"What's in a name?" the Bard demands. While Shakespeare's response is accurate (and make good poetry), a creature's name should serve as a guide to its biology, a key to its basic characteristics. The bowdark tree is blessed with many names, each one adding a vital part to its story.
 
Bowdarks are short, scraggly trees, easily overlooked in the landscape. The rather nondescript leaves--ovate to ​lance-shaped, three to five inches long and two to three inches wide-are borne on stout, thorny twigs. Like other members of the mulberry family (including true mulberries, figs, and breadfruit), bowdarks produce a juicy latex and a compound fruit, which is quite large. These fruits, brain-like in texture and grapefruit-sized, mature in late autumn, crashing to the ground with loud chumps. 

There's a hillside in Homewood, Alabama,  famous for its amphibians. With the first warm, rainy night of spring, salamanders, frogs, and toads rouse themselves from their winter stupors to wriggle, squirm, and hop downhill. Humans, fascinated by this timeless, primeval event, gather below to watch. 

Many people recoil (pun intended) at the mere mention of a snake, while the actual sighting of such a monster sends them scurry­​ing for cover. Occasionally, though, the object of chis ter­ror is a perfectly innocent reptile, the eastern glass lizard. 

Few Alabama plants can match the maypop, either in features or folklore. With its pronounced tropical affinities, close ties to human habitation, bizarre flower construction, and unique Christian symbolism, the species stands (or grows) alone.

Extinction is forever, as the saying goes. While this truth is undeniable, the case of Tulotoma magnifica, the Alabama live-bearing snail, directly contradicts it. Once declared extinct, then rediscovered in huge numbers, the tulotoma--our state's only federally listed endangered snail--clings tightly to life.

Sex is never simple, nor without its costs. While the high costs of sexual reproduction--attracting a mate, transferring gametes, and supporting the offspring--are obvious in animal species (including humans), the same lessons can be learned from a common Alabama woodland plant, jack-in-the-pulpit.

In his 1842 poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the chestnut tree to help define his blacksmith's qualities: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/The village smithy stands." Little did the poet know that in less than a century both blacksmiths and the chestnuts that spread protectively over them would be close to extinction.

Butterflies are the stuff that myths are made of. With their flashing colors, elusive flight, and amazing life history, butterflies have long held a treasured place in human lives, considered by some to be messengers from the gods and symbols
for the immortal soul.

In April 1962, two biologist seining Turkey Creek near the Birmingham suburb of Pinson noticed some odd-looking fish in their samples. Over the next thirty years, other scientists visited the area to collect more specimens and were likewise puzzled by their finds. In 1992 the vermilion darter was formally (and finally!) described in the Bulletin of the Alabama Museum of Natural History by University of Alabama professors Herb Boschung and Rick Mayden and given its scientific name, Etheostoma chermocki. The latter commemorates Ralph L. Chermock (1918-77), long-time professor of biology who founded the Uni­versity of Alabama lchthyological Collection. 

A topic like "the industrial development of central Alabama" induces nightmares in a naturalist, conjuring up images of slag heaps, slurry ponds, and strip-mined vistas. Yet, in at least one case, such development led directly to the discovery of a new species--a plant cleverly adapted to the harshness of its dwindling "refuge."

The story begins with Eugene Allen Smith, longtime state geologist. During
his summer field trips to document and describe Alabama's geological features, Smith also collected plants of interest. In July 1877, he clipped a branch from an odd-looking shrub growing on the limestone bluffs at Pratt's Ferry near Centreville; he later passed the specimen on to Charles Mohr, a Mobile pharmacist and botanist. Mohr was likewise puzzled and sent the specimen to the reigning authority on Southern plants, Alvan Wentworth Chapman of Apalachicola, who formally named the plant in the second edition of his Flora of the Southern States. Thus it was through the combined efforts of Smith, Mohr, and Chapman that Croton alabamensis came to scientific light.