101 fringed orchids to brighten your day
Trudging through my inbox, I found a little ray of sunshine. Subject: 101 fringed orchids. It was a note from The Nature Conservancy with a report from the field. Literally.
The Tellabs Foundation supports The Nature Conservancy to preserve native grasslands. It's part of our commitment to help protect the environment. Our most recent grant supports prairies around the U.S., including the 2,800-acre Nachusa Grasslands in Illinois.
Project director Bill Kleiman leads the team of volunteers and staff that carefully protects Nachusa. I hope you are as inspired as I was by Bill's e-mail, which appears in its entirety below:
The eastern prairie fringed orchid is on the federal endangered species list. Nachusa received a small quantity of powdery seed from a Lake County site back in 1996. We mixed this seed with sand and then a bunch of us walked around wet areas we guessed would support the plant and flung the seed here and there.
About six years later we saw one or two plants in the Prairie Potholes wetlands, a former corn field that we had removed all the tiles from in 1994. These orchids are pollinated by one or a few species of hawk moths--which Nachusa has--but we helped the orchids with their pollination by moving pollen sacs with toothpicks from one plant to another, mimicking the moth.
This created wetland currently looks great with sedges, rushes, winged loosestrife, turtle head, swamp milkweed, gentians, very few weeds...and lots of orchids!
The fringed orchid population grew very slowly for years, and then last year the numbers jumped to 46 plants. Today we counted 101 plants. We also have found a new occurrence of 18 plants in the remnant sedge meadow just west of the restored wetland!
We hope to one day have thousands of these orchids.
Cheers!
Bill Kleiman
Nachusa Grasslands Project Director
The Nature Conservancy
Your dedication does not go unnoticed. Transferring pollen with a toothpick! Thank you for all your hard work. You make the world a better place.