Category: Field Notes

By Bill Finch, Director For more than a week this October, we’ve been spending days at The Nature Conservancy’s Chitwood Barrens Nature Preserve in northeast Alabama because it preserves one of our most important but increasingly

By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels, Communications Director  Bill Finch, founding director of Paint Rock Research Center, was itching to light a fire. Early summer rains and high humidity had held us up for weeks already. Finch tossed a

By Lilly Roehrig, Guest Author, Graduate Student, Environment & Natural Resources, Department of Geography, University of Alabama   From the moment I rumbled into the Paint Rock forest on an ATV, I was in awe of the thousands

By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels, Communications Director I don’t have a Paint Rock rattlesnake story. But after speaking with our center researchers and others for this week’s newsletter, I expect it won’t be long until I meet one

By Mary Medlin, Avian Research Coordinator, with Kelsey Barnett-Fischels Bird No. 62972 seems to like the Paint Rock ecosystem. Since we tagged this male wood thrush last year—even despite our disturbing him with our human hands—he’s

We went deep into Paint Rock with Penn State researchers to track the million-year journey of this mysterious Southeastern tree By Bill Finch, Founding Director Imagine a bean that became a 60-foot tree, with hanging clusters

By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels We don’t allow camping at Paint Rock Research Center, for many reasons. Yet, since 2024, from early May to June, a tent-like structure has appeared in one of our meadows. This tent isn’t

The first genomically informed forest is growing By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels I don’t know what an ash tree looks like, I admit, sheepishly, to Mary Medlin, my coworker and one of Paint Rock Research Center’s science staff.

By Bill Finch, Founding Director Another year, another Act of God. At least that’s what our legal contracts call them, and they’re so big, you feel like something even bigger ought to take the blame. Last

By Bill Finch, Founding Director The gunshots of Independence were barely heard in Alabama, 250 years ago. Few people were left to hear them. The ones who remained couldn’t have cared much about the politics of

Our researchers aren’t tweeting—but they’re listening in on the forests’ social channels. A little over a year ago, 200 acres of trees snapped, uprooted, and fell to the forest floor, hundred-year-old giants bowing down to a

This spring we’ve begun a first-of-its-kind project—one that will have wide-reaching implications for the future of Southeastern forests. Partnering with HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology through an ADECA grant, we’re developing full DNA sequences for multiple species

Early April found Amata Hinkle at the Paint Rock Forest Research Center. Hinkle had visited Sharp-Bingham Mountain Preserve weeks earlier for a training exercise and took an excursion to a creek. “A rock screamed, ‘Turn me

By Mary Wells, Avian Coordinator The wave of green serves as a dinner bell for migratory songbirds who are pouring in from Central and South America each night, eager to dig into all the delicious fruit

They’re always here, but invisible until now, when the trees are bare, stripped of green by the first hard cold, in the closing dark of December.  Hollies and I go back. They show up again and

The Paint Rock Forest Research Center has long been a leader in efforts to restore shortleaf pine, the cornerstone one the South’s most important ecosystems. If you are interested in containerized native shortleaf pine seedlings from

Seeds of a new initiative sown at national Shortleaf Pine conference The mountain-top plateaus surrounding the Paint Rock Valley were once covered in a forest unlike anything most folks have ever seen. It was a sun-drenched

Land set ablaze, flames racing to devour plants and leaving only a trail of blackened ash — it’s an image that may seem destructive, but in a prescribed burn, it’s one of nature’s most powerful tools

Thursday August 25, 2025 Bill Finch will be delivering a talk at 4:00 and the Exhibit opens from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. We would love to see you! Universities being hard to navigate and find parking,

Help us discover what fills it. Yes, a tornado slammed into a beautiful, rare and unusually rich Research Center forest on The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve May 20th. F2 ,says weather service, about 185 miles

Our census interns have been the engine of our forest census.  We’ve had many over the years – thanks in part to our fortunate relationships with the Student Conservation Association and Alabama A&M.  But this year’s crew