it is creating an environment that’s more like Canada,” Minney said. “In the valley itself, something that’s really interesting is the circumneutral wetland, which means it’s on limestone. And where you have an occurrence of wetland on limestone like that it has a lot of rare plants that are associated with it. It’s one of the most vital areas for biodiversity here in the Appalachians.”
Minney said that as local climates continue to change, the Canaan Valley’s unique elevation and moisture forms a “landscape highway” where migration of unique species can occur and ensure the Appalachians remain connected north to south.
He also said the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge and the newly acquired Big Cove are central to the region’s drinking water supply.
The U.S. Forest Service’s Forests to Faucets analysis identifies the landscape as in the second highest of 10 categories for national surface drinking water importance.
