Category: Flora

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Whitebark Pines

Whitebark Pine Courtesy US National Park Service Jen Hooke, Photographer
Whitebark Pine
Courtesy US National Park Service
Jen Hooke, Photographer
Five needle pines- I love them! It was the stately eastern white pine that introduced me to these trees of the five needle clan in my early years in Wisconsin & Michigan. I marveled at their majesty, once the dominant pine of north central and north eastern states, until mostly logged off. Now, about 1% of old growth remains in the US and Canada.

Coming west, I was introduced to other members of the five needle clan- limber pine, whitebark pine, bristlecone pine, and the magnificent western white pine. I’ve found with the exception of the western white pine, the others are difficult to differentiate without examining the cone. The sneaky limber pine can be found at both mid and higher elevations which is a lookalike, sharing the same space as the others, making a fun 3- tree ID game.

It is the whitebark pine that has held my interest more than most for various reasons. First, much like the bristlecone pine, it’s found in high elevations which I’m attracted to for stunning alpine meadows and peak bagging. In Utah that means the Uintahs, high plateaus, and Wasatch mountains, generally found above 10,000 feet.

Secondly, whitebark pine has been struggling from a plethora of assaults, and has been placed on the threatened species list by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Populations of whitebark pine are declining throughout most of the species range because of high levels of mortality from an exotic fungal pathogen that causes the disease white pine blister rust in five-needle pines, and periodic upsurges of the endemic mountain pine beetle. The absence of fire in some forests has also led to advanced succession of shade-tolerant spruce/fir species with subsequent reductions in whitebark pine. Finally, increased atmospheric warming and associated effects from altered precipitation patterns further threaten to reduce the geographic distribution of the species.

As a keystone species, precipitous declines in whitebark pine have cascading effects throughout the ecosystem primarily because of the subalpine and treeline positions the species occupies. When forest stands succumb to mortality, few if any other species exist to fill the structural and functional roles of whitebark pine. Notably, whitebark pine presence dampens snow melt, stabilizes soils, provides cover and birthing habitat, and its seeds are highly nutritious and consumed by a wide array of vertebrate species. For over thirty years researchers and managers have sought to understand whitebark pine ecology, and to devise and implement procedures to reduce population decline and restore these valuable high-elevation ecosystems.

Last, many of my favorite critters, including us humans, are dependent on this pine. Grizzlies and black bears feast on the cones, as do Clark’s Nutcrackers, Steller’s Jays, Pine Grosbeaks, and a host of small rodents. Many native tribes would harvest the highly nutritional cones, similar to the pinyon pine in food value.

This is Jack Green for Bridgerland Audubon Society, and I’m Wild About Utah and its vanishing Whitebark pines!

Credits:

Picture: Whitebark Pine, Courtesy US National Park Service, Jen Hooke, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/
Text: Jack Greene, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading: Lyle W Bingham, Webmaster, and Jack Greene, Author, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Jack Greene’s Postings on Wild About Utah, https://wildaboututah.org/author/jack/

Whitebark Pine, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/whitebark-pine-klamath-network.htm

Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis), U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, https://www.fws.gov/species/whitebark-pine-pinus-albicaulis

Apodaca, Nicolas, The Future of White Pines in the West, Sustainability Education, University of Utah, March 20, 2019, https://sustainability.utah.edu/the-future-of-white-pines-in-the-west/

Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, https://whitebarkfound.org/

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May Day in Mendon

May Day in Mendon: Mendon May Pole Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer
Mendon May Pole
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mendon Glacier Lilly Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer
Mendon Glacier Lilly
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mendon Glacier Lilly Close Up Courtesy & © Mary Heers, PhotographerMendon Glacier Lilly Close Up
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mary's Neighbor's May Queen Crown Courtesy & &copy' Mary Heers, PhotographerMary’s Neighbor’s May Queen Crown
Courtesy & &copy’ Mary Heers, Photographer

Never have I seen the coming of spring celebrated with more flair than Mendon’s May Day.

On the first Saturday in May, Maypoles with 20 foot long ribbons appear in the Mendon town square. By ten o’clock a couple hundred residents have gathered around the poles. A piano in the gazebo strikes the first chords and the May Queen and her entourage step around the corner of the church and onto the green. Suddenly everybody gathered in the square begins to sing. “Come to the woodlands, away, away”. Most people know the whole song by heart.

The queen is crowned and the real showstopper, the braiding of the Maypoles, begins. Mendon’s young girls, grades 1-5, pick up the ribbons. Braiding the poles is complicated. The girls have been practicing after school three times a week since the beginning of April. Last week I dropped in on one of the practices and counted: 3 Maypoles, 64 girls, and a little bit of chaos. There’s a march, a minuet. More songs. Stepping in, stepping out, kneeling, skipping. The girls bob up and down as they sing ”Apples blossoms swing and sway..”

Mendon is one of Cache Valley’s oldest pioneer towns, tucked up against the Wellsville Mountains. Winters were long and hard, and the coming of spring eagerly awaited. The beginnings of May Day can be traced back to the days when the young girls in the pioneer settlement raced up the hillsides to gather spring wildflowers to put in their hair.

The first May Queen, Seny Sorenson, was crowned with a hand woven wreath of flowers in 1863. Since then, every year, rain or shine, a queen has been crowned in the town square, and the maypoles have been braided with the same songs and dance steps. 160 years, with only a few changes.

The queen’s name is now drawn out of a hat from a pool of the town’s high school juniors. And this year, for the first time ever, the young girls will be getting store bought dresses. In the past, the mothers were expected to sew the matching dresses for their daughters. Not knowing about this tradition, you can imagine how bewildered I was when I had just moved to Mendon and answered a knock on my door. A woman I didn’t know handed me a dress pattern and proceed to say something about altering the interfacing. I was pretty sure she was speaking English, but I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Luckily my good friend and neighbor quickly brought me up to speed. This wonderful neighbor had actually been Mendon’s May Queen over 50 years ago. “Do you want to see my crown?” she asked as she opened the door to her hall closet. And there it was, a tight ring of pink and white flowers, secured to a tiny satin pillow with a fading ribbon.

I had one more stop to make. I hopped in my car and drove up to the Deep Canyon trailhead high above Mendon. A short way up the trail I found it– a whole hillside covered with curly yellow Glacier Lilies, the “early blooming flowers” from the May Day song “Maying and Straying…” And believe me, this was a sight worth singing about.

This is Mary Heers, and I’m Wild about Springtime in Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright © Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers AND Courtesy & Copyright © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections/kevin-colver
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Mendon May Day, https://www.mendonutah.net/may_day.htm

May Day Celebration, Mendon City, Utah, https://mendoncity.org/may-day-celebration/

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Ute Ladies’ Tresses – Utah Orchids

Ute Ladies' Tresses at the Mendon Meadow Preserve, Bear River Land Conservancy, Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer
Ute Ladies’ Tresses, Spiranthes diluvialis, at the Mendon Meadow Preserve
Bear River Land Conservancy
Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer

The Mendon Meadow Preserve, Bear River Land Conservancy Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer The Mendon Meadow Preserve
Bear River Land Conservancy
Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer

Bumblebee on Ute Ladies' Tresses at the Mendon Meadow Preserve, Bear River Land Conservancy Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer Bumblebee on Ute Ladies’ Tresses at the Mendon Meadow Preserve
Bear River Land Conservancy
Courtesy & © Mark Brunson, Photographer

It’s a warm summer evening on the west side of Cache Valley, where a small group of volunteers has gathered beside a green pasture. We hear the rattling bugle calls of sandhill cranes in the distance. A Swainson’s hawk scolds us as it circles overhead. As we walk into the field, our steps disturb dragonflies and leopard frogs. But we’re not here for the wildlife. We’re after something rarer: orchids!

Wait, what? Orchids? You mean those delicate tropical plants with colorful blossoms that city folks grow in humid greenhouses? Well, yes actually. It turns out that orchids grow on almost every type of land surface across the globe, including some in Utah.

The orchid we’re seeking has drawn the attention of the federal government. You see, while the orchid family has nearly 28,000 species worldwide, many of those are rare. The one we’re looking for, called Ute Ladies’-tresses, is on the federal Threatened Species list, which gives it legal protection from human impacts until it’s no longer at risk of disappearing.

In Cache County, Ute Ladies’-tresses are guarded by the Bear River Land Conservancy, a nonprofit whose mission is to protect open space and working farms and ranches in northern Utah. After orchids were found in a pasture near the small town of Mendon, the Conservancy received funding to purchase and manage the land in ways that could help the orchids to thrive, and to provide data to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about how the population is doing.

That’s why we volunteers are gathered in a pasture on a Friday evening. Our job is to carefully walk the property, looking for blossoms. When one of us sees an orchid in bloom, we mark the spot with a bamboo plant stake. Then someone trails along behind them – usually that’s me – and records the location using a global positioning system. By taking these GPS measurements, we not only count how many plants have flowered that year, but we also map their locations to learn where we might be losing or gaining orchids over time.

Ute Ladies’-tresses has narrow leaves, hard to distinguish from the surrounding grasses and sedges and rushes. But then it sends up 1-5 flower stalks, up to a foot high. Each stalk has numerous small white flowers arranged in a graceful spiral. The plant likes to grow on solid ground that floods at some point in the year – a streambed that’s dry except during spring runoff, or a flood-irrigated pasture like the one in Mendon. At our site, the first flowers emerge around Pioneer Day, and new ones continue to appear till about Labor Day.

Monitoring this population since 2013, we’ve learned a lot about Ute Ladies’-tresses. One key finding is that flower numbers fluctuate widely from year to year. Our highest count was nearly 2,000 flowering specimens in 2017. But in the very dry summer of 2021, we counted fewer than 30. That year was scary if you’re trying to protect a rare plant, But these orchids live for several years, flowering only when conditions are right, and last year we found more than 1,400.

You see, even if a plant is rare, that doesn’t have to mean it’s fragile. Some rare plants are, to be sure, but Ute Ladies’-tresses is resilient. In fact, last fall the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing the species from the Threatened list. One reason they feel they can do so is the continued protection it gets from groups like Bear River Land Conservancy. And so I look forward to many more August evenings in a Mendon meadow, sharing time with this lovely orchid.

I’m Mark Brunson, and I’m wild about Utah’s rare plants.

Credits:

Images Courtesy & Copyright Mark Brunson, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections and J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin. https://upr.org/
Text: Mark Brunson,
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah pieces authored by Mark Brunson

Ute Ladies’ Tresses in Wet Pasture, Bear River Land Conservancy, https://www.bearriverlandconservancy.org/mendon-meadows

Ute Ladies’ Tresses, Utah Species, Fieldguide, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, State of Utah, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=spiranthes%20diluvialis

Species Profile for Ute ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes diluvialis), US Fish & Wildlife Service, https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/species/2159

Delmatier, Charmaine, Ute Lady’s Tresses (Spiranthes diluvialis), Plant of the Week, USDA Forest Service, 2016, US Department of Agriculture(USDA), https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/spiranthes_diluvialis.shtml

St. John, Loren, Ogle, Dan, USDA NRCS, Ute Lady’s Tresses Spiranthes diluvialis Sheviak, Natural Resources Conservation Service, US Department of Agriculture(USDA), https://plants.usda.gov/DocumentLibrary/plantguide/pdf/pg_spdi6.pdf

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Squirrel Tales

Evergreen Cone Scales, Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes
Evergreen Cone Scales
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes

Nature Rings, Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes Nature Rings
Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes

The recent snows have made the sledding hill at Edith Bowen Laboratory School on the campus of Utah State University a popular place, but without snow, children flock at recess to the wild area under the oak trees to harvest acorns. I’ve invited one of these students, a seven-year-old first grader named Lila, to explain this phenomenon:

“You get an acorn and you rub the pointy bottom part and keep doing it for a bit and then you can put it on whatever finger it fits on and it turns into a nature ring.”

They trade them and then squirrel the rings away in their lockers. Sometimes they stop to notice the squirrels scolding above them in the trees, and one day I sat with them to appreciate a noisy one. Nibbling away, its eight black claws rotated the little nugget it was holding. Standing erect so I could see the whitish belly fur and bushy tail, it kept me in its sights as I sketched its silhouette and details in my nature journal.

The Natural History Museum of Utah sponsored another Squirrel Fest during the first week of December, and I should have been better prepared to identify it so I could participate in that project during the same month as the Christmas Bird Count. The NHMU website reports that more than 900 Utah citizen scientists watched for and collected data on fox squirrels and other squirrels in 2023. I know now that my squirrel wasn’t a fox squirrel native to the eastern U.S. Those critters are moving in. Actually, they have been spreading throughout northern Utah since 2011. I know mine was probably not that target species because the fox squirrel is larger and has a bright yellow or orange belly and a long, very bushy tail.

Here’s another story. One June afternoon last summer in the Cache National Forest, I stumbled upon a massive pile of evidence that squirrels had been busy, having stashed their food finds and then unpacking them. The pile of evergreen cone scale leftovers was over three feet tall. I had seen middens at the base of trees before, but never had I seen a pile this incredible. Even though it was a snow pile that the cone scales covered, the insulation slowing the melt, it was still monstrous.

As most of the students on the first day launching my first ever university writing class described themselves as writers with words like decent, ok, alright, unpolished, and mediocre, I thought about that pile of potential. They have stories, piles of stories to tell and teach, squirreled away maybe, but ready to thaw.

Just like Kate DiCamillo’s superpowered squirrel Ulysses in her children’s novel Flora and Ulysses, we all have stories to write. DiCamillo wrote, “He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Well….Most of it would be true.”

This year on January 21 we celebrate Squirrel Appreciation Day. But whether you watch and write about squirrels or anything else, we think it is time for you to get writing stories just as magical as nature rings made of acorns at recess.

For Wild About Utah, I’m Shannon Rhodes, and I am Lila Hoggan.

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Shannon Rhodes, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Friend Weller, https://upr.org/
Text:     Shannon Rhodes and Lila Hoggan, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Shannon Rhodes

Additional Reading:

Wild About Utah Pieces by Shannon Rhodes, https://wildaboututah.org/author/shannon-rhodes/

DiCamillo, Kate. Flora and Ulysses. 2013. Candlewick Press. https://www.candlewick.com/cat.asp?mode=book&isbn=0763687642

Greene, Jack. Intelligent Tree Squirrels. Wild About Utah, Oct. 17, 2022. https://wildaboututah.org/intelligent-tree-squirrels/

Larese-Casanova, Mark. Nutcrackers and Squirrels: Farmers of the Forest. Wild About Utah, Aug. 26, 2013. https://wildaboututah.org/nutcrackers-squirrels-farmers-forests/

Natural History Museum of Utah. Utah Fox Squirrels. https://nhmu.utah.edu/citizen-science/utah-fox-squirrels

Strand, Holly. Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Wild About Utah, Nov. 26, 2009. https://wildaboututah.org/rocky-the-flying-squirrel/