- Hi there, I'm Frank Graff.

How fire is helping to restore an iconic North Carolina landmark.

Why a rare woodpecker calls a special stand of trees home.

And the science of the canopy ant.

We're talking science in the forest, next on Sci NC.

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- [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[upbeat music] ♪ - Hi again and welcome to Sci NC.

We have all been horrified by images of massive wildfires the past couple of summers, fueled by drought, worsened by climate change.

Remember the huge wildfires in the western United States in 2022?

And we've all experienced the smoke from Canadian wildfires this summer.

But what happens to the forest after the flames die out?

While a wildfire roared over North Carolina's Pilot Mountain in 2021, as part of her series marking the Year of the Trail in North Carolina, producer Michelle Lotker hiked a trail at Pilot Mountain State Park that shows nature's resilience after fire.

- My gosh, look at all the flowers.

Look at the little ferns coming back.

Little curly ferns, and then we can see a lot of blueberry flowers in here.

And there's even some- - There's some berries on that's on the, is that on the briar?

- I can't tell, oh, maybe if they're on the briar.

- It looks like it's on the briar.

- I thought they were blueberries, this is a trick.

Green briar strikes again.

[laughing] It might seem like we're a little too excited about some pretty common plants, but what if I told you a little over a year ago, this whole area was on fire?

In November of 2021, someone lit a campfire at an undesignated campsite in Pilot Mountain State Park.

The fire spread to the rest of the park over several days and burned more than a thousand acres, including the top of Pilot Knob, which was hard to watch, but it turns out wasn't the worst thing for the fire adapted plants that live up there.

- [Janet] Because there's no other way to manage the vegetation up there except for with fire.

- I'm at Pilot Mountain State Park with Janet Pearson, Forest Service Ranger for Surry County, in North Carolina.

There's an awesome overlook in the park, where after a short hike, you can view the unique geological feature and North Carolina icon, that is Pilot Mountain, along with other peaks in the Sauratown mountain range, like Sauratown Mountain and the peaks of Hanging Rock State Park.

What is Pilot made out of, if that means that it's still here while the rest of the land has eroded away?

- So it's a Monadnock quartzite, Monadnock just means rocky hill outcrop.

And what has happened is everything that was a loose, softer material has eroded down into the valley floors between the three peaks.

So it looks like they're isolated mountains when they're actually part of the one mountain range.

- Pilot Mountain is no stranger to fire.

The high elevation attracts lightning strikes, which can start wildfires.

There was a wildfire here in the 1920s and it burnt the entire mountain.

We've had few wildfires between 1920s to early 2000s, and they've been relatively small.

Most of them we was able to get in there and get it put out.

- In 2003, the state park decided to introduce prescribed fire as a management tool at Pilot Mountain, and they've continued to expand how they use fire to manage the ecosystem.

- The whole mountain itself is a fire dependent ecosystem, whether you're burning for a specific species, or you're just opening the canopy to get sunlight to the floor so the next mighty oak tree can grow, or you're creating forage and habitats for the whitetail deer or the wild turkey.

The entire mountain benefits from fire.

The fire was in the entire area that you can see here in the park, but actually the most intense section was right here, and that's where we have a lot of the mortality, which is basically the dead trees.

Some people think that that's very devastating, but looking at it today, you see all of the green undergrowth in there.

You see that the forest floor is just benefiting from the opening here.

It's gonna be really exciting to go out there and look and see what's coming back the second season after the fire.

- Awesome, well let's get down there.

- Okay.

- We explored the popular Pilot Knob Trail which loops around the base of the big pinnacle.

- This is Galax.

When seasonal changes, it actually produces a odor, and some people think it smells really bad.

I don't know, I enjoy it, but I guess 'cause I love being outside.

- So this whole area was burnt, where we're at right now?

- Yes, it was not as intense.

Your intensity changes where the sun exposure is.

So on the northern facing slopes, you're not gonna have as much intense fire because it's gonna stay moist because it didn't get as much sunlight.

- So the grindstone fire covered almost the whole footprint of the park, but this area was really one of the hotter spots.

- Correct, we've got about five acres here that you're seeing a lot more charring in.

And the one good thing though with all the charring that you see and the blackened trees and the dead, is that you're also seeing a lot of new growth.

It's just a whole sea of green, which is great.

- These flowers are gorgeous, what plant is this?

- This is bristly locust, and this is a native plant here in the park and here in this area of North Carolina.

However, the population of the bristly locust has exploded after the fire, and when you look around, you look below us there is bristly locust everywhere.

It's almost like a sea of pink blossoms in here right now.

- So is this the Catawba rhododendron?

- No, it is not.

- Okay, what is this?

- It is the mountain laurel.

This is a great example of the regeneration effects that we get.

Sometimes the mountain laurel can get up to six foot tall.

When you're burning it stunts it back, so you have the old growth here, but it'll come back up out of the root system and be the smaller shrub that it's supposed to be.

Keeping it small and short like this allows other plants the opportunity to grow.

- Fire trims the Catawba rhododendron the same way.

And we could see it flowering down this slope.

One of the reasons the vegetation is bouncing back so quickly is because of previous prescribed burns in the area.

- Burning reduces all of that amount of fuel that's there, it'll take like the dead limbs and everything.

And so if there isn't a wildfire coming through, the intensity of the heat is not as devastating on the trees and the plants.

- Less intense fires means less danger for firefighting crews and the animals that live in the area.

- And the park staff here, I think they reported that they didn't find any mortality.

So I know during the fire we were seeing whitetailed deer as soon as the the black area cooled off, we were seeing whitetailed deer going in, they're very curious.

We've seen a lot of songbirds move through right after it.

- The pine species in this area have some unique adaptations to fire.

- Oh, there's one right coming out from the bark.

- This is pretty wild looking, what is happening here?

- So this is a pitch pine, and this is called Epicormic branching or Epicormic growth.

This is something that you don't typically see in pine trees.

This is the only one, the pitch pine, that actually has the needles that come straight out of the bark.

Normally when you look at a pine tree, the needles come off the branches, and not out of the trunk of the tree.

- Pitch pines use Epicormic growth as a regeneration tactic in times of stress, like fire or disease.

- It'll grow out and do what it needs to do and then it kind of sheds off.

- The extra growth can compensate for decreased foliage on the rest of the tree and take advantage of more available sunlight.

- A lot of times folks will say, what is that wooly booger pine tree?

And normally they're talking about a pitch pine.

- It looks like a wooly booger caterpillar.

- Yes it does.

- But this is really great to see out here.

Another example of the regeneration that's going on.

- And a lot of pine species have cones that are specially adapted to fire.

- Originally the pine cone will look like this, like a armored shell, and then when the heat opens it up, it opens it to this beautiful pine cone here and releases the seed.

And the seed actually looks like charred pieces of wood, so like birds won't come by and collect it.

- They're adapted to bounce back after a fire, it really benefits them there.

- And they're what we call a fire dependent species.

And so for this species to continue to grow and be healthy, and reproduce, it needs fire.

And the fire had been suppressed in this park prior to 2003 for almost a hundred years.

So the population density was getting really small.

- So if you come out and explore the park, you'll see some charred trees, but you'll also see a lot of regrowth.

- Today coming back a year and a half later, it's really exciting to see all of the natural regeneration it's coming up in here.

It's such a good visual for folks to see because, where a lot of folks had the emotional tie to the park, they really thought that the mountain was gone forever, they would never get to come back to enjoy the park and see anything green in the park.

And they was really worried about the animals and the trails.

It gives me great excitement to be able to show people that it is rebounding, and it's doing its natural process, and that is what we want to see.

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- Go anywhere in the forest and you'll find ants.

Source of curiosity or annoyance, scientists estimate there are at least 20 quadrillion ants in the field, that's a million billion.

That's 20 with 15 zeros behind it.

By the way, Antarctica is the only place you won't find ants.

Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences shows us an ant you might not see before, because it's up in the trees, it's the canopy ant.

- [Adrian] This is Michelle.

She's about 30 feet up a tree on her way to look for insects.

- [Michelle] Ooh, there's a wasp nest up here.

- [Adrian] But she's not looking for wasp.

- [Michelle] Okay, maybe it's old.

- [Adrian] She's looking for ants.

And this is actually her last climb after spending four field seasons up in trees, figuring out who lives in the canopy.

- So in the summer, it was like way easier to find the ants 'cause they were like out and about and doing things.

But then like now, they've been a lot harder to find.

- So that day that I went out in the field with Michelle, she didn't find any antoinette tree, but I went out with her 'cause there's not very many people climbing trees to collect insects.

And I think the research she does is extraordinary.

So I went with her to learn more about what she does.

- Yeah, as far as I know, I am the only person in this part of the world who's ever done a study involving climbing up trees to see what insects are living up in the canopy.

Yeah, this tree's special because there is a colony of the rare Aphaenogaster species, Aphaenogaster mariae.

So it was described in like the 1860s, and since then has only been collected a few handfuls of times.

It's so rare in the sense that it's hard to find, but also rare in the sense that even as I've been all around here climbing and sampling more than a hundred trees in this area, we've only found it in five trees total.

When I started this project and when I pitched this project, people were kind of skeptical about it because we were like, nothing really lives in the canopy year round.

And my work has proven that that's not the case, and we're finding lots of species that live up there and that use the canopy as a resource.

There's a orange flag marking a little knob in the tree up there, and that's where there's an ant nest.

And there's a thermo couple up in the tree.

And since November has been recording the temperature of the inside of the ant nest, once an hour, every hour.

So what I've learned from putting all these thermal couples out is that the canopy has a much more extreme environment, it has hotter hots and colder colds than the ground does.

Once I collect the ants in the canopy and on the ground, I really wanna know their thermal tolerances.

So I have these little thermal chambers that I can put the ants in, and then over a period of hours, I can slowly increase or decrease the temperature to test the ant's thermal limits.

And what we're finding is that ants that live up in the canopy are more adapted to this extreme environment.

They're able to handle hotter temperatures.

At the core of it, I think, this work is important because it's giving us a better picture of what's going on in these forests that we are living near.

We're in a state park that people visit all the time, right off the trail.

We can hear the highway, there's a power line right there.

And we're just a few meters off the ground and discovering rare species, we're learning about how organisms live in extreme ecosystems and extreme environments that haven't been studied before.

We're so close to all of this undiscovered biodiversity, and it's fun to be a part of documenting and changing the perspective on that.

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- Keep walking through the forest and you'll also find crayfish if you stumble upon a small body of water.

Sometimes the water in that stream might look clean, but not always.

Researchers have discovered, and producer Rossie Izlar explains how crayfish can survive in any type of water.

- [Rossie] Hello, my little crayfish friend?

These freshwater lobster lookalikes are all over the south, even in some of the nastiest waters.

- Boy oh boy, I have seen cray fishes in some pretty disgusting waters.

- [Rossie] How they manage to live in those waters is a mystery.

But Bronwyn Williams, our resident crayfish expert, says the tiny worms that live on crayfish could be helping.

- [Rossie] There's one, oh hey little dude, okay.

So they have an adhesion point there, butt sucker, if I can say that, that they use to attach to the crayfish.

- [Rossie] Crayfish worms are completely dependent on crayfish for their reproduction.

- They actually need to deposit their cocoons with live embryos onto a living crayfish in order for that embryo to develop and then hatch into a worm.

- [Rossie] And what does the crayfish get out of this?

- What we see in the digestive tract of these crayfish worms, they are grazers for the most part.

So you'll find diatoms and algal material, anything that would really land and settle on that surface of the crayfish.

So they're effectively cleaners.

The crayfish is that I've collected that are just the most fouled, you know, just have the most sediment all over them, and even packed into the gill chambers, I don't find a single worm on them.

So cause and effect obviously, I mean that's anecdotal.

- [Rossie] Worms aren't even the only animals living on crayfish.

They're also home to these little shrimp looking things called ostracods, which seem to live in perfect harmony with the crayfish worm.

And unlike other ostracods, this species has developed claw like hooks, presumably to latch to the cray fish's shell.

So one crayfish literally contains multitudes.

- [Bronwyn] You can think of cray fishes as ecosystems all on their own.

- [Rossie] Also, here's a baby crayfish, you're welcome.

- [Announcer] Check out our weekly science blog to take a deeper dive on current science topics.

- Now to a special forest, and the rare bird that is only found in that forest.

Longleaf Pine forest used to cover 92 million acres, from Virginia to Texas.

Only about 3% of those forests remains.

And that is bad news.

If you're a red-cockaded wood paper, excuse me.

NC Culture Kids explains.

[upbeat music] - Hello everyone, it's Brandon here and today I'm at Weymouth Woods, Sandhills Nature Preserve, and I'm joined by Ranger Nancy.

- Well welcome Brandon, it's great to have you here.

We are all about the Longleaf Pine forest here, that's what we wanna protect.

So Longleaf Pine forest has a lot of really unique critters, plants and animals that live here that are very specific to just this habitat.

And so if you know, if we lose Longleaf, then we kinda lose them too.

So we really wanna make sure we're protecting Longleaf habitat.

And one of those creatures that I hope we get to talk about today a little bit are red-cockaded woodpeckers.

- Red-cockaded woodpeckers.

- Right.

So they're about, they're a medium sized woodpecker, maybe about the size of a robin or a Cardinal, something like that.

And they have that typical woodpecker look, so kind of black and white.

And the really noticeable thing is their bright white cheek patches, it's pretty obvious.

The name isn't so helpful, you'd think, right?

It's called a red-cockaded woodpecker.

That doesn't really help you much, 'cause only the males have a teeny tiny little bit on the side of their head and that's it, you really don't ever see it when you're out in the field.

So the reason they actually called it the red-cockaded woodpecker is because of that little red feather.

And the name cockade comes from the decorations that people used to put in their hats.

Back in the day people would put ribbons or a feather or something like that to decorate their hats, and that was called a cockade.

So red-cockaded woodpecker.

I like to say RCW and shorten it, 'cause it does get kind of a lot to say a lot of times.

- RCW, I love that.

Can we see some RCWs?

I've wanted to see them, but I don't know where to start.

- Yeah, so this is the perfect habitat, this open Longleaf pine forest, it's very, you know, you can see through it a lot.

We don't have a lot of understory, so these kind of shrubby plants down here, they kind of stay at a minimum, so that's the kind of habitat they like.

And then you just wanna look on the sides of typically pine trees, the bark is pretty easy to flake off for them.

And like all woodpeckers, they're really well adapted to foraging on the sides of trees.

So as they're going up and down the tree looking for food, they use their big long beak, and they have this super cool long tongue to kind of grab things and they're looking for bugs.

So spiders, ants, beetles, wood roaches, things like that.

And then as they're kind of going up the tree, they can hang on really well with their feet, which are especially adapted to hanging on the side of a tree.

They have two toes that point forward, and two that point backward, and it's called Zygodactyl feet.

And that just allows them to grip the side of the tree kind of better.

And then while they're doing that they can use their tail to sort of prop them up as they're feeding.

So really cool, really cool birds.

- Wow, Zygodactyl feet, that's a really cool sounding adaptation, and with their tails as well.

What about their behaviors though?

- One of the things about feeding that's pretty cool is, they will tend to separate out by male and female, 'cause a lot of times you'll find them in groups.

The males will generally feed up a little bit higher or out on the branches and the females will stay a little bit lower on the trunks, and that kind of reduces the competition in feeding so that there's enough food for everybody to go around.

So that's just one really cool thing about them.

- You mentioned that the RCWs like to live in pairs or groups or families.

Does that help them survive, and what kind of activities do they do as a group?

- So it's really important for RCW to live in groups, because they have a lot of work to do.

Every woodpecker in the group sleeps in their own hole in the tree or a cavity, and excavating those cavities is really difficult in these live pine trees.

The trees naturally ooze this really sticky resin when they have any kind of damage to them, so when the woodpeckers are tapping on them to excavate the cavity, it oozes out.

So it can take several years for them to build just one cavity.

So it's really helpful to have a whole team working on it.

- Well that sounds like a lot of tapping.

Do they ever get tired, do their heads hurt after that?

- Yeah, right, it takes two years to build a cavity, that is a lot of tapping.

Yeah, yo woodpeckers actually, and this is not just RCWs, but all woodpeckers have a super long tongue that kind of goes back and curls behind their skull and acts like a cushion.

So as they're tapping over and over again, they're not getting a massive headache, they're really well adapted for that type of behavior.

- Well that's good, I'm glad they're not hurting themselves.

But why don't they use dead trees?

Why do they prefer using the live Longleaf pines?

- That's a really good question.

So most woodpeckers use dead trees to nest and roost in.

But the red-cockaded woodpeckers actually use the live trees to their advantage.

So it makes it really hard to excavate a cavity 'cause of all that resin that they have to get through.

But it also means that they have this built-in sticky predator defense.

So basically once they excavate the cavity, they tap a bunch of little what's called resin wells around the outside of their opening, and it oozes that resin, creates this sticky mess all outside their home, and then things like rats, snakes and corn snakes that wanna climb up the tree and eat the birds, can't.

They all sleep in their own cavity.

So if they do one cavity per tree, then that means that they're gonna need one for every single bird in the group, which might just be the pair, sometimes it's just the mom and the dad, but sometimes it might be up to, you know, seven, eight birds in a group.

And so once they are working on all these trees kind of at the same time maintaining them all, we call it a cluster.

So we're standing in the middle of an RCW cluster right now.

- So does all this cluster building help the habitat in any way?

- Actually, yeah.

So RCWs, since they are excavating these cavities in a place that's pretty hard to excavate a cavity, they're actually opening it up for other animals to use too.

Sometimes flying squirrels will take over, possibly another woodpecker, or if they've abandoned their cluster for some reason, then other cavity nesters, like blue birds or nut hatchers are able to use those cavities as well.

- The RCW sounds really good for this habitat.

The other animals are really good at upcycling what they leave behind.

So I read in my field guide that RCW are endangered, is that true?

- Right, so RCWs are listed as federally endangered, and it's because they've lost a lot of their habitat.

They're pretty dependent on this Longleaf Pine forest.

And you know, over the centuries we've lost almost 97% of the original range of Longleaf Pine.

So that means we've also lost about 97% of RCW habitat.

- What is Weymouth Wood's Sandhills Nature Preserve doing to help the RCWs out?

- Yeah, so just being here is the first thing, right?

Just protecting the land itself.

They really depend on this long open Longleaf habitat.

And so just having it here and other lands that just protect Longleaf is the first step.

We also have biologists come and they kind of monitor the populations, they tag them, they sort of monitor them throughout the breeding season and then sometimes they even will start drilling cavities for them, sometimes they can even put in full cavity boxes.

So just that little extra edge to give them some more habitat.

- Well, Ranger Nancy, thank you so much for having me out here and joining me.

I'm really excited to take a look or walk the trails and keep an eye out for the RCWs, and be sure to stay on the trails and respect the wildlife while I'm here.

- Awesome, great to have you here, thanks for coming out and learning more.

- [Announcer] You can watch more Sci NC episodes anytime on our website or through the PBS streaming app.

- And that's it for Sci NC for this week.

But because it's such a North Carolina landmark, we thought we'd leave you with one more look at Pilot Mountain.

It's a unique view though.

This is how a bird flying through the trees would see Pilot Mountain.

Pilot Mountain State Park below, that iconic mountain up ahead.

And while you enjoy the view and the flight, a quick reminder, if you want more Sci NC, follow us on social media.

You can also stream it on the PBS streaming app.

Enjoy the flight, I'm Frank Graff, thanks for watching.

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