Cover Story: To hellbender and back

We’re stomping through one of the most remote areas of the North Georgia woods, looking for a salamander big enough to eat a kitten.

Its proper name is Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, but it’s better, and more accurately, known as the hellbender. It looks like a killer mutant that slithered up from hell. Capable of growing up to 3 feet long, the hellbender is long and tubular, with a set of teeth that can do a dice job on a human hand. So hideous is the hellbender that it’s said when anglers hook one by accident, they kill the thing immediately, out of some primal reflex.

Yet the hellbender’s greatest threat is not from errant fishermen, but from bumbling bureaucrats. Last month, the U.S. Forest Service released plans that could open up vast swaths of the Chattahoochee National Forest to logging companies. All told, almost half of the forest’s 749,000 acres would be “suitable” for logging, according to the plan. Even more acres could be open to all-terrain vehicles.

For its part, the Forest Service claims the plan will maintain the integrity of the wilderness — even creating habitats for certain threatened and endangered animals. What’s more, as a former forest supervisor here concluded back in 1990, rampant logging in the 19th century left this area with no virgin forests. The implication was that further logging won’t do any irreversible damage.

We have a hunch the monster salamander might have another opinion. One of the largest salamanders in the world, the hellbender’s habitat stretches across the Appalachian Mountains. We’re here in the woods of North Georgia to track one down, and to see just how old this forest really is, before it falls to the chainsaw.

We convene inside a Hardee’s in Hiawasee, 10 minutes from the North Carolina border, on a gray and chilly morning.

When I arrive, Georgia Forest Watch’s staff ecologist, Katherine Groves, and six volunteers are already there. Soon we’re joined by two biologists — Matt Elliott, who works in the University of Georgia Ecology Department, and his wife, Stacy Smith. Both are experts on salamanders. They get paid to dig through soil, and count and identify salamanders for environmental groups, the U.S. Forest Service and the state Department of Natural Resources.

Today’s mission is to survey the salamander population in the mountain streams near Kelly Ridge. By comparing their numbers in a young forest versus an old forest, scientists can tell which habitats better support salamander communities.

The trip was organized by Georgia Forest Watch, a nonprofit environmental group that, since its founding in 1986, has faced an uphill battle — trying to curb the destruction of Georgia’s forests, some of the most biologically diverse in the country.

From the highway, a 10-minute rumble over a rocky dirt road leads to the base of Kelly Ridge. We park here and set out on foot on an old logging road.

Depending on your perspective, the Appalachian Mountains either begin or end in

North Georgia. The long line of peaks is just a series of mountains and ridges that stretch 1,800 miles up to Newfoundland. Wherever one ridge curves or intersects with another ridge, you’ll find a cove. Someplace in the cove, either up near the top or further down toward the flatlands, there’s often a spring where moisture collects. The spring turns into a stream, which empties into another stream, which eventually empties into a river with a recognizable name, which empties into either the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. Here on Kelly Ridge, the streams run into the Hiawassee River, which flows into the Tennessee River, which curves northeast and intersects with the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans.

We’re headed for treacherous-sounding places like Rattlesnake Knob, Buzzard Knob and a cove that doesn’t even have a name, supposedly some of the last strongholds of the hellbender.

Of the 23 threatened or endangered species in the Chattahoochee National Forest, 13 are plant, 11 are vertebrates, and nine are mollusks.

Poison ivy and dark green ferns cover the ground. Light green ferns, called fiddleheads because they curl like the ends of a violin, grow 2 to 3 feet tall. Bright spots of purple are scattered among the green. They’re violets — hundreds, thousands of them, brightening the brown floor of dead leaves.

Halfway up the stream, Elliott announces it’s time for the first survey. He hands out small, green nets and Ziploc bags.

A salamander survey is kind of like an Easter Egg hunt. Surveyors are given a certain area, a certain time period (30 minutes in this case), and are told to catch as many salamanders as they can.

Elliott shouts “OK, go,” and the volunteers begin turning over every single rock, log and leaf. Soon they’re scrambling after the zipping, slimy salamanders.

Those working the streams and the seep usually find the most salamanders, which are placed in plastic bags stuffed with wet leaves and dirt so the animals are comfortable. After the half-hour, Elliott and Smith purposefully identify and count the species for each habitat, take a Global Positioning and temperature reading, put the salamanders back in their habitat and lead the crew off to a different section of the stream.

The Georgia Forest Watch survey takes place in two coves. The first survey in the first cove on the way up Lower Cynth Gap nets 32 salamanders, and six different species. No one expected to find a hellbender here; it’s the wrong kind of habitat.

Hellbenders prefer deeper streams and faster running water than in the puny brook of Lower Cynth Gap cove. They’re carnivorous and eat small fish and worms. But their favorite is crayfish. None of the surveyors spotted a single crayfish.

After lunch and a short hike upstream, Elliott and Smith pass out the Ziploc bags for the second survey on this stream. This time Smith says, “Go!” The hunt is on again.

One document — 18,000 pages bound in three separate books — will dictate the fate of the Chattahoochee National Forest for the next 15 years.

Released by the U.S Forest Service April 4, it lays out which areas of the forest will be given permanent protection from logging, which areas will be susceptible to clear cutting, and which areas will be open to four-wheel, all terrain vehicles (ATVs).

Georgia Forest Watch, which was founded after the last management plan was released in the mid-1980s, had high hopes this time around. Along with dozens of other individuals and protection groups, Georgia Forest Watch over the last seven years gave the U.S. Forest Service its suggestions for managing the Chattahoochee. And in an earlier draft hammered out last August, the Forest Service included many of the forest-friendly provisions.

For instance, under the August draft, 60,000 acres of the Chattahoochee would have been designated as wilderness areas — the highest level of protection a forest can get. That would mean no automobiles, no ATVs, no logging. Within those acres were popular hiking destinations such as Turner Creek, Rich Mountain and Raven Cliffs. But the new plan, released last month, slashes that acreage to 8,000 acres, and leaves those tourist spots open for logging. The April plan also allows for opening 400,000 acres of the forest to four-wheelers.

But perhaps most brazenly, the new plan would allow timber companies to double the amount of wood harvested from the forest.

Consider: Between 1996 and 2002, the annual logging harvest from the Chattahoochee was anywhere from 100,000 feet of lumber to 34.9 million. The Forest Service’s April plan would allow 78 million feet to be taken from the forest each year.

In a previous draft of the plan released last August, this section of the woods would have been protected as a wilderness area. But the current proposal would open up big chunks of Kelly Ridge. Why? To create a more hospitable habitat for other animals like endangered, rare and tropical birds, such as the goldenwing warbler, which thrive not in heavy forests but open areas. Of course, how that could affect other animals in the woods is one of the most debated issues among biologists.

Salamanders are the only vertebrates that regenerate limbs. Some salamanders, when chomped by a predator on the tail, will twist and flop until the thing breaks off. Scientists are trying to figure out if there’s a way to replicate that regeneration trick in humans who’ve lost their limbs.

The hellbender’s size, its smarts and its longevity make it a favorite among salamander aficionados. But it doesn’t live for up to 30 years by being easy to find, as we’re learning on Kelly Ridge. Our second survey nets 29 salamanders of seven different species, but none is more than 5 inches long, and none is the hellbender. The salamanders are returned to the habitat where they’re found, the Ziploc bags are stuffed inside a backpack, and the expedition heads deeper into the woods.

After a grueling half-hour hike uphill, we reach Lower Cynth Gap and emerge onto what appears to be a small clear cut. Half a dozen trees lie on the ground, fallen in the same direction. The canopy above is open. The pattern of the fallen trees suggests strong winds knocked them down. So it was a clearing, yes — but a natural one.

The expedition agrees it’d be a perfect habitat for the warbler.

Groves and Randall White, a Georgia Forest Watch board member and physician, make plans to come back in the early morning to scout for warblers.

The rest talk excitedly. If the Forest Service knows about this, then maybe they’d put Kelly Ridge back on the protected list.

Of course, the discovery also makes us worry that the Forest Service hasn’t even surveyed the lands that they’ve put on the chopping block.

The expedition moves on.

Pressure to open up more of the Chattahoochee National Forest to logging has come from many corners. In Towns County, where Kelly Ridge is located, county commissioners passed a resolution last winter demanding that no more wilderness areas be set aside.

Pushing for the resolution was the Georgia chapter of the Ruffed Grouse Society. Bill Cunningham, the society’s volunteer president, explains that birds such as the warbler and the grouse need more open spaces to thrive. Declaring more acres protected from logging will keep those spaces from opening up.

“A lot of the wildlife does benefit from the activities of logging,” he says.

Cunningham traveled to four mountain counties on his lobbying trip. With him was Bill Fletcher, supervisor for the northeast region of the state Department of Natural Resources. Fletcher also asked the four counties to fight the wilderness designation.

“We feel there is enough wilderness on the Chattahoochee at this time,” Fletcher says. Restricting all logging is going too far. “You may want to actually manipulate some habitats to benefit some particular species.”

Right now, open spaces are “dwindling because there’s absolutely no timber being cut right now,” Fletcher says. And Mother Nature isn’t clearing out much of the forest, meaning man has to step in.

“We need to have the flexibility to make open spaces,” Fletcher says.

Cunningham also shrewdly appealed to county commissioners’ disdain for outsiders by telling them what to do in their own back yard. The resolution urged federal officials to “stand firm” against forces outside the county that have “exercised undue influence through the use of appeals, protests and litigation.”

Cunningham himself is from Forsyth County.

But perhaps the strongest argument the resolution posed against more wilderness designations was an economic one. Average personal income in Towns County is just $22,091, according to the University of Georgia’s 2002 Georgia County Guide, more than $7,000 below the national average. And the county has faced some especially tough times in recent years. In the spring of 2001, the Elan Water Bottling Plant in neighboring Union County closed, putting 50 people out of work. When the E.J. Footwear plant closed in March 2002, another 80 people lost their jobs — even before that, the workforce at the shoe factory was cut from 300. When Home Depot opened in Union County in early 2002, 1,300 people applied for jobs at a store that now employs about 150.

And that was before the recent closing of the nearby Levi-Strauss plants in Murphy, N.C., and Blue Ridge cost 823 workers their jobs.

To commissioners, fencing off more of their county to any outside influence means blocking economic development. And they’ll certainly get no argument from the timber industry. Since 1986, logging has claimed 591 million feet of timber from the national forest. No one knows for sure how many acres that translates into: the Forest Service only measures deforestation in terms of feet of wood harvested. However, we know that an acre of old-growth, virgin trees can net 30,000 feet of lumber, and a stand of trees each a foot in diameter averages 8,000 feet of lumber per acre.

With that range, loggers have claimed between 19,700 acres and 73,875 acres — that’s not counting the trees that were cut down for the roads that were built to get to the clear-cuts.

It should be noted that the largest portion of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget comes from granting logging rights; in the case of the Chattahoochee, the agency made $18 million between 1996 and 2002.

The incline of Rattlesnake Knob is so steep, so perilous, that when walking west, counter-clockwise around its north face, my left foot hits the ground at least a full foot higher than the right. A slight slip could lead to a 40-foot tumble. The expedition stops three times to rest or let others catch up.

But it’s worth it. Entering an old-growth forest is like walking back through time. Because of the steepness, and the thinner than usual layer of rich, black soil that covers the solid rock that makes up the Appalachians, the trees of the virgin forest on Rattlesnake Knob aren’t much thicker than the rest of the forest. Yet, there is an undeniable “oldness” to it. The bark on the trees is thicker and gray, as if the moss and mold were trying their best to give the trees a wise old gentlemen’s beard. They are, after all, between 300 and 400 years old, according to core samples taken months earlier.

“Almost any time in science, if you’re looking someplace where no one’s looked before, you’ll find something unexpected, or something that hasn’t been seen before,” Elliott offers.

Flowers that weren’t in the other areas are found here. The volunteers marvel over jack-in-the-pulpits, grand floras, and some kind of orchid with a Latin name. One points out a monstrous sassafras tree larger than most oaks in Atlanta. There’s a debate over whether one massive tree is a black or red cherry, followed by a comment that it is surely the largest cherry tree left in the Chattahoochee National Forest.

The troop, wide-eyed and refreshed, heads down the cove toward a stream born from an old-growth stand.

Thanks to a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period that covered northern China in smoldering ash, scientists know that modern salamanders came on the scene early in the history of dinosaurs. One newly discovered species, named Chunerpeton tianyiensis, so closely resembles the hellbender that scientists have concluded that salamanders haven’t changed much at all anatomically over the eons.

They’ve survived for more than 165 million years mainly just as they are. But the hellbender’s heyday is over.

The hellbender is listed as an endangered species in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. Alabama lists it as threatened and New York lists it as a species of special concern. In Georgia, the hellbender is considered “rare.”

Three miles away is Dismal Cove, which Groves says is last place she’s ever heard of a hellbender being spotted. A Georgia Forest Watch volunteer working another survey found it, and held it up long enough to show other people in the search party.

There’d be no such discovery today; not even close.

A quarter of the way down into the cove with no name, the old-growth gives way to an infant stand. (It had been clear-cut, Elliott found out the next week, in 1989). None of the trees are thick enough for a person to hide behind; sunlight pours onto the forest floor. The surveyors are visibly upset. In the middle of it all is a mucky stream that no hellbender would think of inhabiting.

The nets and Ziploc bags are passed out and another survey begins. The hunters in the stream comment on how much more algae there is here than in the other stream. Groves, who specializes in insect biology, says the algae is probably due to the increased sunlight caused by the clear-cut. Salamanders, she says, don’t like thick algae.

She’s right. The volunteers, used to catching at least one salamander every five minutes, quickly learned this was close to a dead zone. They find only six salamanders, and three species.

It begins to rain.

At the next survey further down into the cove, the forest thickens slightly. Still, it’s probably the same age as the stand we’d just been in; the incline is less steep, so the trees probably had slightly more nutrients in the soil to draw from.

During this final survey of the day, 16 salamanders are rounded up, of four species.

The group is frustrated but at the same time vindicated. They’re sure the recent clear-cutting is to blame for the low numbers of salamanders. The only problem is, they can’t prove it.

“In science, you can’t just come out saying, ‘We found this to be true,’ you know? You have to study it. Scientists are boring that way. You have to study something to death before you can say that ‘Yes, logging is the cause,’” Groves says. “But I think that is likely that the logging that happened affected the salamander population. There’s a study out of North Carolina that specifically says road building and logging significantly decreased the amount of salamanders, the diversity and numbers, in an area. So that has been studied before, it’s just that in that particular area, we can’t say it definitively.”

Georgia Forest Watch in June is forging ahead with another expedition, this time with only one purpose: to find a hellbender.

The Forest Service’s plans for the forest will be finalized after the public is allowed a 90-day comment period that ends July 3.

michael.wall@creativeloafing.com