Inside the secret world of wild orchids
Nature lovers doing their best to protect flowers and their natural habitat
This is a story about the discovery of a rare wild orchid in rural Ottawa, and you’ll find a gaping hole in it: There’s no location for the pretty pink flowers.
The “why not?” is the real point. Not that the discovery of rose pogonia orchids isn’t a strong point itself, but there’s something bigger going on here.
Wild orchids have enemies. Poachers. Stalkers. Trophy hunters. Even smugglers for the tropical types.
And they are not alone in the natural world. Increasingly nature lovers are trying to protect both plants and animals from those who would collect the perfect action photo at the risk of scaring the animal to death or stomping all over its habitat. Or, for that matter, those who just want to take the darn thing home as a souvenir, dead or alive.
Conservation itself is beginning to backfire on the unwary. Biologists who attach tiny transmitters to endangered wildlife sometimes find poachers hacking into their data, hoping to bag an easy tiger.
Eager photographers often crowd too close around owls’ nests or throw out live mice to bring snowy owls in low, talons extended for the perfect photo.
Now flowers. After 50 years in the orchid trenches, Joyce Reddoch has stopped trusting almost anybody around a wild orchid.
There was the time she had discovered in the Larose Forest a single specimen of one orchid that is uncommon in this region: a tall plant with white blooms called hooded ladies’-tresses. She was helping a group doing a survey of orchids and one person in that group wanted to know where this specific orchid species was found.
“Next time we went there, there was a hole,” she said.
“This is someone who we thought was serious about orchids … and who was, but not from the point of view that we thought. And the next thing you know, he had it in a flowerpot and he was showing everybody.”
Orchids aren’t all delicate and aren’t all rare. However, some are very rare, especially if they depend on specific growing conditions.
That brings us to the recent discovery. Naturalists Holly Bickerton and Dan Brunton of Ottawa were out in the field in mid-July and found a small bog that had mostly escaped notice from environmental experts. Bickerton calls it a “mini-Mer Bleue.”
It’s less than a hectare in size.
Bogs are pretty rare; they form when dead vegetation remains in water for thousands of years, but does not decompose because the water is too acidic. The result is a “mat” of vegetation several metres thick. It’s not really land, not really water, and walking on it damages the whole thing.
This little bog has, among other things, an orchid called rose pogonia and it has them by the thousands. It is rare because, as with so many orchids, its habitat is rare. So, who should know? Brunton argues it’s safe to let people know since the flowers are best seen from dry ground. Besides, he notes, this species is uncommon around here but not rare overall. Reddoch and Bickerton disagree. There’s something about wild orchids, more than any other plant, that makes trophy-hunters behave badly.
Detailed, close-up photos have replaced stuffed animals’ heads as the modern wildlife trophy.
“I just don’t want people venturing out onto the bog mat. It could really rough it up,” Bickerton said. “It’s a really difficult thing for biologists with great horned owls’ nests and so on. There’s an urge to communicate this,” but instant communication through social media brings crowds of photographers.
“Owls are a flashpoint and certain people (i.e. birders) I know just don’t report them anymore.
“It is a different world than even 10 or 15 years ago because of social media and the ability of their location to be spread really quickly. And there are so many more photographers out there as the price of really excellent photographic equipment comes down.
“The orchid community is an amazing one and it’s surprising how far-reaching it is.”
Reddoch, a major authority on Eastern Ontario’s orchids, has a darker view: “If you say anything specific (about a location), you are going to get people in there, some of them with their shovels. They just don’t get it.”
The flowers end up “in people’s gardens. And a couple of years later, ‘Oh, that didn’t last very long, did it?’ ”
She has seen orchid areas on the Bruce Peninsula where signs warn people of delicate orchids “and they look like buffalo wallows … People don’t care about signs,” she said.
In a bog, Reddoch said, a single footprint stays for years.
She has seen cases where groups arrive — some carrying chairs — to tromp into the bog in search of the perfect photo.
“I don’t even want to imagine what the habitat is like afterward,” she said.
A single visitor’s impact “is probably finite, but getting a lot of people to go there a lot of times is, I would say, unforgivable.”
Bickerton attended a conference in the United States where a man told her exactly where in Renfrew County she could find a particular orchid.
He had been there.
“They will drive 12 hours on a weekend to see something in perfect flower and photograph it.”
Even sharing information among scientists may not be safe.
The National Geographic recently reported that “within a year of one newly discovered species of Vietnamese orchid, Paphiopedilum canhii, being described in a scientific publication, more than 99 per cent of its population was wiped out by illegal commercial collectors.”
If you say anything specific, you are going to get people in there, some of them with their shovels. They just don’t get it.