The Cheat Mountain salamander is one of 30 species of salamanders known to occur in West Virginia. It was discovered by Graham Netting and Leonard Llewellyn on White Top Mountain, Randolph County in 1935 and was described (named) by N. Bayard Green in 1938.

There are over 70 known sites for this species in the mountainous areas of Tucker, Grant, Randolph, Pendleton and Pocahontas counties.

Indigenous forests across North America have been and continue to be transformed. The implications of these changes are far reaching and include the loss of habitat, biological diversity, and ecological services, as well as diminished air and water quality. The northern flying squirrel is a forest obligate that achieves its highest density in old growth, facilitates critical symbiotic relationships, and is  an essential prey of disturbance-sensitive predators. Its reliance on old-forest attributes varies with community diversity, and its sensitivity to isolation renders it an ideal indicator of landscape connectivity. The results of numerous studies reveal the squirrel’s acute sensitivity to disturbance at multiple spatial scales, which renders it an effective sentinel of forest ecosystem processes and condition over both geological and ecological time scales. Therefore, a thorough understanding of its ecology can inform projections and the effectivemitigation of continued disturbance of ecological communities of boreal and montane coniferous forests.

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Imagine if small families of mastodons lived in isolated areas on mountaintops. People would think such creatures were very special and that it was remarkable, possibly miraculous, that these animals from ancient times were living in our present age. A subspecies as old as mastodons lives today in isolated clusters atop the central Appalachian Mountains in the highest elevations of West Virginia and adjacent Highland County, Virginia. A relic of former ages when the earth was very different, the West Virginia northern flying squirrel was isolated from the northern flying squirrel species when ice sheets covering North America receded about 10,000 years ago.

The most distinctive characteristics of the Blackburnian Warbler are its treetop ecology and the breeding male’s color. One of a large genus of morphologically and ecologically similar warblers, the Blackburnian is the only one with orange in its plumage. The male’s striking black-and-orange pattern makes some observers think of a miniature oriole. Its canopy nesting habits have defied many researchers’ efforts to study its breeding ecology. An estimated 57% of its global population nests in Canada’s Boreal region.