Category: Wildlife

There’s an old campfire song where a bear goes over the mountain to see what he could see. Well, lately, there are a lot of media reports about a lot of bears going over a lot of mountains, and what they’re seeing is tract houses, hot tubs and minivans. Today on Earthly, I talk with Clemson associate professor Shari Rodriguez about why these bears are moving into the suburbs. Here’s a hint: It’s not to join the homeowners association.

Rodriguez researches the human dimensions of wildlife conservation and management, and that includes human wildlife interactions and conflicts. She’s also going to help us think through the human attitudes towards our encounters with animals that can kill us. And we’re going to spend some time trying to understand the trend of humans risking life and limb to get close to dangerous animals in national parks. What seems like pure lunacy might be something more.

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 Show Notes

South Carolina State Wildlife Action Plan
All About E.O. Wilson
SCDNR Bear website
Bear sightings rise in Greenville

The Eastern Hellbender is a mysterious creature. It has a scary name, slimy texture, lives a solitary life under rocks in remote Appalachian Mountain streams, and is mostly nocturnal. Yet it’s also increasingly threatened and important to maintaining stream health.

On this episode of Earthly, Jonathan talks to Clemson associate professor Cathy Jachowski.

Jachowski studies stream ecology, and she’s going to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about the eastern hellbender — including the origin of its horror-movie name — which is just another one of its many mysteries.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

SHOW NOTES

Jachowski Lab

Amphibians are the world’s most vulnerable animals

Help the hellbender
 

Referred to in some scientific literature as “ecological zombies,” feral hogs cost millions of dollars of damage to farms, fields and forests, and they are breeding and spreading at a rate that outpaces the efforts of wildlife professionals to control them. In this Halloween edition of Earthly, Jonathan talks to Greg Yarrow and Andrew Jamison about the feral hog problem in South Carolina and the Southeast. Yarrow is interim dean of Clemson’s College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Science and professor of wildlife biology at Clemson University, and Jamison is a graduate student. Together, they’re leading an effort to greater understand these “ecological zombies” and finding ways to control them. They also discuss once and for all whether Hogzilla — the 800-pound animal caught in South Georgia — is fact or folklore.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Additional Resources

South Carolina Wild Hog Taskforce

Recommendations for Management and Control

SC Department of Natural Resources: Wild Hogs

Wild Pigs Complicating Deer Movement