I think I've been on Lynn Mountain. If not, my students took me to do some surveys on one of the other peaks in the region, possibly Rich or Blue Bouncer. Let's see, Scarlet Tanager, Ovenbird, Acadian Flycatcher, Indigo Bunting (up on top in the stunted oak forest), etc. My biggest surprise there was Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Down in the valleys there were a lot of North Parulas and Louisiana Waterthrush. The pine forests were loaded with Pine Warbler, Yellow-breasted Chat, and Prairie Warbler. If you know what you're doing, you can find Bachman's Sparrow and Brown-headed Nuthatch. (We did.)
It's purty country - lots of mature oak-hickory forest (especially on northern exposures) and shortleaf pine on southern exposures. The plantations are mostly loblolly. The creek bottoms have a lot of hogs and yes, bears are numerous. One of my field techs was bluff-charged by a sow on Rich Mountain, if memory serves.
One of my academic pursuits is to compare breeding bird distributions in major habitat types from the core and from the edges of their ranges. In 2006 and 2007, I sent 2 teams of 2 field biologists to scour the Oklahoma side of the Ouachitas (and Ozarks!) for breeding birds, pretty much every day, from mid-May to mid-July. The point of this study was to nail down specific habitat preferences of primarily Appalachian birds at the southern and western limits of forests they use. My teams specifically targeted the highest peaks and the deepest, darkest riparian areas, as these provide microhabitat conditions most similar to what the birds might encounter closer to the core of their distributions hundreds of miles to the east.
They ran random transects through forest - I got to help them put some in a young pine plantation one sultry afternoon (good times). All-told, they collected data from hundreds of points and thousands of vegetation plots over the two summers. They visited the most squatchy places ol' Bobo could imagine. They started their work in the pre-dawn light. They spent a considerable amount of time just birding those places when they weren't working. These guys found (and photographed) some great stuff. As you might imagine, however, they never found anything the least bit bigfooty, other than ads for the Honobia festival in the shop windows in the towns.
Footers will tell you that no one goes to the woods. They'll tell you that folks only walk on the trails. They'll tell you that bird watchers only look for birds. When they tell you stuff like this, please call them on it, because it's b.s. Even the relatively remote and depopulated Ouachitas have biologists crawling over them now and again - mine was just the latest in a long list of field studies in that area. Other places I tend to work, e.g., public lands from New England down through the Appalachians, get even more attention from ecologists because there are so many colleges, universities, and other research outfits in proximity to them. I can only imagine the number of transects, plots, etc. that have been surveyed in the wilds of that great bigfoot bastion of Ohio. People generally have no clue about how much activity these "wild" areas receive, and from people with a burning desire to discover something new.
