Volunteers help remove the Venus flytrap from harm’s way

Spring Boiling Lakes – The rain did not interrupt them as they squatted down, piercing thick bushes and muddy soil with their shelters.

The drizzling, intermittent and short-lived Monday morning in Boiling Spring Lakes was a welcome respite from the morning high temperatures that would reach 91 degrees in the afternoon.

Neither rain nor clouds, heat and sun would halt the impending construction work along the bottom of the shallow trench where a group of volunteers worked enthusiastically digging as many Venus flytraps as possible to replant them away from the roadside on which they grew by the hundreds.

The development and lack of burning, a critical management tool for flycatcher habitats, has led to a decline in the number of rare, arguably exotic but utterly fascinating carnivorous plants that occur naturally only within a 75-mile radius around Wilmington.

in this little one City of Brunswick Province About 8 miles northwest of Southport, the Venus flytrap has migrated into ditches alongside roads built years ago to accommodate new housing.

These sites provide the moist, open habitat that flycatchers need to grow and thrive, in contrast to the areas they migrated from which are now overgrown with trees and shrubs that filter the sunlight that the low-to-the-ground flycatcher needs.

Efforts to protect a roadside flytrap refuge prompted the city to take over management of streetside mowing in areas that would have been managed by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Now there is interest in building homes on vacant lots where plants once grew. Utility crews will soon begin excavating areas to install water and sewer lines.

“We’re running out of time,” said Tyler Gramley, the company’s vice president. Saracenia Reserve in North America Board of Directors and Volunteers. “Hopefully we can get them all. The more you look the more there are. It’s great. Everything is great.”

Gramley bent down to help the others, who were carefully digging under and pulling up the flycatchers, the roots of the plants hidden in lumps of damp black soil.

Several of the volunteers were frequent flycatcher retrievers who had come over a week earlier to remove plants and replant them on a different roadside.

The group of about a dozen volunteers—young and old—were city dwellers, conservationists, business owners, and out-of-town residents who lend their time, knees, and backs to give plants that in North Carolina are considered an “interesting species” a chance at survival.

“We have the largest population (of flytraps on Venus) per capita, with humans among them,” said Stephanie Bodmer, owner of The Boiling Spring Lakes Motel. “We live with them. We work to preserve them.”

Bodmer is the volunteer coordinator for the flytrap relocation effort, which was galvanized by Julie Moore, a woman whose life’s work has been focused on protecting habitats.

Moore, a retired endangered species biologist Heroes Venus Flytrap To help the Carolinas’ landlords and managers take care of flytrap collections, she was going late Monday morning. An accident on Interstate 40 left her sitting at a standstill on the highway as she traveled from her home in Raleigh to Boiling Spring Lakes.

By the time I got to the site where the volunteers were picking up fly traps by the dozens and carefully putting them into plastic crates for transport, the volunteers were getting ready to head to the site where the plants would be moved.

Beware of fishermen—poaching the Venus flycatcher is a felony—Moore asked Coastal Review not to disclose locations where flycatchers are removed and relocated. Plants are replanted within the lands owned and operated by the town.

The Venus flytrap lacks threatened and endangered species protection despite its dwindling habitat. In fact, in late July, the US Fish and Wildlife Service issued a decision not to list the Venus flytrap at the federal level.

“There is nothing else like them,” Moore said. “Taking it is protected, but the habitat is not. That’s the real problem.”

The Venus flytrap lives in the open savanna of longleaf pines, a habitat that has dwindled dramatically from an estimated 90 million acres stretching from Virginia to Florida and southwest Texas to just over 3 million acres today.

Conservation groups work to preserve and restore tallleaf pine forests. Ten years ago, the Nature Conservancy acquired more than 450 acres of longleaf pine forest in the Bench Got Ridge, an area critical to the conservation of the Green Swamp Reserve.

The preserve, which sprawls over 17,000 acres north of Supply on NC Highway 211, is known for its carnivorous plants and orchids, the same species that grow in Boiling Spring Lakes, a boomtown like much of Brunswick County east of US 17.

When Boiling Spring Lakes resident Amber Townsend moved here 14 years ago, she had no idea the factory that inspired the popular Broadway show-turned-movie, Little Shop of Horrors, was thriving in the area.

It wasn’t until about four years ago, when she visited a local farmers’ market, that she discovered the city is a “known hotspot,” according to Moore, for Venus flycatchers.

Townsend spoke enthusiastically of her machinations to the Venus flytrap as she sat on the ground and carefully excavated every plant she saw. She wore a straw hat decorated with a fake version of the carnivorous plant. The hat matched the Venus Flytrap earrings she was wearing.

“I really loved these plants, and when I discovered there was a way to preserve them, I wanted to help,” she said.

She was one of the returning volunteers who, just over a week ago, had transported some 370 plants.

Volunteer Jared Lukavsky drove from his home in Charlotte for the second time to volunteer.

“I fell in love with these plants a couple of years ago when I saw one at Walmart,” he said. “At the time I didn’t know they were natives. It’s almost the definition of nature to have a plant that wants to eat an insect.”

Boiling Spring Lakes resident Kathy Sykes has lived here for more than 30 years. She vividly recalled seeing the Venus Flytrap for the first time while riding a horse on her property.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “This is a unique little area we live in.”

Moore agreed.

“The boiling of spring lakes is strange as you can see the Venus flytrap running down the road,” she said. “They are endlessly cool. We will continue to do so. We hope to make the area where we moved the Flycatcher an educational place.”