If only Alabama knew how to get rich on its own gold.
Every time I start counting through the state’s stores of gold—blooming everywhere in fall fields—I wonder how in the world we have failed to cash in on our own Fort Knox, our native sunflowers.
No, not the cultivated sunflowers you buy in a seed packet from California or Michigan, not the sunflower seeds rodents chew on around your birdfeeders. I mean the sunflowers native to Alabama, the ones that have been coming up wild here in Alabama for hundreds of thousands of years.
From all I can tell, Alabama is the center of sunflower diversity globally. There are 50 to 60 species and recognized subspecies of sunflowers in the world. Half of those are native to Alabama–including at least 25 known species, and another double handful of subspecies and common hybrids. No other state comes close—not Georgia, not Texas, not California, not the Carolinas, not Florida. The number of sunflower species native outside North America can be counted on one hand.
It’s as if Alabama is at the center of a nuclear explosion of sunflower species. Study them for any length of time, and you’ll recognize that there are sunflowers in Alabama like nothing ever described before. Alabama sunflowers continue to explore what it’s like to be sunflowers, experimenting with new forms of flowers, new kinds of seeds, new chemistries—until they learn to master every opportunity in our diverse landscape.
They’re all different. Some are confoundingly different, like the waist-high longleaf sunflower which is almost entirely restricted to northeast Alabama, or the rayless sunflowers of coastal savannas, which lack any trace of yellow petals and show off midnight purple discs dotted with gold stars. But most bear some resemblance to the manufactured sunflowers we buy in seed packets, with flowers that can be as wide as your hand or as small as your thumb, with petals that range from deep buttery gold to pale lemon yellow, and center discs that can be yellow, red or purple.
They’re all beautiful, as if they’re desperate to be seen. What have we done with this abundance of sunflower riches? Nothing. Not a thing. What could we have done?
A single sunflower species native to the western prairies has become one of the world’s most important food plants, ranking among the top 5 oil-producing plants in the world. In that single sunflower species, scientists have found chemicals that have potential as anti-microbials, as antioxidants that can prevent damage to cells and tissues, with hypertensive qualities that can be used to treat cardiovascular disease. They can be used as preservatives, for wound healing, even for herbicides.
The same western species has become one of North America’s most widely cultivated “wildlife” species, mistakenly planted by bird feeders and deer feeders alike—even though the artificially enlarged seeds are designed to be processed by machines rather than wildlife. I am stunned when I watch my hunting club buddies mow down native sunflowers that deer and turkey have been using for millennia—and replace them with sunflowers designed to be digested by machines, not wildlife. Perplexing, isn’t it?
I wonder what we might find if we studied the human benefits in Alabama’s 25 or so distinctive species, which as far as I can tell have never been analyzed? How would quail and grouse and turkeys and goldfinches respond if we made sure they had access to the wild Alabama sunflower seeds they evolved to eat, rather than force-feeding them the fatty seeds we engineered to cook French fries?
Alabama is sitting on a gold mine. Look for a field of Alabama native sunflowers, and invest yourself in it.
The revolving door of visiting scientists spun faster as the week went on.
Like one of those great blue herons that sometimes finds itself in the backyard lily pond, John Pickering landed Thursday night–and we wondered for a minute if the backyard was big enough. Pick is indeed a presence. The retired UGa professor is one of the early co-founders of the All Taxa Biological Inventory in the Great Smokies, and continues to reinvent (in every conversation!) the way we think about species inventories.
But Pick was conspicuously silent as he looked over the wildflower covered slopes at Paint Rock. You could tell this was a landscape big enough, dramatic enough, rich enough to accommodate his broad interests.
Was it Pick or Doug Booher, or maybe Justin Hart or Jonathan Kleinman from the University of Alabama’s Forest Dynamics program, who first spotted the quadrillium among the wildflowers at Callaway Sinks? We weren’t sure whether this four-parted aberration of the three-leafed trillium was just a lucky find, or a sign of good luck. Hart and Kleinman were enthusiastic about the potential of the forest plot, and pledged to work to bring their university’s resources to the effort in whatever way they could (Greg Starr and Christy Staudhammer, on sabbatical in France, also hope to involve their labs at University of Alabama).
All day long, and deep into the night, Pick and Finch argued over the identity of plants. Maarten van der Giessen and Colleen Keleher, who’ve pioneered the propagation and introduction of a number of unusual Alabama native plants, joined in the debate. They had come in that afternoon, and watching them see the bluebells for the first time was almost as moving as watching the bluebells. As the group picked apart what they’d seen after dinner, all were aided by the glow of an unusually fine distillation of Alabama moon light. The most intriguing plant problem of all was the identity of the flowerless clumps of lily-like leaves they’d seen near one of the sinks. Lily of the valley, Pick insisted. Wood lily, Beth Finch said. Not likely on either count, said Bill Finch, though he conceded it did look a bit like Convallariaceae. Maarten just sipped and smiled.
But it’s always wise to remember that a plant has more than looks. Each has a distinct chemical profile, with flavonoids that can often be tasted and smelled. The hills of Paint Rock are increasingly rich with odors and flavors as the spring develops – the minty brightness of the extremely rare limerock woodmint, the lemony spice of spicebush. And as Al Schotz eventually reminded us, the pungent odor of the legendary mountain garlic, ramps. There would have been a quick resolution to the argument if they had just bent down and nibbled on the distinguished and utterly distinguishing flavor of those mysterious leaves: sweet, rich, peppery, garlicky, with a hint of musk.
Here’s one last sip for ramps, that rare delicacy of the Paint Rock mountains, and a poem from Pick to memorialize the day:
Unusual beauty by John Pickering
Whether by the design of a dyslexic dog or the cruel dealings of your developmental mishandling of some new mutant means, you, Quadrillium, are a strange, magnificent one. You made it, transformed from the normal, not a lucky Irish four-leaf clover, but a different gentle giant amongst your Trillium clan, a perfect hopeful monster. Goldschmidt would wonder at your form, take pleasure, grin with pride.
Four leaves, four petals, four sepals, your new symmetry displayed with glory.
But whatever for?
With whom will you mate?
Will you confuse the bees?
Will your plan now be passed on to a new genus, or be scrambled back into Trillium’s hard-scrabble conservative world, or end in deathly solitude?
It’ll not be child’s play to plug your square peg into a triangular world.
Win or lose, without a goal, without a thought, at least the hard hand of chance tried, with some success, to bring about your three-plus- one-more excess.
So wait hidden amongst the profusion of beauty in Calloway Sinks’ rich herbaceous layer, entangled with the tried and true. Time will tell. New forms will come, others go. As for yours, we do not know.
A million years from now, things will be different, as they’ll change every tomorrow, by small increments, Nature’s punctuated jokes, and wicked asteroids.
We fear change, try to keep things the same, expend much futility on protecting the status quo, as we warm and on we go.
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 rare trees: the shortleaf pine.
The shortleaf pine encapsulates the Cumberland Plateau’s richest assortment of wildflowers and wildlife. And it’s all here because The Nature Conservancy preserved the legacy of fire at Chitwood Barrens.
Fire, shortleaf pine, wildflowers, and wildlife have an ancient bond here in Alabama. They depend on each other. When we forgot that, we lost most of the state’s richest forest systems, the pine savannas that once spread in meadows as far as the eye can see.
We want to help Alabama landowners restore those rich fields of trees, wildlife, and wildflowers. That’s why we’re making like squirrels in the trees, collecting shortleaf pine cones as fast as we can before the first blast of winter sends seeds flying. The seedlings from our collections will be available this fall. Learn how you can restore your own forest with these valuable seeds here.
You don’t need to be a huge conservation organization to do this work. All you need to get these trees growing is a good piece of land, some winter rain, a lot of sunshine, and a sprinkle of fire when the time is right.
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 tuft of grass on the dirt fire break, holding lighter to blades, and watched the flames erupt and disappear as the fuel dissolved to cinders. It was early September, nearing three-digit heat index, and around us swayed glorious stems of goldenrod, chatoyant ironweed, tufts of pink thistles. Soon, we hoped, it would all be ablaze.
Fire might be a surprising conservation tool to some. Growing up in the age of Smokey Bear, I was taught fire—any and all, save that contained in a designated fireplace—is bad. Yet for grasslands like this at Hellums Research Outpost, fire is not only natural but essential. By prescribing regular controlled burns, our research technicians are serving an important role in the health of this grassland. We do this work as match for our NFWF funds, but so far, no one has funded us directly for this. The big donation is from Chris Hellums who generously offered his property to us for research and restoration.
It wasn’t that long ago that fire didn’t need our help to crawl across the landscape. While there’s still some debate on the matter, a growing consensus points to lightning strikes as a natural igniter. In the growing season, the right strike of lightning could start a blaze that spread until rain or creek or otherwise dampened the creep of flames.
“There’s been some great work in the Florida panhandle, for example,” says Finch, who wrote the book on longleaf savannas, “demonstrating that lightning fires returned to longleaf savannas multiple times each decade even when humans were demonstrably absent from the landscape.”
Finch mentions contemporary accounts that suggest Native peoples may have burned the landscape around their villages in part to create a barrier for wildfire, and in part to improve forage and foraging, or for agriculture. But in much of the South, lightning fires were so common, there just wasn’t a lot of fuel left for people to burn.
Cecil Frost made the first estimate that lightning alone would account for fires on average three times each decade in coastal areas. Jean Huffman conducted the seminal research demonstrating the same occurrence in the Panhandle, except she showed that return intervals were great than three times each decade in many cases. The frequency and seasonal timing of the lightning fire regime would vary by forest type, local geography, and by latitude—the farther away from the coast, generally the less frequent the lightning.
Whether lightning or early management practices, things changed when cash crops and large plantations were established. Fire suppression became vital to protecting all that was being built. And the sweetgums and cedars and other woody plants crept in and snuffed out the airiness of the grass- and wildflower-dominant fields.
Today in places like Hellums, a 1,500-acre property with extensive forests, incredible cave systems, and actively managed open habitats in the Paint Rock Valley, restored and remnant grasslands need a regular dose of fire fed by a human hand to sustain the openness and diversity possible. There are a couple of typical burning windows. In plants’ dormant season—late winter to early spring—fire helps remove deep layers of fallen leaves from previous years and can help in the first stages of restoration. In the summer growing season, fire can make great strides in killing woody competitors and bringing a site back to grass and wildflower dominance.
That’s our goal on the Hellums property. On our early September burn day, the water truck we’d all been waiting for rolled into position. Three students and their instructor from the Alabama A&M FireDawgs joined the Research Center staff, ready to light up. The FireDawgs not only provide us the extra safety of more hands and eyes to keep the burn under control, but they also offer us the opportunity to share real-world training and experience with the next generation of land stewards and conservationists.
It’s ideal burn conditions when the wind is predictably blowing at a moderate speed from one direction. But as on most summer burn days, the wind was fickle, blowing from several directions; occasionally a good gust would get the fire moving. The humidity had dropped down to just about 30%, a rarity in the South. With a drip torch in hand, Finch dropped fire along the perimeter, passing the torch off later to a FireDawg to try his hand at directing fire under supervision. Low flames engulfed plants and set moisture in the plants sizzling. Columns of water vapor surged forth. The heat grew even more intense. Our crews walked the perimeter of the fire break to make sure no ember or spark went astray.
This correspondent here only lasted a couple hours in the throes of the fire and, more so, the sweltering heat. But our crew spent a good 8 hours that day directing the blaze across 150 acres or more. The result of their hard work is stark.
You may be scratching your head looking between the before and after burn photos. It does seem counterintuitive. Where there once were brilliant wildflowers and a mix of native grasses there now is charred earth. Yet, this burn knocked back the woody plants that had started to sneak into the landscape and would threaten to alter this habitat if left to its own devices. All this soil is open to sunlight now, and a diversity of seeds are already starting to sprout again. The beauty will be back. This October, some areas are already thick with green. More importantly, the health will be maintained.
And as we keep this habitat open and encourage more diversity of these cutthroat and bluestem and gamma grasses, of the goldenrods and milkweeds and more, we’ll begin to see the return of other important members of this grassland community—like turkey and quail. The landowners are excited about this; we hope you are too.
If you’re a student researcher interested in working with us to conduct biodiversity surveys before and after our future burns, reach out.
Standing on the prow of the deck at our main house could indeed make you feel like you were flying.
Fortunately, we fixed our Titanic before it sank.
The new deck on the Main House. | Photo by Brandon Renner
The buildings we purchased for our residential facilities at Paint Rock were built to survive a disaster, and mostly they would. But time and Paint Rock weather takes a toll, and the great expansive deck that looks out over McFarland Cove and our forests had become an attractive nuisance. We just shut it down until we could put together enough money to bring in our favorite Northeast Alabama construction team, led by Delane Underwood. They essentially rebuilt the deck from the bottom up, adding to its structural soundness as they went. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s beautiful, safe, and secure, and we’re all flying over the forest again.
We’ve got work to do on all our structures at Paint Rock. The previous hunting club decided to dig up and leave with our critical check-in shed (yes, the whole shed), but we’re going to rebuild a new and better one. Delane and crew are now tackling the worst of the issues at our other residential facility, the Red House (those rotting steps up to the house are now solid as a rock, and water no longer pours through the middle of the porch roof).
That’s the boring deferred-maintenance stuff that every facility like ours has to deal with, and there’s no way around it. Our buildings get a lot of use all year. We had a dozen researchers staying at the Red House in August. We’ve had film crews from England, artists from around the state, and every month a lot of scientists trying to continue their normal work in an era that doesn’t even allow travel funding. We can’t wait to announce the details of a new workshop program for secondary teachers across the region, taught by our top researchers. It costs us, but we do our best to accommodate all.
But here’s something to contemplate before you fly away: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bring these residential facilities up to a higher standard, if we made them into something that fully reflected our mission—buildings that not only facilitate meeting, sleeping, and eating but that actually tell important stories about why we are here and why that matters to the rest of North America? Facilities with the space and tools and resiliency that support the level of research and conservation we’re doing?
Top: An exterior view of the Red House. Bottom left: A portion of the Red House porch. Bottom right: Delane Underwood and crew at work on the Red House.
At the Main House, we’ve imagined the massive wood-paneled garage could be transformed into a large conference room, and we know our large working basement area could be better designed to serve the needs of our staff and visiting researchers.
At the Red House, we’ve begun to reimagine a center for nature-based art and video education and production, all driven by interaction with science and the surrounding landscape. That useless double garage could become a studio; the porches could be expanded to become a large outdoor teaching and observation area where all could engage directly with the surrounding forest.
For us to make real on these visions—to better connect people from all over with the importance of our Alabama natural heritage and the value and meaning it holds—we need your help.
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 of shades of green that each tree contributed to the rippling mosaic of the forest. One might assume that the years and disturbance events those trees have survived are lost to the passage of time, but our crew knew better. There is a secret history to be discovered beneath Paint Rock’s broadleaf canopy, and that very day we were beginning our journey to uncover it.
As a University of Alabama graduate student researcher in Justin Hart’s Forest Dynamics Lab, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects across Alabama and Tennessee that address pertinent forest management issues using science-based solutions, with a particular focus on forest stand dynamics and silviculture. Our work at Paint Rock in July of 2026 was one of these projects, fully funded by the Paint Rock Research Center (with a grant from the Tom Sardy Foundation).
Students from the University of Alabama gather at a plot center in the Paint Rock forest to review their tree cores. They include Alexandria Roberts (left), Lilly Roehrig (left center), Kana Furukawa (right center), and Lucille McGuire (right).
Our lab set out to core over a thousand trees in the 60-hectare Paint Rock forest dynamics plot to begin to build a story of their past. Kana Furukawa, my fellow graduate student researcher and leader of our fieldwork at Paint Rock, describes the project as a “…spatiotemporal analysis of canopy disturbances and tree establishment” that will “… add context to our understanding of the relationships between canopy disturbances and regeneration across spatial scales.”
By adding data to the pre-existing forest census dataset via tree ages and growth rates, we can reconstruct the establishment patterns of trees and identify canopy disturbance events, such as tornadoes or ice storms, that have influenced stand development and succession. Along with determining a tree’s age by dating the rings of a sample, we can also view other information, such as anomalous growth changes, that may indicate when and where the canopy was disturbed.
Together, these data allow us to reconstruct the forest’s history and identify patterns of disturbance and regeneration across time. This will help guide future conservation and management decisions, and the information can also support future ecological research at Paint Rock.
PhD student Lucy McGuire cores into an American beech tree.
However, before this history could be read, we had to collect the tree core samples from several species. By coring more than a thousand trees, we’re able to reconstruct disturbance patterns across the entire study area and glean a broader context of how different species and stands responded to disturbances through time.
With increment borers—which consist of three main components: the bit, the handle, and the spoon—we collected our samples. As we pressed the tip against the tree and turned the handle clockwise, the bit caught on the bark and began to burrow into the tree. While we continued to turn, the wooden core was carved out. Once we cored far enough into the tree to hit the pith (the “center” of the tree), we inserted the spoon and turned the borer counterclockwise to remove the bit. The spoon—a narrow, cup-shaped piece of metal—was slid inside the hollow bit, and when removed, it contained the core. We inserted the cores into a paper straw for transportation, labeled with its corresponding forest dynamics tree ID number.
A student pulls the spoon out of the bit, which contains the tree core sample.
Tree cores can range anywhere from a few centimeters to several decimeters or longer, depending on the tree diameter, but the process does not harm the tree. Many trees have the ability to quickly respond to small wounds such as those that coring causes, which are only a few millimeters in diameter, and long-term studies have shown that coring does not significantly impact tree mortality.
As we worked, I learned that tree coring is as much an art as it is a science. Feeling the tethering bite of the bit as it catches into the smooth bark of a maple or knowing when to pull out of an oak with a rotten center were skills that took me many field days to master. As a crew, we grew faster, stronger, and more efficient at our tasks as time went on, and soon the creaking of a borer carving through wood became music to my ears.
Above: University of Alabama student Alexandria Roberts uses a microscope to count rings on a tree core, which is a part of the dating process. Below: Tree cores that the University of Alabama students have collected, mounted, and sanded.
After a month of fieldwork at Paint Rock, we finally collected the last sample and returned to Tuscaloosa to begin processing. In the lab, we mount the tree cores with their cells vertically aligned and glued to a piece of routed wood, and then we sand the samples with abrasives at various levels to reveal the individual tree-ring structure. Once sanded, each tree-ring series is examined under magnification.
Kana and other students in the Forest Dynamics Lab date the annual rings to the calendar year of formation, identify scars or growth releases associated with disturbances using statistical techniques, and compile the information into geo-referenced datasets that can be analyzed alongside Paint Rock’s existing forest census records.
This is a long process, and one that is still ongoing. Though there is still much work to be done, I feel proud that through our research, we will be able to better understand the disturbance and developmental history of a Southeastern hardwood forest, which ultimately may improve the ability to manage it. Additionally, I am excited to see what further research will reveal about the extraordinary ecosystem at Paint Rock.
Sewanee is not much more than 50 minutes up the road from our upper campus here in the valley. Except for a couple of monster hills, it’s not a bad bicycle ride. But on the way there’s a sudden transition from loud red elephants to big orange T’s, and that pointless line dividing one state from another makes us seem much further apart than we are.
The Greater Paint Rock ecosystem we recognize always included Sewanee and lands a little north of there. The increasingly famous pre-Columbian artwork illuminated by Sewanee and University of Tennessee researchers is as rich south of the state line as it is northward. Every year, new research reinforces those ties. The new trees and plants we discover in Paint Rock wander freely up to Sewanee and the University’s 13,000-acre Domain. Underground rivers carry life under mountains, moving sightless cavefish from one side of the border to the other. Sewanee’s Kristen Cecala notes that significant changes in salamander genetics north and south of Interstate 24 lasso Sewanee and Paint Rock into a common ecosystem.
A view of the forest that unites us.
Now, the two campuses seem ready to converge in a new relationship that will bring benefits to both. We explored the possibilities around Sewanee’s campus early this summer, and a big contingent of Sewanee faculty visited Paint Rock a couple of weeks ago. A forestry class from Sewanee is scheduled for their first visit next week. And Sewanee convened a meeting with the Appalachian Conservation Institute, a non-profit preserving large landscapes surrounding the Little Sequatchee River, multiplying opportunities along this extraordinary highway of biodiversity in the Southern Cumberlands.
The Research Center has always worked to be a resource for all researchers, and all universities. Sewanee is just one of our partners. We have long and exciting relationships with University of Alabama, Alabama A&M, Jacksonville State University, Auburn, University of West Alabama, and research institutions like HudsonAlpha. We work closely with University of Georgia, and researchers come here from as far away as New England and California. Sewanee isn’t a Tier 1 research institution like some of those. But it’s a place where students have a unique opportunity to engage with the natural world, and the school’s liberal arts curriculum has a revered reputation for turning out leaders in many fields.
From top-left to bottom: Researchers from Sewanee and Appalachian Conservation Institute tour the Paint Rock forest; Sewanee forest research and education biologist Christy Soldo looks out on our prairie restoration work at Hellums Research Outpost; Sewanee aquatic biologist Kristen Cecala inspects a crayfish at our Big Ellum Bottom Research Outpost on the Paint Rock River.
What makes our growing relationship with Sewanee distinctive is our mutual recognition that there’s something important going on here at the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau. It’s not some Brigadoon-like retreat from the world—it really is a storehouse of biodiversity that’s always played an exceptional role in the life of North America, and must again. We agree it’s our job to understand it, look after it, and share its riches with a new generation. We’re looking at programs that unite us in research and restoration, conservation and communications.
You’ll soon hear more about our plans with Sewanee.
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 of these venomous snakes. I look forward to it.
The eastern timber rattlesnake our center knows is not a vicious, slithering beast but rather a docile serpent of the forest. I hope you’ll take a moment to read these four rattlesnake stories and get to know more about this important member of our natural systems.
Photo by Brandon Renner, Paint Rock Research Center Research Technician and Shortleaf Program Manager. | Pictured: A rattlesnake with a large meal in its stomach backed against the bank, a less than ideal spot to digest that meal. Snakes typically don’t like to travel far after consuming such large prey items, as it makes them vulnerable to predation. Typically this snake would much more prefer the comfort of a burrow or a gap between rocks to digest a prey item of this size.
As Generous as a Rattlesnake
By Bill Finch, Founding Director, Paint Rock Research Center
I played with small snakes as a child. I even took a pocketful of earth snakes to church, as a sort of offering.
But I was raised to fear rattlesnakes and did to the point of not being able to speak when I saw one. Coming over a mountain one day, I looked out over a rocky western face gathering the first heat of spring and thought if I’m ever going to see a rattlesnake, it’s right now. Almost the moment I thought it, I saw the rattlesnake stretched leisurely along a rock, 10 feet away. Tired of fear, I sat down on a rock a few feet away, and we just looked at each other for half an hour or so. It occurred to me then that the last thing a rattlesnake wanted to do was put its mouth on a nasty human.
In the 50 years since, I’ve stepped over, stepped around, and even crawled over eastern timber rattlers and diamondbacks, and their response has always been “generous … magnanimous,” as William Bartram described them during his famous 18th century explorations of the South.
We have a “tree of Paradise” on the preserve. It’s a persimmon, and one of several on the preserve that produce unusually large and desirable fruit. It shades a spring that emerges from a cliff shelter, and like many others—rabbits, raccoons, deer, bear, and thousands of years of people—we were attracted to that spring and its fruits. We set up cameras there with University of Alabama researchers, hoping to get a better handle on what was using this ancient thoroughfare of life, and four people and two dogs crossed and recrossed the spring beneath the tree dozens of times, occasionally stopping to eat a persimmon. Until Kendra Abbott, professional nature photographer, educator, and outdoor enthusiast, let out a Wisconsin “Whoa,” and there beneath the tree and our feet was a large rattlesnake, as insouciant as only a rattlesnake can be, waiting patiently for the commotion to die down so it could get back to business. We tended our cameras and left it in peace.
I reckon it’s possible to be bitten by an eastern timber rattler. But you have to try very hard. There are snake-handling churches in Northeast Alabama that testify to that. I remember two drunk men in Calhoun County who decided to pitch a rattlesnake back and forth. My dog tested one’s patience, got a nasty bite and an expensive trip to the vet, and hasn’t pestered one since.
There’s a long tradition at Sharp-Bingham, dating decades before the research center was established here, that no rattlesnakes should ever be killed. The hunting club grumbled, but none was worse for leaving them alone. So yes, we have one of the healthiest populations of timber rattlers in North America. Please feel free to recommend us to your favorite “most snake-infested places” website. Rattlesnakes are our companions at the research center. We sometimes see the same rattlesnake for days at a time. We give them a friendly nod and names, and work around them, knowing they protect us as they protect the forest. And we know that if we can’t live with a creature as generous as a timber rattler, there’s no hope we’ll ever learn to live with nature.
Photo by Helen Czech, Research Associate in Wildlife, Forestry, and Environmental Sciences Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Alabama A&M University. | Pictured: A small-bodied juvenile rattlesnake exhibiting rarely observed canebrake behavior in a tree.
The Snake-Tree Quadrat
By Patience Knight, Field Coordinator/Wildlife Research Technician, Alabama A&M University
In summer of 2021, my colleague Helen Czech and I were taking a large group of student techs to the Paint Rock forest dynamics plot. I started with a tour of the plot and, of course, told them to expect to see venomous snakes. Sure enough, we came upon an adult rattler. All was well; they got their pictures, and we continued.
Then I began training, while Helen went out to the far side of the plot on a separate assignment. As I was explaining to our crew how we process each quadrat, one of them asked about a snake she saw near one of the quadrat corners. It was a copperhead. So great! We’d seen the venomous snakes of Sharp-Bingham. I reminded them that this was what we expected and to just avoid that area.
I proceeded to show them how we tag trees in each quadrat and walked up to a slender cedar sapling. There, at eye level, within its branches, I saw a small snake. I called the crew over to check it out and take pictures. Because of its dark color and patchy pattern, I figured it was a baby rat snake. As the techs took pictures, one said, “That’s definitely not a rat snake.” So I took a closer look at my pictures and finally saw two little buttons on the end of its tail.
At this point I was dumbfounded and at least two of our new hires were huddled together, literally side-eying me. They’d come to the conclusion that we’d brought them out to their doom, and they were ready to check out. I tried (rather unsuccessfully) to explain and quickly figured out I needed backup.
I bellowed across the hollow to Helen. As a lapsed herpetologist (her words, not mine), I knew she could clear things up. This had to be a rare pygmy rattlesnake. This wasn’t normal. She’d be able to convince our skeptical crewmates that this was an anomaly.
When Helen finally got back to us and we showed her the snake in the tree, she stared a moment and simply responded with a, “Huh.” In her 20-plus years conducting fieldwork, she’d never seen a baby timber rattlesnake up in a tree like that. With her words, I was vindicated! The two skeptics decided to stick around, and we resumed training. But that baby rattler decided to spite us and was up higher in that little tree when we left for the day, only for us to find it even higher the next day. By the end of that second day, I had had enough. I decided to remind that rattler that it was terrestrial, not arboreal, and I used one of our extending poles to return it to its station. Ever since that day, that block of the plot is referred to as “Snake-tree.”
Photo by Nathan Paris, Forest Research Coordinator, Paint Rock Research Center
A Short Trip Across the Threshold
By Nathan Paris, Forest Research Coordinator, Paint Rock Research Center
Last September, I was walking up to the research center basement and reaching for the doorknob when I noticed a young timber rattler stretched out across the threshold. I can’t speak to the snake’s reaction to my approach, but I was certainly surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been. The snake promptly moved to the side of the door and coiled, and I was able to safely pass and notify the other team members inside to exit carefully or use another door. To this day I continue to scan this area with greater scrutiny when entering or exiting through the basement door, always vigilant, always on the lookout for the beings we share this space with.
Photo by Horace Clemmons.
Respect the Rattler
Interview with Horace Clemmons, Previous Paint Rock Valley Resident, by Bill Finch
Horace Clemmons shares the blame for many things here at the research center. It was Horace who began assembling the properties that became the Sharp-Bingham Preserve. It was Horace who built the soaring residential facilities. It was Horace who negotiated sales to The Nature Conservancy and later the research center.
And to a large degree, Horace is responsible for the respect that rattlesnakes enjoy on the property. He laid down the law for the hunting clubs.
“Look, I told them if they killed something they weren’t going to eat, they were out of the club,” Horace said. Apparently, none of the hunters were willing to consider rattlesnakes table fare, and Horace was clearly a more potent threat than the rattlesnakes.
“There were always a lot of them back there,” he said. The convoluted ins and outs of the limestone bluffs made excellent communal denning areas. The forest provided an abundance of fat pack rats, field mice and voles, rabbits, possums, an occasional bird. Modern human hunting habits may have inadvertently made life easier for the rattlers: When open feeding of deer was once permitted, it wasn’t unusual to find a big rattlesnake under a feed trough, waiting quietly for the squirrels and raccoons attracted to the fodder.
But it’s also clear that Horace had somewhat of a special affinity for the rattlesnakes. Horace studied their habits and was essentially our first rattlesnake researcher. Years before the majority of scientists came to the same conclusion, Horace saw that the parenting behavior of rattlers was more protective than many believed.
“I used to go for a walk every morning, and at that first culvert below the house, I noticed this big fat rattlesnake laying there, and she’s so plump I said she’s about to hatch off some babies.”
“Hatch off” is a manner of speaking. As Horace is well aware, rattlesnakes don’t lay eggs, they live-birth fairly well developed young. Many once thought that the mother abandoned the young as soon as they were born.
“And a week later I saw four or five little rattlesnakes around her, and they were there together for a week or so, and then one day I walked across the culvert and saw all these rattlesnake skins, and they were all gone.”
That was back in the early days of this century, and many doubted his observations. But he found an Arizona researcher who studied rattlesnake behavior. “He said, I don’t care what people say, these stick around to the first molt and then they leave.” Western rattlesnakes are different in many ways from the eastern species, but this behavior seems consistent. Nowadays, there’s not much argument that Horace was correct.
Naturally, Horace was the one everyone sought out when there was a rattlesnake in an awkward place.
“There was one time Elizabeth (his wife) called, and said she thought there was a big branch across the road, and she wanted me to come get it. And by the time I got there, she realized it was a big rattlesnake.”
Horace picked it up as high as he could and he said it touched the ground. “That was the last snake I ever caught with my hands. You know you always have to shake them a bit (to keep them from coiling), and I was talking to Elizabeth and wasn’t paying attention and it was all wrapped around my arm, and I finally got enough unwound. I never caught another bare handed.”
“I told him I would divorce him if he did,” Elizabeth added.
Even Horace, tempter of fate, was never bitten. Elizabeth said she’d heard that sometime in the last century a Boy Scout had been bitten somewhere nearby. But with decades of activities of hunters, researchers, flower lovers, dogs, none had even been bitten by a rattlesnake, Horace said.
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 stuck around. We delight in his melodious flute-like trills, which are easier to hear than it is to see this near-threatened species. But we don’t have to see No. 62972 to know he’s around. We’re able to track his busy movements through our dense, expansive forest with our Motus station.
The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a global research network that uses radio telemetry towers to pick up signals of geolocator tags attached to anything from rodents to insects to birds. We feel lucky to have a station at the Paint Rock Research Center, supported by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. With only about 11 stations in the whole state of Alabama, we help fill a detection gap for birds and other small species researchers and conservationists are following. We gain more-complete migration data. We detect species that are often hard to see or hear. And we provide insight to the presence of birds and more in our area of undisturbed but remote habitat. Plus, the Motus database is open-access and easy for anyone to use.
Our team installed the Sharp-Bingham Mountain Preserve Motus station with researchers from University of Tennessee Chattanooga and Alabama A&M University in 2024. Since then, we’ve detected 48 total individuals across 5 species. Most are birds, such as the eastern whip-poor-will and the sharp-shinned hawk, but we have also detected gray myotis—small bats that are being tagged by our friends at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
This season, we were excited to see the amount of returning tagged birds from our previous seasons. No. 62972 wasn’t the only bird to come back. No. 62974 did, too. He was born and tagged here last year, and he is one of the lucky few juveniles that make it through their first year. Now, he stands a much better chance of surviving and returning over the next few years. This site fidelity speaks a lot to the habitat quality here at Paint Rock—and also to birds’ amazing ability to navigate to sites that offer plentiful forage and habitat year after year.
At the end of July, we picked up a new species, too: a purple martin. This individual was tagged in Nashville in June of this year and has been bouncing between ours and a handful of other stations in northeastern Georgia and southern Tennessee. It could be visiting to fuel up on insects for migration or to prospect nesting grounds for next year. It would find plenty of company in the bustling colony of purple martins that our neighbors maintain, so we’ll be looking out for a ping from it come spring.
Wood thrush with a Motus tag and federal band attached.
ADCNR biologist Mercedes Maddox and PRRC reseracher Mary Medlin fitting wood thrush with tags.
ADCNR biologists and PRRC staff waiting for wood thrush to fly into a mist net.
Access Motus Data on Your Own
You don’t have to be a scientist to view and follow along with Motus data. To keep up with our Motus station data and more:
Select “Stations” at the left (or explore data by species or projects!)
Search for or zoom in on the map to the station you’re interested in observing
Click “View Station
From here, you can see the flight patterns and movement of species our station has picked up, as well as view a chart or table of the different species that have flown past the tower. There are a number of filtering option as well for species and animals, projects, time duration, and more.
Have a Project Idea?
If there are any scientists reading, we are always on the lookout for more collaborations that tap into our tagging and Motus station efforts. If you and your team have a project in mind, please reach out to us here.
*Note: All banding, marking, and sampling is being conducted under a federally authorized Bird Banding Permit issued by the U.S. Geological Survey’s BBL.
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 of wisteria-like flowers in May, smooth and smokey gray bark, and golden-yellow wood.
There are many features of the tree we call yellowwood that make it unforgettable. But many never see one. Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) is rare enough and becoming rarer each year. But most importantly, it’s very picky about where it grows. Like many rare species in Paint Rock, it’s restricted to unexplained forest islands, widely scattered through the southern and central U.S. and isolated within the ocean of more common eastern forest trees. If you looked at the range of yellowwood on a map of eastern North America, it would look much like the patterns of remote islands in the Pacific, so far apart you can’t imagine how the trees could have hopped from one place to another.
Yellowwood is one of the mysteries of the modern forest that can only be explained by understanding how our forests have changed over millions of years. Was yellowwood always this rare and scattered? Or was it widespread and common before something caused it to retreat to these small islands within the larger forest? What something was it?
By understanding yellowwood and its rare forest island companions—like smoketrees, limerock arrowwood, Alabama snowwreath, and other trees and shrubs rarely seen outside of refuges like Paint Rock—we may better understand how future changes may shape our forests.
Photos courtesy of Austin H. Parr, Lab Manager, Pennsylvania State University and
Emily Scott, Ecology Program, MS Student, Pennsylvania State University
That’s why it was such a pleasure to host Penn State University researchers Austin Parr and Emily Scott, who have spent weeks this summer touring these yellowwood islands. Naturally, they wanted specimens from the southernmost populations in Alabama, where yellowwood has been hiding out perhaps longer than anywhere else in North America.
Handsome specimens of yellowwood can still be found at the Sharp-Bingham Preserve, which we help manage with The Nature Conservancy. But as is the case everywhere I’ve ever seen it, getting there is an adventure bordering on an ordeal. In the South, yellowwood seems to thrive only where steep, unstable limestone slopes create a break in the forest canopy. We climbed, slid, tumbled down some of the preserve’s steepest slopes on a day so warm and humid the forest seemed to be sweating. At times, Emily and Austin had to cling to the trees they were sampling to avoid slipping farther down the slope. And just as the tropicalness of the Paint Rock summer seemed overwhelming, the sky broke, and we found shelter from the rains in the coolness of one of Paint Rock’s largest and most spectacular caves.
Photos courtesy of Austin H. Parr, Lab Manager, Pennsylvania State University and Emily Scott, Ecology Program, MS Student, Pennsylvania State University
We brought back DNA specimens of 14 yellowwood, another sighting of Paint Rock’s rare “extinct” hawthorn, plenty of ticks and chiggers, and an encounter with a large and strangely pale timber rattler. To see yellowwood, sometimes you have to really want to.
This won’t be the last you hear about yellowwood. We had a conversation with HudsonAlpha Biotechnology Institute, and we all agreed that a more detailed effort to undercover the tree’s whole genome, rather than just snippets, will be necessary for the future of this work. We’ll be working with all concerned to understand what yellowwood can tell us about the history and future of eastern forests.
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 for a campout—rather it’s a Malaise trap for collecting small creatures with big implications for life on this Earth.
Photo by Kendra Abbott
Kendra and John Abbott, professional nature photographers, educators, and outdoor enthusiasts both with roles at The University of Alabama, are supporting a national effort to study insect trends. Along with more than 150 other researchers, the Abbotts are gathering insect biomass and diversity insights from two collection sites across Alabama for the last couple years.
“Insects affect everything,” Kendra says. “Their decline is directly related to our survival.”
Dr. Peter Dunn, biologist from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, began this North American–focused study in 2019. Based on an insect biomass study that documented an alarming 75% decline in insect mass in Europe over 27 years, Dunn wanted to develop a standardized method for tracking insect trends in North America. Biomass—the number of insects found in the collections—are of interest, but Dunn also wants to understand the extent of insect biodiversity, too.
In 2024, the Abbotts saw the call for researchers to join this North American Insect Abundance Network. They noticed a gap in data for the Southeast that they wanted to help resolve, and Paint Rock became a key site for their project because of the amount of biodiversity already present. “A place with strong biodiversity all starts with geology and then moves up from there with plants and insects and everything else,” Kendra says.
Even two years ago, as teams collected insects, the amount of biomass proved so abundant that it became stressful to process. Now the Abbotts and others across the U.S. are already noting a drastic decline. “Last year was a breeze to process,” Kendra says. “There weren’t that many insects. This year is going to be even quicker.”
“Insects affect everything. Their decline is directly related to our survival.”
Insect declines do not have a single culprit but rather should be thought of as “death by 1,000 cuts”: many overlapping pressures that chip away at populations. Large‑scale agriculture and the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides, combined with the chemicals people put on their own lawns and gardens, strip away both insects and the plants they rely on. At the same time, habitat loss from logging and development, climate change, increasing light pollution, and more frequent extreme weather events—like hard freezes after warm spells or torrential rains and flooding—kill insects directly and weaken populations over time. Any one of these stressors might be manageable, Kendra says, but together they leave insects struggling to survive and recover.
As biomass has declined overall, the Abbotts’ team has also noticed an interesting shift in insect species distribution, where the amount of one species masks a striking loss in biodiversity with a sheer amount of its biomass. The Diptera group, which includes true flies like bee flies, tachinid flies (commonly mistaken for wasps), and assassin flies, has overtaken some samples—so much so that their bodies have overflowed the petri dishes as the Abbotts and their team sorted samples. Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, sawflies, and ants), Coleoptera (beetles), and moths, too, have shown peaks in samples at different times. Kendra says these single-species abundance they have been seeing is likely due to the species having a good year from a specific microclimate condition that the group needs.
The Abbotts rarely see butterflies, though in the past, Paint Rock has been well-known for butterflies. Nor do they see many Nematocera, a group that includes mosquitoes and crane flies, which are especially important for bird reproduction and fledgling rearing because of their high omega 3 fatty acid content. And the overall picture from the data, similar to Europe’s, is revealing a disturbing trend of loss for a body of creatures essential to most life on this planet.
With something as widespread and vital as insects, you do not have to be at the same level of research and conservation as Paint Rock Research Center to have a positive impact. Kendra emphasizes, “Adding anything you can to your yard that insects can come to visit for pollen or nectar—just little steps like that—can make huge differences in insect biomass.” Native plants are best, like black-eyed Susans and Texas star hibiscus, which are easier to find at local nurseries, but some non-native plants can also provide food for insects, too, such as zinnias, squashes, and lantana.
