At the top of Stone Mountain most people look up and out to enjoy the sweeping views of Atlanta, but Carrie Straight and Brian McKnight look down.
Straight, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and McKnight, a naturalist and educator with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, are at the top of the mountain on a gray, cold and very windy winter day, checking on the tiny – and very rare – plants that grow there.
The black spored quillwort, an endangered species that grows in just a handful of places in Georgia, looks like tiny tufts of grass. It grows at the bottom of pools that form when holes and dents in the mountain collect rain water. Another plant, the little amphianthus, shoots up tiny pairs of leaves that float on the surface of the pools. That plant, which is also known as pool sprite and snorkelwort, is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
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