Tracking down a Story

We were down by the Yadkin River today in a remote section of Davie County on the story you probably heard about. It seems that Duke Power is inching ever closer to ending their 30 year search for a location to build a Nuclear Power Plant in this region.

Some Reports suggest that the plant could be in Stokes County on Belews Creek adjacent to the Coal Burning plant and although published reports say that Duke Power wouldn't confirm that suggestion, they did confirm today that a Nuclear Plant will NOT be built on Belews Creek. They underlined, CAPITALIZED and BOLD FACED the NOT on their statement.

Davie County, on the other hand, is on Duke Power's list of places to put the plant. They own 1600 acres land along the Yadkin River that is currently leased to several farmers and set up as a Wildlife Refuge by the State of NC.

After spending a better part of the day gathering our usual neighborhood reaction from a selection of nearby property owners and getting footage of the perimeters of the property it was time to head out to a location by the river nearest to the Duke Property.



That's where Caron and I met up with Joe McCloskey, part time Sat Truck Driver, full time Photojournalist.(except for when his gear is locked in his news unit at a service center that won't be open for 2 days.)



So today, Joe is our guy to get us on the air. Driving the Santa Maria to the far reaches of Davie County to digitally impress our images into the sky.



When we walked down to the river to survey our live shot location we spotted what you see in the pictures. Animal Tracks. Several different kinds.



We threw out our best guesses about the large ones next to Joe's Fist. We were thinking maybe bear, based on one of the neigbors telling us about seeing bears in the area. But after looking on the internet, I can see that these large ones are Canine tracks. Probably not dogs since there aren't any houses for miles of there. These large tracks match up really well against the Coyote tracks which also have been reported in this area.



These smaller tracks in the above picture are two different animals. The one on the left is a racoon track, but I can't find a match for the two tracks to the right.



The above is a wider view of the racoon and unknown tracks to the left and another type of track to the right side of the picture.



This one (above) is another raccon and smaller version of the possible coyote track, indicating more than one coyote on the scene.



This is another set of the Coyote tracks that are a bit deeper and more defined.



And then we went live. Despite our facination with all the wildlife tracks we still made our slot on the evening news. I might have to go back down there and check out those tracks again one day.