Types of Wildlife Found in Chatham County, NC

Chatham County Real Estate Broker Eric Andrews discusses some of the wildlife found in Pittsboro and beyond. People moving to the area often ask about deer, bears, snakes, birds, hawks, eagles, otters, beaver, fox, albino deer, black deer and more.

Speaker 1:           What kind of wildlife do you see in Chatham County?

Speaker 2:           Well, we have quite a bit of wildlife in Chatham County. I mean, common are the deer, raccoon, fox, coyote, skunk, turkey. I’ve seen so much, I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen, I was walking a track on the Rocky River and I saw a bald eagle come away from the Jordan Lake area, and it swooped down in the Rocky River and picked up a fish, which was just an amazing sight to see. I’ve seen osprey do the same thing. I’ve walked up on some owls. I’ve seen scratches from bears, I’ve never seen a bear out in the wild. And I had one of my former football players shot and killed a wild pig with tusks.

Speaker 1:           In Chatham County?

Speaker 2:           In Chatham County on the Rocky River. Yeah. So I guess pigs will go feral.

Speaker 1:           That’s right.

Speaker 2:           And they’ll grow tusks and they can cause a lot of damage. I think there’s even been TV shows about it or whatever, but I’ve never seen one in person. People always ask me, when they walk land with me, they’re real scared about snakes. I mean, in 20 years, I think I might have come up on maybe a dozen snakes or whatever. My girlfriend, she’s like, “I want to see what you do.” And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to go walk 32 acres with these guys. Do you want to you want to come along?” And she’s like, “Yeah, yeah. I want to see what you do for a living.” So sure enough, this is the middle of the fall, we’re going down this trail with a bunch of leaves and everything, and these two guys are buying this land for hunting. And sure enough, the biggest, fattest copper head ever was right in the middle of the trail and I had to stop everybody and they were just… But that rarely, rarely happens. I don’t often see snakes.

I see box turtles all the time and I’ll see snapping turtles walk from pond to pond, and I’ve seen otter and beaver play in the rivers and streams around here. One of my best friends from high school in upstate New York is a guy named Jim Bruchac, and he and I played high school and college ball together. He’s a nationally known tracker and he has a book, Tracks and Scat of the Southeast, and so he came down here and visited and we did some tracking and some investigation. He has this little nature book where all the tracks and all the scat, you can identify what animals you have in the area, and he actually gave me an acknowledgement in that book. So whenever somebody says, “Eric Andrews, you don’t know shit,” I’m like, “Well, actually I do.” There’s a book about it and there’s my name in the front page with an acknowledgement, so they can’t say I don’t know it. But that’s one of the things.

One of the things I get made fun of about is I list land and I take 25 pictures of land and people are like, “Oh, there’s a tree. Oh, there’s a tree. Oh, look, a tree.” And sometimes that’s what the land is like, but to make it a little bit more interesting, if we have a knocked over tree, then we can see what kind of soil it is. But I think it’s interesting to have deer prints or coyote scat or anything like that. We’ll take pictures of anything just to make it a little bit more enjoyable. There’s a lot of wildlife in Chatham County. I saw bobcat one time. That’s pretty rare and if you see a bobcat, that’s probably not a good thing. It’s probably not doing too well if it’s in the daytime or whatever. But that was off of 3M. I’ve seen some white deer. Never saw a black deer, but I’ve heard they’re out there. Yeah, there’s quite a bit of wildlife out there.