Somewhere after 2 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday in mid-March, the chaotic wind of a descending helicopter whipped the calm skies above the Appalachian Trail near Icewater Spring Shelter. Four people — two Smoky Mountains Hiking Club volunteers and two Appalachian Trail Conservancy employees — waited at the intersection of the Boulevard and Appalachian trails, watching the bundle of black locust logs suspended below the chopper come to a gentle rest in the small forest opening.

With 360-degree vision, bright-colored bodies that sparkle jewel-like in the sun and acrobatic flight patterns reaching speeds of nearly 35 miles per hour, dragonflies are some of the more glamorous members of the insect world.

It’s wildflower season in the Great Smoky Mountains, and beneath the long morning shadows at Chestnut Tops Trail near Townsend, Tennessee, Tom Harrington is in his element. We’ve barely reached the trailhead sign before Harrington, a hiking and “wildflowering” aficionado and park volunteer of 25 years, pauses to point out the colonies of purple flowers painting the path — purple phacelia (Phacelia bipinnatifida), a native wildflower whose nectar is said to make some of the best honey around.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachians, an ancient landscape teeming with life — including what naturalist and explorer William Bartram in 1791 called “insects of infinite variety,” many of them “admirably beautiful.” Some 200 years later, naturalist E. O. Wilson would describe them as the “little things that run the world.” 

The four-state mountain region that includes Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to an estimated 14,500 black bears, but one particular animal had caught the attention of a watchful police chief in one of the park’s gateway communities.

Every year, millions of people visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park to experience its clear mountain streams, verdant views, and diverse forms of natural beauty. The mountains exert a powerful spell — but too often, that spell is broken by the sight of plastic bottles and candy wrappers scattered beside trailheads and overlooks, fast food bags and old tires flung along roadsides and plastic bags or balloons hung in treetops. 

Southern Appalachia affords many opportunities to watch and learn more about our diverse species of wildlife. At my home near the border of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, I see migrating and breeding birds, wild turkeys rearing poults, white-tailed deer with their fawns and the occasional black bear.

Mike Meldrum could claim his current occupation as a third career — if he weren’t so careful to avoid calling it a job.

“I want to have fun and feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with my time,” said Meldrum, a former park ranger whose handiwork has raised $37,000 in support of Great Smoky Mountains National Park during the last two years alone.

Mindy Fawver is retired from a career in commercial photography and graphic design, while her husband, Doug Bruce, works as an industrial alignment engineer; neither has a professional background in biology, conservation, or taxonomy. But together, the couple has documented more than 60 species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park never before recorded there.

With wrinkly skin that comes in various shades of brown, eastern hellbenders aren’t easy to spot. These giant salamanders, which average 20 inches in length, spend most of their lives nearly invisible under rocks on the bottom of cool, fast-flowing streams.