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- [S142] Newspaper Article, The Mountain Press, 30 Dec 2000.
Homestead - Family farmhouse holds many memories
By: TINA ALSTON, Staff Writer December 30, 2000
Holiday visitors driving south from Knoxville last week may have caught a glimpse of a country scene ready for greeting card as they drove past the Wye Road intersection on Chapman Highway.
Kim and Donna DeLozier's newly remodeled home sits perched atop a knoll overlooking family farms dating back three generations.
"It's a good place to live, but the neighbors are a little rough," said DeLozier, joking about his brother, Mike, and father, Bill, who live on either side.
Four years ago the couple completely gutted the home, moving walls and completely changing the floor plan to create more open spaces.
While tearing down an old chimney, DeLozier found a paper dated 1913, indicating the probable year his grandfather built the home on a parcel of what used to be 1,000 acres of land the family once owned.
"It's almost as if someone left it there on purpose, so we would find it," he said.
As a wildlife biologist for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, DeLozier overseas such programs as the wild hog eradication and the reintroduction of elk into the park.
While his father tries to get rid of unwanted hogs, Travis DeLozier learns about raising the domesticated variety along with other modern farming methods as an agriculture major at the University of Tennessee, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who teaches agriculture courses at Seymour High School.
Their daughter Carrie, head majorette at UT, will finish her career Monday in the Cotton Bowl, with her young baton students in Sevier County watching their teacher on national television.
With her children out of the nest, Donna Delozier finds more time for decorating projects while working full-time at Sevier County Schools' central office.
"I'm a snowman person," she said, pointing to more than 20 themed accessories, some of which remain in the kitchen all year. Other "snow-persons" remain throughout the holiday season.
A favorite place to watch snowmen melt or to observe young calves frolic is an old porch swing at the corner of a wrap-around porch, which entirely surrounds the home.
"That swing is older than I am and that's old," said her father-in-law, who then pointed to the porch's sky-blue ceiling. "My mamaw painted that ceiling light blue so insects wouldn't build their nests up there. We haven't had any dirt daubers or wasps."
Another portion of the house that predates the elder DeLozier is the living room mantel, which bears the label, "Woodruff's Department Store 1917."
"I restored that mantel for them and discovered it was made out of chesnut," said their uncle Jack Delozier, retired superintendent of Sevier County Electric Service.
"This was quite a farm at one time," said Delozier, who dropped the capital "L" in the family last name.
Whatever the spelling, their French ancestors must smile down on the woods and fields of the DeLozier family compound, where cattle still roam.
Tina Alston can be reached at talston@themountainpress.com.
- [S142] Newspaper Article, 15 Oct 2013.
Retired Smokies biologist recounts 32 years of wildlife work in new book
MORGAN SIMMONS, STAFF WRITER
Retired Smokies biologist recounts 32 years of wildlife work in new book
'Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger' is available through Amazon either as paperback or in downloadable format.
When Kim DeLozier was chief wildlife biologist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, writing a book was the last thing on his mind.
For 32 years DeLozier hunted wild hogs and darted nuisance bears all over the Smokies. During his tenure, the black bear population increased fourfold from an estimated 400 to 1,600. Efforts to reintroduce the red wolf in the Smokies in the early 1900s proved unsuccessful, but river otter, elk and peregrine falcons all made comebacks under his watch.
By the time DeLozier retired in 2010, he had some stories to tell — enough to fill a book.
“Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger” is DeLozier’s salute to a career he never stopped loving despite its frequent frustrations and occasional heartaches. Cowritten by best-selling author Carolyn Jourdan, the book’s title refers to the time DeLozier had to transport a sedated bear from Silers Bald in the back seat of a helicopter. There was no clear place to land on top of the mountain, and the takeoff was delayed because of high wind. Foremost in DeLozier’s and the pilot’s minds was the very real possibility that the bear would awaken midflight.
“I didn’t want to give the bear another dose of tranquilizer because I was afraid she might die,” DeLozier said in a recent interview. “The noise inside the helicopter was deafening. It made for an interesting trip.”
DeLozier said the book is filled with offbeat adventures that simply came with the job, like the time park wildlife managers use blowguns to tranquilize a gang of skunks in Cades Cove Campground that had become tame from eating visitors’ food and garbage.
DeLozier writes about how bear management in the park evolved from simply moving nuisance bears from one place to another — the park once moved 32 bears from the Chimneys picnic area during a three-year period — to the realization that the main problem is people leaving garbage where bears can get to it, especially at night.
DeLozier recounts how in 1989 a middle-age woman from Ohio named Phyllis Murphy was mauled by a bear while walking along a stream in the Chimneys picnic area.
To find the guilty bear, wildlife officers went back at night with spotlights and were shocked to find 12 bears foraging through garbage cans. Food and scraps were everywhere.
“It was worse than we realized,” DeLozier said. “That one instant changed bear management in the park.”
DeLozier and Jourdan currently are wrapping up a second volume of wildlife anecdotes that will expand the focus to the park’s elk, wild pigs and white-tailed deer.
Some of the most captivating reading in “Bear in the Back Seat” comes early in the book when DeLozier describes his first days on the job. He was 23 and fresh out of college when the park hired him as a seasonal wild hog hunter. Raised on a farm in Sevier County, he’d been around animals all of his life, but this did little to prepare him for his first assignment. It was 1978, and there was no blueprint for managing wildlife in a mountain setting like the Smokies, where 9 million tourists were part of the equation.
DeLozier’s supervisor gave him a backpack and a shotgun and placed him under the command of a mountain man named Buck Branham, who happened to be a poacher as well as an expert on killing wild hogs. It was DeLozier’s dream job.
DeLozier provides a harrowing but steadfastly professional account of May 21, 2000, when Glenda Ann Bradley, a 50-year-old Cocke County schoolteacher, was killed by a bear attack near the Little River Trail not far from Elkmont.
“That was an extremely rare case of predatory behavior where a bear ran someone down and killed her for food. Black bears had done that before, but never in the Southeast,” DeLozier said. “I still keep her funeral announcement on my desk at home. I never want to become complacent about what happened.”
“Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger” is available through Amazon either as paperback or in downloadable format for Kindle or PC. The book is expected to be available at the park’s visitor centers soon.
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 7 Mar 2015.
Upland Chronicles: Peregrine falcons returned home to Duck Hawk Peaks
CARROLL MCMAHAN
The peregrine falcon, also known a duck hawk, is renowned for its speed.
The Eye of the Needle, off Alum Cave Bluff Trail, is the best place to spot a peregrine falcon nest.
Near the Alum Cave Bluff on the south side of majestic Mount LeConte is the thin leaning ridge with jagged points known as Duck Hawk Peaks. There's Little Duck Hawk Ridge paralleled by Big Duck Hawk Ridge. Peregrine Peak is the old name for the large mountain where the Alum Cave and Duck Hawk areas are located. Early settlers began calling the area by these names after observing the fast-flying birds nesting there.
Duck hawk is the local dialect name for a peregrine falcon (Falco peregrines antatum). The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on earth. About the same size as a crow, it can dive at over 200 miles an hour and fly vast distances. Some peregrine migrate more than 15, 000 miles a year, going from Alaska in summer to South America in the winter.
Although no one is sure why, peregrines vanished from Tennessee a couple of decades before DDT began causing them to disappear elsewhere. They had been missing from the Smokies for about 50 years when, in 1980, there was a national effort to restore the falcons. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park partnered with the Peregrine Fund, and wildlife biologist Kim Delozier took on the job of reintroducing them to the park.
This was the park's first attempt to reintroduce a wildlife species to begin the restoration of a native ecosystem in the Smokies. According to Delozier, by the time the effort began, the surviving wild stock had dwindled to such an extent that the program had to rely on breeding different sub-species of peregrines to get a species to restore.
The technique used to try to reestablish the falcons in the Smokies was to "hack" the birds on high protected cliff ledges. The hacking process involved feeding young birds that couldn't yet fly in a controlled situation, inside a large wooden box with little human contact, until they matured enough to grow feathers. Their goal was to get the bird accustomed to the area so it would think of the place as its home.
Unlike a regular bird nest, the peregrine nest, called a scrape or eyrie, is just a few rocks and twigs or loose debris on a cliff or a building ledge. Some peregrines will use an old raven nest, and sometimes they'll nest in the hollow cavity of a large tree. But their usual nesting sites are usually on a rocky cliff, to help avoid predators.
The park started the program by taking captive-bred birds to a hack box located high atop a cliff on Greenbrier Pinnacle. In each of the years 1984, 1985 and 1986, a group of young chicks was brought in. The tiny birds were put in a box and fed until they grew their flight feathers. Then they were released, 13 birds in all. Each time this was done, the birds hung around for a while, then flew off. It was hoped that the falcons would come back to the park and breed eventually. Because adult falcons were seen back in the area in 1987, no additional young birds were hacked; for fear that the older birds might kill the young ones.
For the next decade, no other falcons were released. There were infrequent sightings of falcons flying overhead, and people hearing them screaming. However, they could never find a nest or any young, despite searching the cliffs throughout the entire park by helicopter.
Astonishingly, things changed in 1997, with reports of sightings of falcons flying and screaming near Alum Cave on the trail up to Mount LeConte. Early each morning, Delozier and his crew carefully watched to see if the falcons were focusing their activity around any particular location where a nest might be active.
After a few weeks of close observation, a volunteer reported that he could see three baby falcon chicks on a scrape located on the east side of Little Duck Hawk Ridge, just below the spot called the Eye of the Needle – an open hole that passes clear through the razor-backed ridge.
Success at last! The Great Smoky Mountains National Park had documented the first successful peregrine falcon nest in the entire state of Tennessee since 1947. However, when they came back, the peregrines didn't return to the place they had been hacked beginning in 1984. Instead the amazing birds chose a ridge off Alum Cave known as Little Duck Hawk Ridge.
Interestingly, all of the science was less wise than the local folks who'd lived in the mountains before the park was established. They had noticed where the birds used to nest. "We were pretty embarrassed to have ignored the old names," said Kim Delozier. "We should've looked at a map to decide where to re-release the falcons in the first place. Rather than hacking them at Greenbrier Pinnacle, we should've released them at Peregrine Peak or Little Duck Hawk Ridge."
One of the best places to see peregrine falcons is at the Eye of the Needle, the distinctive rock formation with a hole all the way through the cliff. It is viewable from Inspiration Point off Alum Cave Trail. Late winter and early spring, or August through September, are the most likely times to see them. To locate their nests, look for the whitewash covering the cliff where their droppings fall.
It's an awesome sight to see the young falcons practice diving off a cliff, or to observe the way the adult peregrines hunt, circling high in the air watching for prey to fly below them. Once they've locked in on a particular bird, they engage in a stoop to attack their prey. The once-absent duck hawks have returned.
Carroll McMahan is special projects facilitator for the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce and serves as Sevier County historian.
The Upland Chronicles series celebrates the heritage and past of Sevier County. If you have suggestions for future topics, would like to submit a column or have comments, please contact Carroll McMahan at 453-6411 or cmcmahan@scoc.org; or Ron Rader at 604-9161 or ron@ronraderproperties.com.
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, d. 23 Oct 2007, Sevier County Health Care Center, Sevierville, Sevier County, Tennessee 
