Natural Connections

I met a new friend this spring, and I’ve been heading up north to visit them every chance I get. We didn’t meet online exactly, but I did use an app to figure out their location. You see, I read about them over the winter, and just had to find out more about their life! They are a little odd – they supplement their diet with insects and make an unusual kind of yogurt – and they may not be hanging out this far south for very much longer.  Being a botany nerd, I call this new friend of mine Pinguicula vulgaris, a plant also known as Common Butterwort.

Keir, who specializes in moss, passed around tuft after tuft of green Dr. Seussian inventions. The scientific names he gave with each sample slipped through my brain in a fog of unspellable syllables. I admired each one eagerly, though, in awe of the kaleidoscope of leaf shapes, textures, patterns, and colors. I was crouched down, admiring the round, glistening leaves of a unique moss sprinkled in a thick jumble across a small bowl between cedar roots, when Keir finally spoke words I recognized. “And here’s some spilled penny moss…” I couldn’t even see the specimen he held up, but I knew he’d just named my lovely, shiny friend.

I pretty much stopped fishing after my dad stopped untangling my line and tying my hook. The few times I’ve tried as an adult, I’ve come up empty-handed. So I have the utmost respect for osprey, who catch at least one fish for every four dives. How do they do it? Osprey, eagles, kingfishers, and green herons have adaptations that make them excellent anglers.

With a quick push from shore, my old green canoe caught the current and we swept downstream on the Namekagon River. The recent rains have filled the river with more water than I’ve seen in a couple of summers, and warm days have filled the river with life. I’m not sure that we’d been searching for anything in particular when we decided to paddle on the Namekagon, but what we found was a river, that, in the words of Mary Oliver, is “touching every life it meets.”

Coggin and I followed Karen’s memory through the dark swamps in search of this rare flower. The dirt path wound around spruce, fir, birch, and cedars. A hint of color caught my eye. There, almost crushed by the tip of a spruce tree blown off in some strong wind, the white and pink of the Ram’s Head orchid glowed through the gloom.  Since the fungi, forest community, and pollination have to coalesce perfectly for an orchid to bloom, we felt lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

The old turtle scraped at the sand with her naily toes as the kids gathered in a wide circle around her. Sometimes I get questions about dinosaurs on field trips, but they don’t fit into the Museum’s focus on Northern Wisconsin species. Today, instead, the first- and second-graders got a close-up look at a creature whose species has existed on Earth for over 40 million years, with direct ancestors much older than dinosaurs.

The fleshy stem bore no leaves, just a sprig of beautiful little flowers on the upper half. Each blossom looked like a whimsical elf. Coralroots exist underground for much of their lives, and their flowering stalk may not pop up every year, or in the same place. So, while widespread and not uncommon, coralroots can be hard to spot – or at least that’s my excuse for never having seen one before this year! 

As I climbed back into my car with a camera full of more lovely wildflower photos, I smiled at my good luck. Here in Wisconsin and Minnesota, we have quite a variety of habitats and soil types in a relatively small area. I can explore rich soils and maple forests filled with trilliums, wild oats, and large-flowered bellwort one day, then delight in the bedrock home of bird’s eye primrose (and a not-yet-booming mystery plant) the next. And now here I was enjoying prairie flowers in a barrens!  What do we have to thank for these riches? Why the glaciers, of course!

This week I attend a festival of birds and nature.

Last week, with evening sunshine glinting off the riffled waters of Lake Superior’s North Shore, and a surprisingly warm breeze wafting over the spit of wave-washed bedrock, a flower caught my eye. Rock-hopping over, I discovered the pink petals and yellow centers I’d been looking for. Notches in each of the five petals gave them a lovely heart shape. At the base of the flower’s wiry stem was a little rosette of bright green leaves with wavy edges. This flower was one of dozens all sprouting from the cushion of moss in a little bedrock nook. Besides the Bird's-eye Primrose, quite a diversity of plants crowded together in this island of habitat surrounded by a sea of bedrock.