Terra Ludis: Play Ground | Meet Naturalist Amy Renfranz

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Amy Renfranz is a naturalist and writer based out of Seven Devils, NC. You may have read her recurring "Dear Naturalist" column in the Watauga Democrat. In our interview, we asked her to tell us about her favorite memories outdoors.

You can't help but love spring and all the ephemerals that pop up first, just watching them, and sometimes I've even forgotten they existed in the year since, and all of a sudden an old friend shows up on the forest floor and it's pretty exciting...

Down in Wilson Creek actually, we were just camping out, and we had gone out at night salamandering – looking for the salamanders – salamanders are nocturnal, especially the terrestrial salamanders. At night, it becomes more humid, they need that cool moisture on their skin to be able to breathe – so they come out at night, and a lot of time they’ll crawl on top of rocks or up on the trees, and just in this one little area, we found all these Yonahlossee salamanders, which I’d only seen one before then, so that was awesome. They’ve got these orange markings, and light blue and dark blue – one of the most beautiful wild creatures. And then we hiked back to our camping spot and look up on the hill and there’re all these blue lights, little blue lights, hundreds of them, close to the forest floor, and just moving really slowly, never turning off. But they look like what you would imagine fairies just like slowly drifting through the leaf litter and up above, and it was fantastic. We walked over to where they were on this hillside and just looking up, it was hypnotizing, and they slowly started to go dim and the lights went out, and it turns out they were blue ghost fireflies, which I hadn’t even heard of, and there they were, living by the hundreds if not thousands on this one little hillside in the Wilson Creek area. That experience was just – that’s the wonder and the excitement that I think is worth living life for.

In this image, Amy is holding a recently shed antler from an elk at Grandfather Mountain State Park.

Photo by Collin Jewell.

#optoutside #naturalist #hiking #wonder #nature

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