Reporting for Mother Jones, Jackie Flynn Mogensen goes to the Carolinas and spends time with Julie Moore, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, who is on the hunt for some of the last-remaining Venus flytraps growing in the wild. As Mogensen reports, the population of the tiny iconic plant is dwindling, but not enough to require federal action. Moore, who now runs a flytrap conservation nonprofit, is on a mission to save them.
After a stint at the North Carolina Heritage Program, the state’s primary biodiversity agency, she landed at the Fish and Wildlife Service in DC in 2004. There, she focused on convincing private landowners to voluntarily take up conservation measures for all types of threatened critters, including longleaf pine species like the red-cockaded woodpecker. When she retired in 2019, she left feeling like the agency failed to understand and serve people on a local level. So, after settling down in Raleigh, she founded Venus Flytrap Champions, knowing full well that public support of a key charismatic species can help save whole ecosystems. Now she treks up and down the coast, trying to convince people to safeguard flytraps and, in some cases, digging them up to relocate them. Think of her as Susan Orlean’s orchid thief but for rescuing, not stealing, plants.
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