Hunting a Lost Orchid at Sleeping Bear Dunes

If you have ever seen a park ranger crawling through a marsh, they may have been looking for a plant nobody has seen in a hundred years. At Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, ranger Kara Quirke and her team, Emma Murray and Justin Donahue, search the park for rare and endangered plants.

Searching a wetland for rare plants. NPS / R. Klammer

A map, foot by foot

The team records every find in ArcGIS Field Maps, which works without an internet connection in the backcountry and gathers thousands of reports from rangers across the park onto one map, current and past seasons alike. Instead of paging through hundreds of old survey sheets, the rangers can see what grows where — building up a complete map of the park's plants, "foot by foot, and acre by acre."

Kara Quirke records a notable population in the field. NPS / R. Klammer

A hundred-year game of telephone

One of their targets is the small round-leaved orchid (Galearis rotundifolia). Its last record in the park is thirdhand: a survey by William and Edith Overlease of West Chester University, more than 40 years old, reported that local botanists knew of another botanist, E. J. Parker, who found it in 1904.

Old reports like these are often all the team has to go on, and they have aged badly. A plant may be placed beside a road that no longer exists, or at a place name nobody has used for a century. Kara's copies are full of pencilled guesses — "Boekeloo = Copper Road?" — and, again and again, "Location?"

"Because land has been protected so long, I can find plants that haven't been seen since the 1970s," she says. "So I go on wild goose chases and sometimes it pays off."

Five hours in a cedar swamp

This chase led to a cedar swamp, where the team spent more than five hours walking, crawling and crouching through dense growth, stopping over plants most people would step on — a sedge that turned out to be unusual, the hairs on a seed head seen through a hand lens.

Identifying a plant by the hairs on its fruiting body. NPS / R. Klammer

They found dozens of northern bog orchids, fen orchids and bog muhly (Muhlenbergia uniflora). The small round-leaved orchid was nowhere to be seen.

A fen orchid found on the search. NPS / R. Klammer

Why it matters

Many rare plants live only in very particular places — Pitcher's thistle on Great Lakes dunes, the Michigan monkey flower only in cold-water seeps that stay around 45°F. As forests change, temperatures rise and habitats shrink and break apart, some survive only where the ecosystems they depend on still hold on. Without help, they may one day exist only in old survey notes.

Rare plants thrive in healthy ecosystems, so finding them — or failing to — says something about the land. The team's records help the park protect those places (some backcountry sites are kept secret for that reason), and help conservationists elsewhere protect their own.

A good find. NPS / R. Klammer

The search for the small round-leaved orchid goes on.

Sources

Written from "Searching for Rare Orchids at Sleeping Bear Dunes," Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's photograph of the small round-leaved orchid is licensed separately and is not reproduced here.