Conservationists hope to bring beloved bird back
The common loon’s haunting wail that pierced the dusk on Massachusetts lakes disappeared long ago. Today, the birds number fewer than 50 pairs in the Bay State and conservationists are hoping to rebuild their population, starting with a handful of chicks from Maine and New York. The Restore the Call program at the Biodiversity Research Institute in Portland plans to move 10 chicks to an area south of Boston this summer. David Evers, the institute’s executive director, says restoring an animal population starts out small but he is optimistic.
Loons once lived throughout Massachusetts. Hunting and habitat loss contributed to their decline and they were wiped out by 1898, the last eggs plucked near a lake south of Boston. They began returning in the 1970s, but the state still only has 45 breeding pairs. “All we need to do is establish one pair,” Evers said. “Once that one pair is established and once that pair produces young, and those young come back, and they start to establish territories, then you’ve got some brooding that can start from that little seed.”
However, common loons can be slow to recover because they don’t breed until they are several years old. “Loons depend on high quality habitat without certain types of disturbance,” said Danielle D’Auria, a wildlife biologist with Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The bird’s range has shrunk throughout the U.S. It has disappeared in Oregon and southern Michigan and parts of Idaho, Montana and Washington. It is a threatened species in New Hampshire, where last year biologists for the Loon Preservation Committee recorded 234 loon chicks hatched and 26 percent of them did not survive.
In all, researchers count about 14,000 loon pairs in the country. And while their population remains strong in Canada, where they are a national symbol, the birds face threats of mercury and lead pollution there as they do in the United States. Maine Audubon, which is helping with the relocation project, says Maine has at least 2,000 pairs of loons and New York has about 1,000. The Institute has undertaken similar projects in Minnesota and plans to add Wyoming to the program next year.
A $6.5 million grant from the Ricketts Conservation Foundation funds the loon relocation efforts. The Institute also relocated seven chicks from New York’s Adirondack area to Massachusetts last year. Most of the few dozen loons in Massachusetts live near the Quabbin and Wachusetts reservoirs in the central part of the state. The chicks will be relocated to an area near where the last eggs were believed taken before the birds disappeared from the state.
Maine has the largest common loon population in the eastern US and the birds are loved in the state. Bird enthusiasts participate in Maine Audubon’s “loon count” every year. Susan Gallo, wildlife biologist for Maine Audubon, said the group is working with the birders, some of whom haven’t embraced the idea of Maine loons moving out of state. “Loons are near and dear to people’s hearts in Maine,” she said. “Anything we can do to get the loons to nest in new places, I think, is a benefit to loons.”—AP
Armed with an orange staple gun and dozens of burlap squares entwined with ratty green roots, Mike Kane wades hip-deep into the swamp to restore what generations of thieves have stolen. The ghost orchid. Once abundant in the Florida Everglades, experts say fewer than 2,000 ghost orchids (Dendrophylax lindenii) are left in the state, where it is considered an endangered plant. Cuba has some too, but just how many is unknown.
Poaching, urbanization and pesticide pollution-which cuts down on insect pollinators-are among the ghost orchid’s top threats, according to Kane, a professor of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida. “We are losing these,” said Kane, who is leading the first project of its kind to repopulate the swamps with these orchids. He and his graduate students grow ghost orchids from genetically diverse seeds in their northern Florida lab.
After the plants have grown for a few years, they take them to a secluded location deep inside the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in the southern part of the state. This tranquil spot, known as McBride’s Pond, lies under a shady canopy of pop ash, pond apple and cypress trees. “The public cannot come in and poach and they cannot disrupt our experiments,” said Jameson Coopman, a graduate student in Kane’s lab.
The two men take turns stapling the burlapnot the roots-onto the tree trunks, as an alligator quietly suns itself nearby and swallowtail butterflies swoop overhead. The burlap will decompose, but the orchid’s spider-like roots will hug the bark and hopefully, make the tree its new home. “We give it a quick mist when we are done,” said Coopman. “We don’t help the plant any further and it does the rest.” This year, they planted 160.
Last year, it was 80. Kane recalled high-fiving in the swamp with his then graduate student, Nguyen Hoang of Vietnam, when they returned a few weeks after planting and discovered that most had survived. “They were doing so well. It was incredible. We were really surprised.” Kane’s lab has also seen some unusual success with botanists managing to coax ghost orchids to bloom in the space of three years. In the wild, they can take 16 years or more, if they ever flower at all.
Target for thieves
The ghost orchid, often targeted by poachers, rose to pop culture fame with the book, “The Orchid Thief,” and its movie version, “Adaptation,” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Orchid enthusiasts are romanced by the leafless flower’s erotic appearance, it’s pure white hue, and the way it dances in the wind. The bloom emerges just once a year, usually for a week or so in June or July. It has one known pollinator, the giant sphinx moth.
The ghost orchid is tough to grow and even tougher to keep alive, especially when ripped from its natural environment. “The reason they are almost extinct is that years ago, people took them out of the forest, they took them down from the trees and sent them around to other parts of the country to grow as houseplants,” said Carl Lewis, director of the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami. Lewis is leading another restoration effort known as the Million Orchid Project. The five-year plan aims to reestablish eight different kinds of rare orchids, including the ghost orchid, throughout urban spaces in south Florida.
“There were so many of them taken away that now we have hardly any of them left,” said Lewis, who is cloning ghost orchids in his lab. “Imagine if we could get these orchids growing in the tree canopy above a busy, functioning city,” he added. “Our goal is to get so many out in the community that people will just appreciate them, and anyone interested in stealing them will have so many orchids around that there will be no point.”
Future threats
Elsewhere in the Florida Everglades, biologist Mike Owen keeps close tabs on 120 of the 380 ghost orchids that have been observed in the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. He says he likes them because they are the “underdogs” of the flower world, like Cinderella, whose time at the ball was so fleeting, or the bug-eyed American comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who was popular in the 1980s. “It just gets no respect,” Owen said with a grin, echoing Dangerfield’s signature punch line.
“But then for about 10 days, it steals the show.” In the past 15 years, Owen has noticed nine were stolen. Add that to another two dozen or so that died of apparently natural causes, and he sees trouble ahead for this fragile flower. “If you take a ghost orchid out of its native habitat, it will die,” said Owen. “And people know this. But somebody must be offering some money for a ghost orchid flower.” Owen and his colleagues are compiling a list of all the known ghost orchids in the region. Perhaps one day, this data will support a petition to get federal endangered species protection for the ghost orchid, he said. “Then, the laws are a lot tighter. The fines are a lot larger too.” Owen is also concerned about an Asian pest known as the emerald ash borer which is spreading in the United States, and might someday make it to south Florida.
“It kills all the ash trees,” including the type that ghost orchids prefer as their hosts, known as pop ash, said Owen. “If we lose the pop ash, we are going to lose about 80 percent of our ghost orchids.” Scientists who seek to preserve this rare orchid say it’s about more than just a flower. “Orchids are the first line indicators of environmental change,” said Kane. “Understanding how they grow, how to reintroduce them, is a very important foundation for conservation.” — AFP