Story by Kelly Kendall
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It’s been ten years since it became a felony to pick Venus Flytraps from the wild. Reporter Kelly Kendall brings us inside a day of enforcing that law.
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In 1759…North Carolina’s colonial governor, Arthur Dobbs, wrote of a plant that “closes upon anything that touches it.” He was, of course, referring to the Venus Flytrap…which all these years later… still inspires the fascination of the world. But in the place of the flytrap’s origin…the coastal Carolinas…that fascination has led to crime and law enforcement.
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*NAT sound of officers walking through woods*
In the tall grasses of eastern north carolina…officer Fred Gorchess is looking for two things…Venus Flytraps and their poachers.
SUPER: Fred Gorchess, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission
SOT: “One of the guys got, because we ended up having a trial. He got eight or ten months.”
Gorchess is an officer with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. They enforce laws related to everything from hunting and fishing…to venus flytraps.
SOT: “It would blow your mind, even me as a wildlife guy, the money that’s in some of the resources out here.”
The Venus Flytrap is perhaps most widely known for its role in the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors.
*Clip from Little Shop of Horrors*
But what many don’t know about the meat-eating plant…is that it is native to to the Carolinas…only growing within a 75-mile radius of Wilmington, including the Holly Shelter Game Lands, where many poachers come to pick the prized plant.
SOT: “The last guy I caught out here, I talked to him, and he was out here for under an hour and I want to say he has four or five hundred of them in under and hour.”
Though it’s illegal to pick the plants…poachers do it for the money. according to Gorchess…it can be a lucrative business.
SOT: “Some of them told me they were getting 25 cents per plant; some of them were getting a dollar, dollar-fifty per plant.”
But in 2014…the state legislature upped the penalty for flytrap poaching from a misdemeanor to a felony.
SOT: “Going back to the risk being worth the reward, if you get caught when it was an infraction, you get a minimal fine of 50 bucks, but you made $600 digging the flytraps up.”
Now…a poacher can get up to two years in prison for picking flytraps. Today…Gorchess says the stricter penalties have helped deter poachers from picking fly traps, but he still makes arrests. in Hampstead…I’m Kelly Kendall.
