[Music] Gulf winds blow through canopy roads all the way to Thomasville.

Native names written on the land echo through the Red Clay Hills.

Where the scent of long leaf Florida pine, reach up on past that Georgia line.

Stroll through Tallahassee town or southern Apalachee bound, take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Welcome to Local Roots.

I'm Suzanne Smith with WFSU Public Media.

When you're out in the woods in North Florida and South Georgia, it's natural to think about the native animals that call this place home.

But did you know that in Attipulgus Georgia, there is a non-native animal that considers it the perfect place to live?

WFSU's Tabitha Weinstein introduces us to In May 2023, Bo and Tarra welcome new roommate Mundi to her new home, an elephant refuge just north of the Georgia Florida border.

Mundi is a wild boar, an African savanna elephant, while Tarra and Bo are Asian elephants.

This introduction is a delicate situation.

That's because Mundi hasn't seen another elephant in more than three decades.

Okay, so this is.

Hello, How are you?

African.

I got my head up here.

I'm going to touch you on what Tarra is doing is a little trunk touch.

So just barely touching trunks.

That's a really, really good sign.

That is Carol Buckley.

She created and runs Elephant Refuge North America, in Attipulgus, Georgia.

After working with elephants for 40 years.

Buckley created the refuge to give formerly captive animals a way to live like the wild animals they are.

But what most people don't see is the psychological damage.

And we have to heal that in order for the body to heal.

So if you only are focusing on the body, if you're only doing vet care and you're not dealing with the psychological, you are not going to heal that, help that elephant to heal.

But you put them in an environment where they feel safe, where they have friends, where they're happy and they're playing.

What is that doing?

It's creating an endorphins, it's doing the healing process.

So internally in their mind and in their heart.

Then they start to heal.

And then the body can heal.

Mundi's life before the refuge hasn't been easy.

Transported to the United States, along with 62 other wild elephants, she was soon sold to the Dr. Juan Rivera Zoo of Puerto Rico.

The zoo and the Puerto Rican people loved Mindy.

But she spent 35 years in an area of 15,000 square feet, just over a quarter acre of land.

And she spent it all alone.

And Mundi is doing great.

She's doing absolutely even better than we expected for being alone for 35 years.

But that demonstrates that you never lose the wild that this animal.

You can bring a wild animal into captivity, but you don't change who they are.

You just inhibit their natural behavior by the facilities and the management that you you know, you put on them.

When the zoo's poor conditions forced it to close.

It was time for Mindy to find a new home, a place to live out the rest of her days.

But finding a retirement home for an eight foot tall, 8,000 pound, middle-aged elephant is not easy, especially one that is blind in one eye.

And missing a task.

Enter Elephant Refuge North America.

It took years for the arrangements to be made.

Then Buckley spent two weeks with Mundi at the zoo, making sure she was as comfortable as possible on her journey to the refuge.

But they're always wild.

She always has the elephant sense, and she always has that drive.

She may not know how to really correctly act around other elephants, but she can learn because they're so smart.

And Bo will teach her.

But before the duo of Bo and Tarra could become a trio with Mundi, they had to get to know each other with the fence in between them.

Bo was standing at the fence.

And Tarfa was over there, too.

And Mundi went over him for 45 minutes.

As I sat here, she played.

So she would roll around on the ground and get back up and interact with Bo and then down again and do the classic African elephant play, which is get on your wrist, put your face, put your face in the ground, kick your feet, run into the tree, come back again, shake your head, flop your ears.

That's all play behavior for African elephants.

Soon the elephants didn't need the fence anymore.

They spent time with 850 acres of forest pastures, creeks and ponds to play and wander.

They can communicate with other elephants three miles away, through the air, through the ground, 30 miles.

They feel all the vibration and energy that comes into their area, which is one of the reasons we're not open to the public, because I can't control people's energy.

Although the refuge is not open to the public, there are web cameras that capture the moments between the animals.

Called Ele-cams, they provide a peaceful way to observe the elephants in their new home.

This is what we want is for her to come here and be more tolerable and feel safe.

The elephants are not the only animals to make use of the refuge.

Mundi, Bo and Tarra are joined by canine friends such as Sammy, who can be seen playing outdoors together.

On the ele-cams.

For more information and elephant updates.

Visit Elephant Aid International dot org.

For WFSU Public I'm Tabitha Weinstein.

While you can only see Mundi, Bo, and Tarra on Webcams, you can see many animals native to this region at the Tallahassee Museum, WFSU's Rob Diaz de Villegas had an up close and personal, emphasis on purr, with a Florida Panther.

What's your favorite thing about working with cats or my favorite?

Always some of the Panthers and the Bobcats.

I just love them.

I mean, especially the ones that we have these days are just really personable.

They're happy to see us.

They cooperate.

They work really well with their training so we can inject them with their vaccines.

You got to see they purr and they were up against the fence.

So he had immature fractures in his humerus.

And that's the elbow that they did the stem cell transplant on.

So they injected the stem cells into his elbow joint.

And he does have arthritis because of it.

But we just do this laser therapy once a week and it's really easy, low level light therapy.

It helps with inflammation.

It can actually help break down arthritis.

They may play.

Obviously cats sleep 18 to 20 hours a day.

So there's a lot of sleeping.

These days they are pretty lazy because it's so hot and they are cats.

Florida Panthers are PUMAs, and PUMAs are the same as cougars and mountain lions.

And the Florida Panther is just a separate subspecies.

They were all connected all throughout the U.S. Now the Florida panther is in this small section of southwest Florida.

So the Florida panther itself would have bred with other cougars PUMAs in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and all the way through Texas.

The apex predator is almost removed from the Florida landscape.

The red wolves or other apex predator has been completely removed from the landscape.

It's crazy to think that in our own backyards there would have been Panthers and Red wolves.

Having them on our landscape helps protect plants and animals and other species.

Rob has done several stories over the years That takes a look at controlled burning and its impact on our woodland areas.

But today he's doing something a little bit different in a special WSU ecology project collaboration with the PBS program NOVA, he explores how fire locally can impact climate change globally.

And the findings might be different than what you expect.

The forest is on fire, but what looks like destruction is actually helping the plants and animals that live here open canopy, lower tree stocking.

Those characteristics are really good for a lot of our plant and animal biodiversity here.

Fire reduces competition.

The bloomers pop up and they all start competing with one another to see because you've got open ground everywhere after a fire.

Good for plants and animals.

But could regular fire do much more and actually help this ecosystem take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

Right now we're on a prescribed burns.

We typically burn about 12000 to 13000 acres of our longleaf pine forests every year.

Josh Public is a scientist at the Jones Center, a 29,000 acre research facility and preserve in South Georgia, composed mostly of longleaf pine forests.

Today, the Jones Center crew is intentionally burning part of their preserve.

A lot of people will think that these fires are massive fires, but with the prescribed fire, it's really reducing a lot of the understory component.

So not a very intense fire.

Fire thins out the underbrush while leaving fire resistant longleaf pines unharmed.

This eliminates what could become fuel for a more intense wildfire while making space for native wildlife that has evolved in this landscape.

Bryan Means is with the Coastal Plains Institute.

Historically, before Europeans arrived and altered the natural fire regime of the Longleaf pine ecosystem, fires were ignited by lightning, and that's been the case climatically for thousands, if not tens of thousands and even millions of years here.

That fire does have an environmental drawback.

During prescribed fires.

Here we are emitting carbon to the atmosphere.

All that plant material that is burning is composed of carbon, mostly stored as carbohydrates in the plants bodies.

When it burns much of it turns into carbon dioxide.

So how is it that burning can be beneficial to the environment to understand just shows as part of the lonely forest that hasn't been managed with fire right here in this position, we can't see over a hundred hundred feet into the woods here.

It's very hard for us to see visually through this than you might think.

The more densely packed vegetation means more carbon is stored here.

That's true.

But it also means there's more fuel.

So you have a lot of buildup of what we call ladder fuel.

So if a fire was to occur in here, a wildfire, then fire could move up through that made canopy position and then carry on into the crowns of those overstory longleaf pine.

So you may have a high intensity crown fire, which would release a lot of carbon and probably result in a lot of mortality of Overstory Pine, Florida is the lightning capital of the US, so the plants and animals that thrive here are adapted to fire.

Regular burning in this ecosystem helps prevent catastrophic wildfires which can burn even the big fire resistant trees, the ones that store the most carbon.

So this smaller fire helps keep that carbon in the trees and out of the air.

But still with regular burning of the underbrush, could the system be burning away more carbon than it stores during prescribed fires?

Here we are emitting carbon into the atmosphere, but usually what we have is this regrowth of plant species and then a lot of flushing of new foliage from these longleaf pine plants in the forest grow by capturing carbon through photosynthesis.

New growth between zero and 60 days after burn is considered to be growth that the burn promoted.

But is the carbon captured by the growth more than the fire emitted?

To figure this out, researchers take all the living and dead organic material within one square meter, weigh it and figure out the carbon concentration.

This gives them an idea of the average content of an area in about 30 to 60 days.

The net carbon uptake of this system is similar to pre fire levels, a very resilient system.

It recovers really well after skyfire and for as much carbon as is stored above ground, there may be more below.

In a lot of forest ecosystems you can have as much as half of the total ecosystem carbon in the forest soil.

Carbon in soil comes from decomposing plant material.

But fire burns plant matter, partnering with tall timbers Research Station Ping Hsieh has been studying soil in long leaf plots where fire has been excluded and those which are frequently burned in soil organic matter level in the burn plot actually is higher than the unburned plot.

One reason might be black carbon.

You see, for a good long time, for months and even years after a burn, you can see the freshly charred pine needles and twigs and pine bark and search and rub it around your fingers and and see the black carbon there.

This partially combusted material makes its way into the soil where it can stay for a while.

Research conducted by one of Dr. Shwe students finds that dead plant material might store carbon longer if it's burned on average, if you harvest a plant material like my student did and a bury into the soil 3 to 4 years, all this material go back to the atmosphere.

And if you turn that raw material into black carbon, the main resins that will increase at least 100 times.

To be clear, there are some drawbacks with burning.

For example, it can send smoke into inhabited areas where it can affect people with respiratory ailments.

But smoke can have a much greater health impact than uncontrolled wildfires.

While the Jones Center is still in the process of researching carbon in the longleaf pine ecosystem, what it has learned so far is that with regular burning to promote healthy growth, the system is at worst carbon neutral and can even possibly help draw CO2 from the atmosphere.

And so for a longleaf pine forest in the American Southeast, regular fire creates the best carbon scenario.

A man with a never give up attitude is the focus of this next story by WFSU's Mike Plummer.

He met an artist who doesn't let the fact that he's going blind, prevent him from painting a better tomorrow.

My name is James Cocke and my last name is spelled C-o-c-k-e. Tell everybody put an e on that thing or you won't find me If you're looking for me.

That is James Cork.

And he has end stage glaucoma.

I started seeing flashes of light and I didn't think was normal.

It was glaucoma.

And that's the eye pressure.

And I found out that you can have a stroke from glaucoma if you if it's left untreated.

And you can lose your vision, your vision becomes the peripheral vision, get smaller and smaller.

And if it's untreated, you can actually go blind.

James first came to our attention when he did A Voices that Inspire a segment for WFSU Radio.

Here's this week's Voices That Inspire.

My name is James Cocke and I'm... His glaucoma has snuffed out his vision in one eye and severely hinders vision in his other.

Aside from his visual predicament, James impressed us with his unique sense of humor and his never give up glass half full, always positive attitude.

There's old folkss, we're talking and we'll have a brain freeze.

And in the thought just jumps out your pocket and runs down the road and it's gone.

So I say don't pull it off.

And for tomorrow, do it today.

That attitude has led James to an unusual activity for someone with his condition: painting.

It was Father's Day of last year, so last June, and I'm up to about 450 paintings.

And they're full of you know, he gave me a new lease on life and I just I've enjoyed it so much and I'm sure if I had two great eyes, I would be an okay artist.

I challenge anybody to shut one eye.

and put a screen over the other one and see what they can do.

You know, when I first started and I started doing the patterns and I thought, Well, I see the same pattern every day.

It varies, but the shapes change a little bit.

So when I wake up in the morning and I see that pattern, I get directly to the to the, oh, my little studio is a junk room that I paint in and I try to emulate what I saw the night before.

If I'm not if I'm not painting, I'm thinking about or what I'm gonna paint or how to do it a little differently.

And so it's always on my mind that it might If I think of something in the middle of the night, I'll just reach over and grab my phone and go to the reminder and say, I want to do this or I want to do that.

I thought of one last night.

I thought about the old cottontail rabbit down here in the south with that little white tail.

I thought, I'll just pay his little, buft then call it the end.

Another interesting thing about James is that if he decides he wants to try something, he just does it.

He wanted to write a book, so he wrote one and then a couple more.

I like telling stories and and I wanted to tell my story and but I never claimed I was a writer, so I've had people tell me, said James, I loved your stories, but I hated the format, you know, or this, that and the other.

But this is a picture of the city, a river that runs from Waycross to to the coast, and it starts out in my younger days on Doghill you know, and it goes on and there's probably 500 stories in there.

Oh, I had a little notepad when I was selling air conditioner that I would say I'm going over to Joe Smith House to give him a quote and then I think of a story.

But the snake in the car or, you know, some crazy little snippet.

And that night I would come home, put it on a yellow legal pad.

Well, after six years, I said it's time.

And I started putting it in chronological order and my memory would not allow me.

It just it just I couldn't get it right.

And that's the reason I tell people, go ahead and do stop them.

You know, don't don't procrastinate.

And finally, James shares an experience I think is helpful to understanding his positive outlook.

My appendix ruptured back 20 something years ago and I was in the hospital.

And you never know if you have good insurance or not until you have to use it.

And I had some crappy insurance and I'm laying there and I'm thinking if I live, I don't even know who will pay for all this.

We were in a bind.

But I'm telling you, I never once thought, Lord, take me home now cause I can't.

You know, I'm not be able to afford all this.

It's just that will to live.

I think that a lot of people have.

So I've got three great children and I got five great grandchildren and great daughter and loves.

I mean, I've been blessed.

When you look at other people's woes I have been in just because I can't see very well.

You know, that's something that is not don't make me say I quit.

I'm just not going to.

Sounds like a good lesson for all of us.

For WFSU Public Media, I'm Mike Plummer.

Learn more about James Cook at the WFSU Local Roots website.

In this week's Spotlight, we feature a local artist with a special in-studio performance.

Here's Kanese.

It's not personal.

Well, maybe it is because of feeling these things when I look at you.

It feels so true.

But I know it won't last.

Got baggage from the past and I'll be damned if you carry all that pain.

I'd rather walk away.

It's not anything you do.

You've been perfect.

And you try to fix and make it work.

When you came in was broken.

It's so hard to say.

No, no, no.

So maybe I should go.

Maybe I should go.

Oh, wouldn't it be nice?

Nice.

Nice.

If I could keep this love for life?

But I doubt that, doubt that, doubt that, doubt that, doubt that.

Doubt that.

But atleast we have tonight.

Oh, wouldn't it be nice?

Wouldn't it be nice?

Your hands all over me here brings me ecstasy.

You seem so good for me.

It'll be so easy till I get jealous.

Overzealous in the hell you cause over rebellion.

Give you heartbreak for no reason.

Heart infected with treason.

It's not personal.

This hotmess was here before you came along.

Came along.

We both know going in what was going on.

So don't be shocked that in the morning I'll be gone.

Wouldn't it be nice, nice, nice.

If I keep this love for life, but I doubt that, doubt that, doubt that.

Doubt that.

But at least we have tonight.

Wouldn't that be nice.

If I could keep this love for life.

But I doubt that.

Doubt that.

Doubt that.

Doubt that.

Doubt that.

Doubt that.

tonight?

Wouldn't it be nice.

You can learn more about Katnise and hear more of her music on our WFSU YouTube channel under our Spotlight playlist and on our WSU Local Routes website.

That's it for this episode of Local Roots.

You can find these stories and more on our website, WFSU.org/localroutes And while you're online, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Plus, don't forget to sign up for our community calendar newsletter.

Delivered weekly to your email, it is a great way to stay on top of events happening in person and in the virtual world.

I'm Suzanne Smith.

For everyone at WFSU Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Have a great week, everyone.

Magnolia trees greet the southern breeze in the land where rivers wind.

Seeds spring up from the past and leave us treasures yet to find.

Where our children play along the land our fathers built with on honest hands.

Take a moment now and look around at the paradise we have found.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

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