Flying squirrels, the only airborne mammals in the Americas (bats excepted), are sneakily common in Jamesland and across much of the continent. We may rarely encounter these shy creatures of the night, but the abundant acorns, beechnuts, and hickory nuts of our region support a thriving population nonetheless. When Richmond’s minor league baseball team held a naming contest and Flying Squirrels won out, it was a quirky but defensible choice of a mascot to represent the area.
But all of that pertains to the southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans, known to the Powhatan as assapan. At the other end of Jamesland lives a little-known and even more seldom-seen cousin to that species, with a very different lifestyle and very different circumstances.
Across the northern tier of states and through much of Canada, G. volans is replaced by the northern flying squirrel, G. sabrinus. Although they are superficially similar, their tastes and fortunes have diverged greatly over the millennia. While the southern species prefers hardwood forests, its northern counterpart is a devotee of conifers—spruce, fir, pine. While the southern species feasts on nuts, the northern has a more adventurous palate, sniffing out truffles beneath the forest floor and nibbling lichens and tree sap. And while the southern squirrel is doing just fine in a world transformed by humans, the northern has fared less well. A recent series of warmer winters expanded the former’s range northward by over a hundred miles—invading the territories of its cold-weather cousin, swamping its population with hybrids, and even delivering dangerous new parasites.
The retreat of the northern flying squirrel is nothing new, even if it has accelerated lately. During the Ice Age, when Jamesland’s landscape resembled much of modern Canada, that species may well have been the default over most of our region. The shrinking of the glaciers pulled the squirrels northward, along with the spruce woods on which they depended. But during that process, some of the squirrels were left stranded.
That brings us to the Virginia northern flying squirrel, Glaucomys sabrinus fuscus: a unique subspecies and a relic of the Pleistocene, clinging on to an “island” of cool northern forest in the high Alleghenies. The spruce and northern hardwoods (especially beech, birch, and maple) that support it occur today only in a meager patch of West Virginia and adjacent Virginia, including a small, fragile population on Allegheny Mountain at Jamesland’s topmost end. Over the years logging and coal mining destroyed enough of its habitat that the subspecies was added to the federal endangered list in the 1980s. That situation has since stabilized, with most of the squirrels now dwelling on carefully managed national forest land, and it has been delisted. But any animal with such a limited range is vulnerable, and the potential impacts of climate change are not well understood.
For now, though, the marooned squirrels of the high Alleghenies still follow the old ways of their ancestors and their far-northern kin. Their fascinating behavior includes glides of as much as 150 feet (not true flight, as impressive as it is, but technically a controlled fall using a patagium or flap of skin between the legs). It includes a highly eclectic diet of fungi, sap, flowers, bugs, bird eggs, and even carrion. And during the winter months, it includes the creatures’ habit of shacking up together in extended-family groups in tree holes to keep warm. The future of G. s. fuscus may be murky, but this remarkable survivor is one of Jamesland’s most distinctive citizens and an emblem of one of its most distinctive ecosystems.
In a time when our “big game” is no bigger than the white-tailed deer, and we are lucky to catch glimpses of a predator like the bobcat, it is easy to forget that Jamesland until recently supported far larger and more fearsome fur-bearing creatures. But consider the testimony of the German explorer John (Johann) Lederer, who reported the following while traversing the Virginia Piedmont in 1669:
Great herds of red and fallow deer I daily saw feeding; and on the hill-sides, bears crashing mast like swine. Small leopards I have seen in the woods, but never any lions, though their skins are much worn by the Indians. The wolves in these parts are so ravenous, that I often in the night feared my horse would be devoured by them…
It is startling to realize that for decades during the early colonial era, everything above the Fall Line was seen—with good reason—as a forbidding wilderness. What are we to make of Lederer’s litany of monstrous beasts, most of which match nothing in our modern-day experience? Let’s step through his fantastical-seeming account and flesh it out with facts.
First, Lederer encountered “great herds” of multiple species of deer and equated them understandably to the deer of his native Europe. “Fallow deer” would have been the species we know now as the white-tail, while “red deer” is the British name for a species that has a close American relative: the elk, or wapiti (Cervus canadensis). Lederer is far from the only source suggesting that herds of elk were a fixture of the pre-settlement Piedmont and highland landscape. A few place names still persist on our modern maps to testify to this—notably Elk Island in the James just below its confluence with the Rivanna. The last wild elk known in Virginia was not shot until 1855, and a recent reintroduction effort has established a small herd in the southwestern part of the state. (One of these individuals wandered as far as Giles County, near the Jamesland border, where it was killed in 2023.)
It may boggle the imagination to think of these mighty creatures roaming the Piedmont in numbers. But it’s important to remember that the Piedmont of today, even in its “wilder” parts, bears little resemblance to the landscape encountered by the first European explorers. The current consensus among environmental historians is that that landscape was powerfully shaped by a force that today has been rendered all but irrelevant: fire. Some of this fire would have been naturally set by lightning strikes, with no roads or other breaks to constrain its spread. But far more of a factor, in all likelihood, were the intentional fires set by Jamesland’s Indigenous inhabitants. There is much historical evidence that tribes from the mountains to the coast used fire regularly and strategically, for multiple reasons including the management and hunting of game, the facilitation of travel, and the clearing of land for cultivation. This helps to explain some of the early accounts that at first seem puzzling—like Robert Beverley’s description of “large Spots of Meadows and Savanna’s, wherein are Hundreds of Acres without any Tree at all; but yield Reeds and Grass of incredible Height”; or John Smith’s claim that in Tidewater areas settled by Indians “a man may gallop a horse amongst these woods any waie, but where the creekes or Rivers shall hinder.” Far from being destructive, this fire regime would have maintained a dynamic mosaic of open woods and grasslands with a highly diverse flora, and would have invited big grazers and browsers like elk from “wilder” areas to the north and west.
Elk would have been one of the most eye-catching creatures of the interior mid-Atlantic to a visitor like Lederer, but there was even bigger game to be found. We find these formidable mammals in the 1613 account of Captain Samuel Argall, who ventured up the Potomac and found in the nearby grasslands “great store of Cattle as big as Kine.” We find them again in the 1671 travels of Thomas Batte and Robert Fallam, who discovered somewhere in the neighborhood of Roanoke an “infinite quantity of…buffaloes, so gentle and undisturb’d that they had no fear at the appearance of the men.” These were American bison (Bison bison), the same “buffaloes” that thundered over the Great Plains by the millions, which in those days also ranged clear across the Midwest and spilled through the mountain gaps onto the eastern seaboard. Records of bison are more prevalent a bit to the south of Jamesland, where they likely followed migratory paths that eventually became the settlers’ Wilderness Road; and a bit to the north, where the spacious Shenandoah Valley offered the herds plenty of room and grass. (Bison skins were still being sold in Augusta County as late as 1749; by a half-century later they would be extirpated from Virginia.) But the Jamesland map still bears traces of their existence here, in names like the Buffalo Lick Plantation near Lynchburg (named for one of the natural salt licks where the herds congregated) and Amherst County’s Buffalo River.
In his list of beasts of the Piedmont, Lederer next turns his attention to cats. Something he calls the “wilde Cat” is covered separately, under “small Vermin”; this can only be the bobcat (Lynx rufus), which persists in our woods today as a rarely-seen but widely distributed top predator. Somewhere near the confluence of the North and South Anna rivers he had an especially remarkable encounter with this species:
Travelling thorow the Woods, a Doe seized by a wild Cat crossed our way; the miserable creature being even spent and breathless with the burden and cruelty of her rider, who having fastned on her shoulder, left not sucking out her bloud until she sunk under him: which one of the Indians perceiving, let flie a luckie Arrow, which piercing him thorow the belly, made him quit his prey already slain, and turn with a terrible grimas at us; but his strength and spirits failing him, we escaped his revenge, which had certainly ensued, were not his wound mortal. This creature is something bigger then our English Fox, of a reddish grey colour, and in figure every way agreeing with an ordinary Cat; fierce, ravenous and cunning: for finding the Deer (upon which they delight most to prey) too swift for them, they watch upon branches of trees, and as they walk or feed under, jump down upon them.
This may seem implausible, but ambush attacks by bobcats on white-tailed deer (typically fawns but occasionally does) are a well-documented part of their predatory repertoire. More puzzling is Lederer’s “small leopard,” which he clearly distinguishes from the bobcat and other “small vermin” as a mammal of more significance. There’s always the possibility that his eyes deceived him, or that he misremembered or embellished a sighting; it’s hardly the only passage from his account that invites skepticism.
But another, startling possibility is at least worth mentioning. Several species of wild cats that we now associate with Latin America (or close relatives thereof) once ranged much farther north. Fossils of jaguar, ocelot, margay, and jaguarundi have all been found in what is now the eastern United States, some as far north as Pennsylvania. Although they seem to have largely vanished along with the rest of the Ice Age megafauna, credible records of jaguar and ocelot exist from Louisiana and Arkansas as late as the nineteenth century. Somewhere in central South Carolina not long after Lederer’s travels, fellow explorer John Lawson ran into what he called a “tyger”:
As we were on our Road this Morning, our Indian shot at a Tyger, that cross’d the Way, he being a great Distance from us. I believe he did him no Harm, because he sat on his Breech afterwards, and look’d upon us. I suppose he expected to have had a Spaniel Bitch, that I had with me, for his Breakfast…Tygers are never met withal in the Settlement; but are more to the Westward, and are not numerous on this Side the Chain of Mountains. I once saw one, that was larger that a Panther, and seem’d to be a very bold Creature. The Indians that hunt in those Quarters, say, they are seldom met withal. It seems to differ from the Tyger of Asia and Africa.
As Lawson explicitly distinguished this animal from the more common “panther,” it’s hard to account for it as anything other than a jaguar. Similarly, Lederer’s “small leopard” would seem to be an excellent fit for the spotted, mid-sized ocelot. It’s far from impossible that both species could have persisted in low densities in the eastern seaboard colonies just prior to European settlement, but for now that possibility must remain in the realm of speculation.
Definitely present in these parts, on the other hand, was the creature that Lederer called “lion,” Lawson called “panther,” and science now formally designates as the eastern cougar (Puma concolor couguar). Although there’s plenty of taxonomic uncertainty around the Americas’ most widely distributed cat (some authorities have listed as many as 32 subspecies, while others collapse them all into one), the official line of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is that cougars of eastern North America are a separate entity–and that, with their last confirmed sighting in 1938, they are now safely considered extinct.
A hundred years before that, they were still not hard to find in the mid-Atlantic. A single hunter in central Pennsylvania managed to kill 64 of them during a stretch from 1820 to 1845. (This added to the lore that produced the “Nittany Lion” as the Penn State mascot.) Yet this kind of unrestrained hunting, not only of the cougars themselves but of the deer that constituted their prey base, was already taking a severe toll. 1882 saw the last cougar killed in Virginia, while West Virginia’s population was extinguished just five years later. This latter event reads almost like a tall tale, with its protagonists being Colonel Cecil Clay (who’d lost an arm in the Civil War, at the battle of Fort Harrison near Richmond) and Francis McCoy (a local hunter of renown dubbed the “strongman of the mountains”). It was near the very top of the Alleghenies, just twenty miles or so west of the Jamesland border, that they pursued and treed the big cat. At that point they filled it with buckshot only to watch it drop from its branch and start mauling their dogs in a blood-misted fury–whereupon McCoy, if the tale is to be believed, rushed in and finished the job with his bare hands.
The story of cougars in the East is far from finished. Recent years have seen a rash of sightings in the Appalachians, many straining credulity while others seem legitimate. Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources has investigated over a hundred of these claims since 1970, “mostly near Shenandoah National Park and in Bedford, Amherst and Nelson counties.” Officials conclude that most of these sightings, in all likelihood, really were cougars–but they urge caution in interpreting the data. Many of the sightings may be of the same wandering cat, and the provenance of such cats is far from clear. Some are probably escaped pets (estimates of privately owned cougars in the U.S. range into the thousands), while others may be lone males roaming far from their western homes. Still, the return of the deer and the regrowth of much suitable habitat provides reason for optimism about these predators reoccupying their original range.
Populations of other mammals in the Jamesland highlands have also seen a great deal of flux. The snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) may now be extirpated from Jamesland thanks to habitat loss, although it survives in small numbers in the spruce forests of the West Virginia Alleghenies. An ill-fated introduction of a non-native subspecies from New Brunswick in the 1960s did our local hares no favors. Apparently faring better are two other northern mammals, the North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) and the fisher (Pekania pennanti, the weasel-like tree climber known colloquially as “fisher cat”). Both species disappeared from the central Appalachians as their native forests fell to the ax during the nineteenth century, but both now seem to be making a comeback. Local sightings are on the increase, and have been confirmed by wildlife officials in Augusta, Botetourt, and Giles counties (both species) as well as Bath County (porcupine only).
Last but not least on Lederer’s list of highlights was the wolf. Now emblematic of remote wilderness, for the colonists of the sixteenth century this animal was an omnipresent inconvenience. Roving wolfpacks welcomed the sight of the livestock that arrived on the English ships; raising sheep and goats in particular proved totally impractical until the wolf problem could be dealt with. The first bounty system debuted in Jamestown in 1632, awarding a prize of between $1 and $6 for each wolf scalp–nothing to sneeze at, considering the average worker of the day earned less than $10 a month. Later legislation established an alternate reward of 100 pounds of tobacco, which for a time was the primary currency in the Colony. Indians were eligible too, but their prize was different: for every eight scalps delivered by a tribe, its “King or Great Man” would be given one cow. (In the House of Burgesses’ estimation, this was one of many tactics for “making them Christian.”)
Attacks by wolves on the settlers themselves were vanishingly rare, and early naturalists observed that the New World varieties of the creature seemed smaller and less aggressive than their counterparts in Europe. That didn’t stop the escalating campaign of vilification aimed at the species that, for many, embodied the “savagery” that must be driven back in the name of progress. Bounty hunters developed ever more brutal and effective techniques, lining pits with sharpened sticks, hiding mackerel hooks inside meat deployed as bait, and lacing cow carcasses with strychnine.
As with the cougar, bison, and elk, by the time any kind of conservation consciousness had dawned, the wolves of the East had been cast into oblivion. The last one on record, a wily old male, hung on alone for five years in the Alleghenies. After reputedly poaching twenty-seven lambs from a farm on Point Mountain, he became the target of a relentless hunt that reached its climax at New Year’s of 1897. That day a party of fifteen men and boys set out through two feet of snow on a chase through the mountains that stretched on for over a week. In the end it was seventeen-year-old Daniel Hamrick that brought the beast down, proudly measuring the distance of his shot at 187 paces. The spot was hardly ten miles from where the last cougar had fallen a decade earlier.
Matching up historical accounts with today’s recognized varieties of wolf has proven surprisingly challenging. A big part of the problem is that controversy still rages over how many species or subspecies there once were, how many there still are, and where to draw the lines between them. One interpretation is that Jamesland originally hosted two types of wolf: the red wolf of the coastal plain and the eastern wolf (a.k.a gray or timber wolf) of the interior. The former, which dwindled to a tiny remnant in Texas and Louisiana and has since been reintroduced to North Carolina, is most often recognized as a full species unto itself, Canis rufus. The latter, which has been reduced to somewhere between 500 and 2,000 individuals in the Great Lakes region, is variously treated as a subspecies or a full species (Canis lycaon); some consider C. rufus and C. lycaon to constitute a species together, varying historically along a continuum.
Complicating things even further is the coyote (C. latrans), which has invaded Jamesland and much of the East since the 1980s. The animals known informally as “eastern coyotes” turn out to be as much as a quarter wolf, genetically speaking, and the term “coywolf” has been coined as a way of better distinguishing them. Meanwhile some eastern wolf populations have coyote DNA making up as much as forty percent of their genomes, and one study found the red wolves in North Carolina to be a shocking 75% coyote. The only certainty here, it seems, is that the canids of North America are a tangled web with a complicated history.
If Jamesland’s roster of large mammals has diminished significantly since the arrival of Europeans, the loss becomes even more drastic when we look back to the arrival of the first humans. That arrival seems to have coincided roughly with the Last Glacial Maximum, when the ice sheet extended as far south as what is now Pennsylvania. The natural environment at this time would have been barely recognizable to us, with temperatures some twenty degrees cooler than today’s and rainfall more or less halved. Open, wind-whipped tundra covering our high mountains, while woodlands of spruce, fir, and jack pine covered much of the lowlands. Any vegetation resembling today’s would likely have been pushed to the outer coastal plain, which in this era extended much farther; with the sea drained from what is now the Chesapeake, Jamesland would have stretched all the way to the joining of the ancestral James and Susquehanna rivers (somewhere near Virginia Beach’s Cape Henry).
What mammals would have greeted our first predecessors here? We can answer that question with more than speculation, because fossil evidence from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene has survived in several locations. Some of those are caves and fissures in our highland region, where animal remains accumulated through multiple processes. Highland County’s Strait Canyon has produced many fossils of creatures that may have fallen to their deaths over the millennia, including mastodon, woodland muskox, tapir, and horse. Bath County’s Clark Cave and Botetourt County’s Arcadia Cave preserved many bones of small mammals and birds that were likely built up by roosting owls. But these caves saw many uses, and larger fossils found here have been attributed to dire wolf and American lion.
All of the species mentioned in the paragraph above are now extinct, along with many others whose presence in Jamesland has not been confirmed. North America as a whole lost some 35 types of large mammal during the late Pleistocene, and since the conditions in much of our region were unfavorable for fossil preservation, remains of many of these have surely been lost. (Some of our likeliest fossil sites are now underneath the Chesapeake Bay, as demonstrated by the mastodon bones recently unearthed by the tunnel borer that is at work expanding the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.)
The final demise of the majority of these has been dated to a very small window that coincides with the spread of another new mammal across the continent: humans. This also happens to be the case on other continents, at different times. Although a rapidly changing climate may have helped to make the megafauna vulnerable, it’s become harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the primary culprit was us. The popular story of a spear-armed hunting spree is probably too simplistic, as humans likely destabilized the ecosystem in multiple ways (by setting fires, spreading new diseases, and killing predators, for example). But while the exact blend of factors is still the stuff of heated controversy, it’s clear that once Jamesland welcomed Homo sapiens its environment would never be the same.
Stretching back still further in time, other kinds of fossils appear in the few spots where fortune has favored their preservation. Along the James in Surry County, outcrops of the St. Mary’s and Yorktown formations bear witness to a time when sea levels were much higher than today’s. This was the late Miocene and early Pliocene, several million years ago, an era that saw the Atlantic rise at times to form a shore somewhere near Richmond. Fossils of multiple extinct species of whales and an extinct walrus have turned up here, along with the more famous teeth of the megalodon sharks that would have terrorized these gentler creatures.
The Richmond Basin to the west of our capital city, formed by the accumulation of sediments in a rift valley during the tearing apart of the supercontinent Pangea, is one of the few areas of the Piedmont where fossils can be expected. These rocks were laid down in the late Triassic, before the appearance of anything technically qualifying as a mammal. Yet excavations here have yielded priceless clues about the road to mammalhood.
Near Midlothian in Chesterfield County, where the former roadbed of Old Hundred Road crosses Little Tomahawk Creek (now just adjacent to Tomahawk Creek Middle School), paleontologist Paul Olsen came across a bonanza of vertebrate remains in the early 1980s. The site was evidently a shallow lake with swampy margins during these creatures’ lives some 230 million years ago. Some of the fossils belonged to strange crocodile- and lizard-like reptiles, examples of the creatures that ruled the earth just before the dinosaur age, while fish bones and scales also appeared in “vast quantities.” But there were also jawbones and loose teeth from animals that clearly belonged on a different evolutionary line.
These turned out to be cynodonts, a type of vertebrate that is mostly forgotten today but that represented a crucial step on the path from reptiles to mammals. Common and widespread in the Triassic, they would have laid eggs like the former but had warm-blooded metabolism (and possibly milk glands and fur) like the latter. Some were large herbivores, like the new species described as Boreogomphodon from the Tomahawk site, which might have reached the size of a large pig. Others were smaller and may have had some carnivorous or omnivorous tendencies, like the type from Tomahawk that is tentatively assigned to Microconodon (originally described from North Carolina). These remarkable findings document a fascinating, transitional time in our evolutionary history, when some of the lifeforms that would come to dominate the next two hundred million years were still on the drawing board.
They may not be as flashy as the mammals covered above, but several smaller species have populations in Jamesland that are significant, either because we are at the edge of their range or because their range is concentrated here. Two of them, like the flying squirrel, are relictual northerners left isolated here since the Pleistocene:
- The eastern water shrew (Sorex albibarbis), which dives for its insect prey at night in cool mountain streams, propelled by its partially webbed, fringed feet
- The southern rock vole (Microtus chrotorrhinus carolinensis), a social creature of mossy, rocky slopes near water, set apart from other voles by its yellow nose
Both of these elusive animals are listed as endangered in Virginia, and both have only been found in a single spot in Jamesland: along Little Back Creek, at the foot of Allegheny Mountain in Bath County. At the other end of the nation, the Great Dismal Swamp is home to unique varieties of several small mammals:
- The Dismal Swamp bog lemming (Synaptomys cooperi helaletes), an elusive vole-like creature of canebrakes and other moist open habitats, separated from its lemming cousins by over a hundred miles; it managed to escape notice for eighty years after its first discovery, and is now best found by looking for its distinctive green feces
- The Dismal Swamp short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda telmalestes), a tiny yet fierce predator which along with other short-tailed shrews is among the world’s only venomous mammals
- The Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew (Sorex longirostris fisheri), a long-tailed shrew with a taste for spiders, formerly on the federal endangered species list
The stories of these three have some notable parallels. All were originally described as full species in the late nineteenth century, and have since been demoted to subspecies (with the short-tailed shrew perhaps set to lose even its subspecies status, according to a recent taxonomic review). All were thought at first to be strictly limited to the Great Dismal Swamp proper, but all have now been documented from a somewhat wider area of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. And while populations of all three are tentatively deemed secure at the moment, they share a vulnerability to many of the same threats–including drainage of wetlands, suppression of fire, and urbanization.
Finally, small numbers of two federally endangered bats can be found in Jamesland. The Virginia big-eared bat (Corynorhinus townsendii virginianus) is absolutely dependent on limestone caves with forested surroundings in the central Appalachians, where it breeds and roosts throughout the year. A so-called “whisper bat,” it echolocates far more quietly than other bats in an effort to outwit its moth prey, using its super-sized ears to pick up their faint signals. Although its largest populations are found in West Virginia and Kentucky, its range extends into Highland and Bath counties; Arbegast Cave in the former county has hosted a maternity colony in recent years with as many as 474 individuals counted.
The smaller Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis), tipping the scales at just a quarter of an ounce, relies on caves only in winter when it congregates into colonies called hibernacula. Indiana bats have been found hibernating in Highland, Bath, and Craig counties, with an all-time high count of 600 in Bath County’s Starr Chapel Cave. Although a gate has been in place there for some time to prevent human intruders from disturbing the bats, the population here and elsewhere has sharply declined nonetheless; the highest number recorded in Starr Chapel since 2000 is only 67.
These colonies can reach spectacular concentrations as the animals pack in tightly together for warmth, with measured densities as high as 5,000 bats per square meter. Unfortunately this habit has made them sitting ducks for an imported fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, which has devastated this and other eastern cave bats since its first appearance circa 2007. By one estimate Pennsylvania has lost 95 percent of its cave bat population, with officials mostly at a loss for ways to treat the plague or slow its spread. Because it is known to be transmissible between caves by sticking to human clothing, fully closing off known hibernacula is one of the only conservation methods available. (This helps even in the absence of white-nose syndrome, as bats woken from hibernation by human disturbance can waste as much as a month’s worth of their critical fat reserves.)