Mammals of Carolina Bays 3 



Furthermore, because little information on the vertebrate fauna asso- 

 ciated with pocosins is available, definitive statements made by previous 

 authors concerning wildlife values of pocosins were premature. Cur- 

 rently, discussions about the unique biological value of pocosins and 

 Carolina bays on the one hand, and consideration for their use in agri- 

 business, silviculture, peat mining, and waste disposal on the other, are 

 commonplace, but in most cases detailed information on which to base 

 management decisions is lacking. 



Although the information presented here pertains only to North 

 Carolina, we suspect that our findings could apply generally to other 

 pocosins and Carolina bays in the southeast. However, we have little 

 experience with these communities outside North Carolina. Our efforts 

 to date have been focused on making species inventories of a large 

 number of different communities throughout the North Carolina 

 Coastal Plain. While we consider our results more than preliminary, prob- 

 lems associated with sampling the wide array of Carolina bays and 

 pocosin communities make it impractical at this time to compare rela- 

 tive abundance and density of species in specific habitat types based on 

 cumulative trap-night success. Additional studies are planned to develop 

 more elaborate population profiles for specific pocosin plant 

 communities. 



HABITATS STUDIED 



Pocosin habitats are defined with difficulty, since considerable con- 

 fusion persists in the use of the term. It originated from the Algonquin 

 Indian word "poquosin" and is one of the few Algonquin words 

 adopted by European settlers. Tooker (1899) provided a detailed discus- 

 sion of the origin, meaning and use of the term. In tracing its early use, 

 by both Indians and early settlers, Tooker found that "pocosin" referred 

 to a wide variety of low, wet areas extending from New England through 

 the Carolinas. Among European settlers, the term was locally inter- 

 changeable with "dismals" and "galls" for describing swampy thickets. 



Botanists and ecologists have likewise used the word to describe a 

 variety of low, wooded, wetland habitats, and in many instances the 

 terms bay, bayhead, shrub bog, or evergreen shrub bog have been used 

 to describe pocosin vegetation types. The term "bay" is particularly con- 

 fusing because it refers to a number of successional stages of Southeast- 

 ern wetlands that support several species of bay trees (Sweet Bay, Mag- 

 nolia virginiana; Red flay, Persea borbonia; and Loblolly Bay, Gordonia 

 lasianthus), while the term Carolina bay, partly named for the presence 

 of bay trees, refers to elliptical depressions that often support pocosin 

 vegetation. Carolina bays are permanent geological features and often 

 are specifically named sites (e.g. Wolf Bay, Bladen County), while the 



