The Wildflower Detective
Here’s some blue-eyed grass that Caitlin photographed a couple of weeks ago on Mount Desert Island. It’s part of the iris family and not a true grass. If you like blue-eyed grass, check out this blog post by one of Caitlin’s former classmates: http://writingfornature.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/blue-eyed-grass-diminuitive-irises/.
Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is trying to solve a nature mystery: How have land use and climate change altered the plant landscape of New England? Having earned a degree in environmental science and public policy at Harvard and a masters in the Field Naturalist Program at the University of Vermont, Caitlin came to Maine’s Mount Desert Island last summer to begin her research. Because scientific studies need a sharp focus, she decided to concentrate on wildflowers. She holed up in the Acadia National Park archives, studying historical records and century-old plant specimens from the island. She began a quest that will eventually lead to her Ph.D. from Boston University—and might require help from you.
Here’s Caitlin, enjoying the Maine coast.
Caitlin is another of those delightful and interesting people who cross our path here at The Naturalist’s Notebook on an almost daily basis. She is again spending the summer here on Mount Desert Island doing research, and she dropped by the Notebook for a visit the other day. As we talked about her work, she mentioned that she is hunting for any records or observations of plants on MDI over the last century—jottings in your great grandmother’s diary noting when certain flowers bloomed, a rare 1945 book on Maine wildflowers, your own garden journal from the 1990s, whatever. But I will now step aside and let Caitlin explain what she’s doing and how you might be able to assist her:
“My research explores how climate change and land use change affect plant communities in New England,” she writes. “When I look at a landscape, or a flower, I am often wondering to myself, What did this place look like a century ago? Did this plant always grow here? Was it once much more abundant?
Caitlin’s wildflower walks led her to these pink lady’s slippers. They’re a type of orchid and can live to be 20 years old if not eaten by deer (who love them) or over-picked by humans (who sometimes wipe them out). How is climate change affecting lady’s slippers? Caitlin is trying to find out.
“Luckily, in a place like Mount Desert Island, those questions can be answered reasonably well. Botanists and nature lovers have come here for two centuries. Between the rusticators, the Harvard boys on summer trips in the 1880s, the naturalists who worked for the park, the professors and students at the College of the Atlantic, and the local community of gardeners, the plants here have been well-studied and well-loved for generations. Many of these people left behind books like the 1894 Flora of Mount Desert Island, as well as letters, notebooks, photographs and pressed flowers in herbariums. From these clues, I can piece together a history of the plants on this island. My research last summer uncovered trends in the flora. Many native plants are disappearing from the landscape, or declining in abundance; nonnative species are becoming more numerous and often more abundant too.
This is Labrador tea, part of the heath family. As the name suggests, its leaves can be brewed into herbal tea; if kept in a closet or drawer, they also can keep moths away from clothing.
“As a graduate student in biology, I am hyper-aware of climate change and its largely unknown ecological effects. A study on any landscape now must consider: How does climate change fit into the processes and patterns that I am seeing here? Are warmer temperatures changing things? How? And how much? On Mount Desert Island we have local weather records that date back to the 1890s. These are currently being digitized and analyzed to give us an important and useful measurement of how the climate has changed right here.
Caitlin came upon this sheep-laurel, which because of its toxicity to animals is sometimes known as lamb-kill, sheep-kill or calf-kill. Meat from an animal that has eaten sheep-laurel can itself be toxic. The nectar can even produce toxic honey!
“Studies from across the world and, more locally, in southern New England have found that warmer temperatures are correlated with earlier flowering times. Spring is coming sooner than it used to, and the plants are responding with blooms and blossoms weeks before they once opened. The timing of flowering provides a quick metric for biologists. Recording flowering is like taking a pulse on the landscape. It is a vital sign that lets us know how a plant is responding to its climate. When ecologists study the timing of things like flowering, or leafing out, or when migrating birds arrive, they call it phenology.
“Observing phenology was once a popular pastime for naturalists—Thoreau’s journals are filled with charts of the first flowers, first leaves and first birds that he saw on Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. Like neon T-shirts and ironic fedoras, phenology has now returned to fashion. We know that the timing of flowering is closely tied to temperature, so tracing the shifting flowering phenology of our plants allows us to track the effects of climate change on the flora. When we add in studies of phenologies of other organisms—insects, birds, herbivores, and pollinators—we can catch shifts that don’t match up. Flowers may be blooming and then dying before a hummingbird arrives to drink their nectar. Relationships and food chains may be disrupted, unable to adjust to the quickly changing climate.
This bunchberry, which Caitlin photographed on MDI, has a secret you may not know about: It is the world’s fastest plant. Intrigued? I will reveal the secret farther down in the blog.
“So, back to my research. Here on MDI we have the old flora records, we have the weather records, and we have these historic snapshots of flowers in bloom—either actual snapshots or herbarium specimens that were collected at the moment of their most brilliant flowering and now sit in a cabinet at the herbarium of College of the Atlantic. I am beginning to record flowering for many common plant species here. But my records are just a start, and though Ph.D.s are notoriously unending, I will have only a couple years of data before I write my dissertation. What I need are more years. I wish I had a time machine with the ability to go back to the early ’90s and begin recording flowering times then, so that today, when I sit down at my desk at Acadia National Park headquarters, I could open up a notebook of twenty years of carefully collected data. Now that would be a memorable Ph.D. research project!
This is an herbarium specimen collected by Edward Rand, co-author (with John Redfield) of the 1894 book Flora of Mount Desert Island, Maine.
“But, without a time machine, I can still graduate. I hope to use the records of others—local gardeners, amateur naturalists, flower-lovers—to create a robust data set of when things bloomed here in the recent past. The Wild Gardens of Acadia post weekly “What’s in Bloom” lists. Ruth Grierson’s newspaper columns often recount the first flowering of local plants. To me, these simple observations are diamond mines of data. And I am looking for more! If you have a notebook or a calendar with notes jotted down— ‘May 30th, first lilacs, seems early’—please let me know! And if you have older field books in your attic, your great-grandmother’s records from the garden, your father-in-law’s journal from his days bagging peaks and painting flowers in water color, I would love to see these as well. Any and all local records of flowers on Mount Desert Island are welcome additions to my research! Please email me at mackenz@bu.edu with any leads. Thank you!”
Postscript
I mentioned above that bunchberry is sometimes called the world’s fastest plant. That’s because when its petals unfold, they release spring-like filaments that fire pollen into the air at 800 times the acceleration of the Space Shuttle liftoff. Below is a video of this happening, filmed at 10,000 frames per second.
Welcome to the Neighborhood
I should have figured it out from the mauled thistle feeder outside our house, but only when I saw the gigantic scat on our dirt road this week did I realize: We have a black bear. Have any of you had interesting bear experiences?
Real scientists measure bear scat crosswise with calipers because the diameter helps reveal the animal’s size. I had only a yardstick, but I estimated the width of some of this as more than an inch and a half—definitely from a grown-up.
The plant matter in the scat reflected the bear’s early season diet. No berries or nuts yet, but a bit of sunflower seed and thistle from our feeders.
Notebook Snapshot of the Day
Whoa—what’s going on with the front stoop at The Naturalist’s Notebook? You will have to wait and see. A hint: It will be intriguing to everyone who’s even a little curious about the last 13.7 billion years (give or take).
Hi Again to a Gifted Young Naturalist and Artist
Last year we introduced you to Luke Seitz, a remarkable birder and artist, who was then 17. If you haven’t read it, go back and read my Q-and-A with him from last July: http://naturalistsnote.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/an-extraordinary-and-inspiring-young-birder-and-artist/
Luke came up here from the Portland area last weekend to work as a guide at the Acadia Birding Festival. He stopped by the Notebook for a two-hour visit and dropped off more of his watercolor paintings of birds, which we will be selling this summer. Luke will be entering Cornell to study ornithology this fall, and in the meantime will be serving as a naturalist on board a whale-watching boat and doing a number of bird paintings commissioned by people who saw his work this spring while he was serving as a birding guide at the noted avian-migration hotspot of High Island, Texas.
Luke with Pamelia and some of his paintings.
Speaking of the Acadia Birding Festival, Pamelia and I took time to enjoy the event’s lobster dinner at Thurston’s with some friends and organizer Michael Good (far right), who did a great job, as always, in giving festival participants a wonderful bird-watching and learning experience.
Answer to the Last Puzzler
The nestlings in the photo above, taken last week in Maine (thank you, LJ), are blue jays.
Today’s Puzzler
Here’s a slide from the Acadia Birding Festival bird-identification workshop. Is the bird in the photo a:
a) Tennessee warbler
b) Magnolia warbler
c) Northern parula
Can you guess what it is?
Comment on bears-
New Jersey and it’s black bear population have been in the news over the last few years. Most of the sensationalism revolves around the annual “black bear hunt”. Factions from both sides have managed to get the media’s attention from time to time. Most of the issue is obviously in response to human population impeding on black bear territory. There have been a few situations where black bears have been in closer contact with humans than, (I think) either side wanted. The result is that there is now an annual “black bear hunt”. It is limited and really does not address the situation. “Lucky” hunters get one of a a few bear permits issued each year and are allowed to go shoot a bear. The part that does not make sense is that the areas where hunting is allowed are far from the nieghborhoods where bears have been raiding garbage cans or, in one case, scaring off a few campers in a State park.
Our own experiences with bears have been polarized.
Our first experience was when our daughter, Sarah, was about 5 years old. She exclaimed there were “bears at the birdfeeder!” We knew they had been raiding it from time to time but, no damage done. We watched as a mother and two cubs went on to play in the sand box, then quietly continue on their way. We have had a few sightings on the property (one or two a year) since then and I would like to think they are those very cubs, grown up now. Maybe they are the grand-cubs of that mother bear?
Our next bear story had to do with a neighbor reporting that a pick-up truck had been in and out of our driveway numerous times over the period of a couple of weeks, at times of the day when we were at work. Becoming a little nervous, we began being extra vigilant about locking up! Finally, one raining Saturday morning our doorbell rang. No one we know ever comes to our front door! I opened it to see the pick-up truck, and two rangers standing in the doorway. They explained that a bear had been illegally shot on our property and I immediately pleaded innocence!!! They had somehow determined it was a hunter from accross the woodland and just wanted to make sure we have not granted permission to hunt. We never knew how the bearicide case played out but we could not help but assume that one of “our” bear family was the victim.
It’s a Magnolia warbler. Thanks for making me look up three more new birds that I was not familiar with.
I enjoy your blog and learn a lot here.