Eastern hellbenders are cold and slick to the touch, but are also very muscular. (Photo: Lisa Sorg) WATAUGA COUNTY—Ben Dalton broke the glassy surface of the Watauga River, spit out his mouthpiece and gasped for breath. All morning, Dalton, a state wildlife biologist, and two other snorkelers had been scouring the river bed, trying to rescue as many eastern hellbenders as they could.
So far, they had not saved a one. “They just hunker down and press themselves against the sides of the rock,” Dalton said, in a nasal voice through his snorkeling mask. He wielded a “tickler,” which resembled a long, yellow pipe cleaner.
“I’m going to try to goose the hellbender and see if it will shoot out the front.” Glistening in a sleek wetsuit, Dalton is thin, lean and agile, much like the hellbenders he was trying to rescue. In early July, the U.
S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with support from American Rivers and MountainTrue, would begin staging heavy equipment nearby, the first step in dismantling the , southwest of Boone in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The dam, which once powered a timber mill, has fragmented and degraded the giant salamander’s sensitive habitat.
Dalton is accustomed to the mercurial moods of amphibians. His biology career has taken him to Missouri, where he studied the to Puerto Rico, where he observed Coqui frogs, and now to the mountains of North Carolina, where he’s trying to outwit a hellbender. “If hellbenders don’t want to come out,” Dalton s.
