Endangered prairie orchid a 'hidden treasure'

Tiny white ghosts flutter in the breeze.

No one is really supposed to know where the endangered Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchids are except the scores of botanists and hundreds of volunteers throughout Illinois who have been busy in the past couple weeks documenting locations and collecting data on plant numbers.

The delicate blooms will wilt soon enough and the stalks that held them will whither away as well. But hopefully not before researchers are able to determine if recovery efforts are working and new seeds are collected to ensure the orchids' survival.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been leading an effort to restore the persnickety plants' populations in several states.

"It's definitely working," said Cathy Pollack, a biologist with the federal agency, "because we're learning new things every day."

Researchers have learned it takes more than just spreading seeds on marshy soil to make the orchids grow. It turns out a specific fungus has to be present in the soil for the plants to thrive. In addition, it's only a particular nocturnal family of moths that are responsible for pollinating the flowers when they blossom. And it's important to regularly remove any vegetation that may shade or smother the orchids.

"I wouldn't say the plants are finicky," said Scott Kobal, a DuPage County Forest Preserve ecologist, "they're just finicky about their habitat."

Before mankind began drying up wetlands to make way for development, the flowers were a lot more plentiful, Pollack said. The plants can grow up to three feet tall and may hold up to 40 flowers.

Two DuPage forest preserves are home to small populations of the wild orchids (officials don't want to publicize exactly where to protect the plants as much as possible).

They're not easily accessible, yet Kobal and volunteers have been monitoring them since the early 1990s. Year after year, they traipse through the same thickets and brambles to get to the plants to document things like how many blooms are on each stem, how many leaves are on the stalks and if there are any new plants that have sprouted in the area.

But this year, something different happened.

"This week we found a plant in a third preserve," Kobal said. "This was another site where we hadn't seen them in about 25 years, so we're very excited."

In the 1990s, seeds were planted in the area, but there also may have been a dormant plant already there just waiting for the right conditions, Kobal said. Experts may never know what was responsible for the new growth.

DuPage is not alone in discovering the orchids in unexpected places. In 2008, a new population was discovered in McHenry County. Another patch recently was found in Kane County.

"It's like a paleontologist working in the Gobi Desert for years looking for a particular dinosaur bone and then one day at lunch he throws an apple core into the sand and where it lands it knocks away some dust and there's the dinosaur bone they've been looking for," said Drew Ullberg, director of natural resources for the Kane County Forest Preserve District.

McHenry County Conservation District plant ecologist Laurie Boldt said finding the new plants was like finding "a hidden treasure."

"It's such a mysterious orchid where some years you can have high numbers and then the next you have low numbers and you don't know why," she said. "Then when you find a new set of these spectacularly beautiful orchids, it just makes your day."

The orchids bloom in late June and usually disappear by mid-July. The top of each white blossom looks like a massive hood for a robed figure. The flower's namesake fringed petals jut out left, right and down, giving each bloom an ethereal, humanlike form.

Listed as a federally "threatened" species, the Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid is "endangered" in Illinois. Kobal called it one of DuPage County's "top tier" plants for monitoring.

There's not a lot of funding available for such detailed documenting and rigorous research. There is, however, a lot of work that goes into bringing a flower back from the brink of extinction, and that's where the volunteers come in.

"We can't do this kind of work without our partners," Pollack said. "A big deal in all of this is our volunteers."

And sometimes the volunteer work has to be hands-on. That's because sometimes the hawk moths that are supposed to do the pollinating don't get the job done.

"We have volunteers that do this every year and, depending on the site, they could have one to 100 plants they have to hand pollinate," Pollack said. "That can be tedious work that lasts three or four hours."

So why put so much effort into saving a flower that provides little more than its aesthetic beauty?

"Imagine if you would remove all the rivets that go into making an airplane," Ullberg said. "As we remove a rivet here and a couple over there you weaken the whole system and eventually the plane will crash. Imagine that plane is our ecosystem and that's why it's important."