Picture this… You are a simple ant, living your life in the Bitterroot mountains of western Montana. You have not a care in the world – except to help feed your hundreds of family members and to protect your queen. “Hm this looks like a cool place, possibly lots to eat!”, you exclaim as you stumble upon a wide open fen.

“What is this sugary looking delectable delight? I’ll just have a little taste, then I’ll go let the others know!” You trek the long distance over the Carex, Mimulus, Cinquefoil, and more.

“Wow look at all of this! I’m gonna feed my family forever!” Your little ant brain fills you with joy as you make your way to the new delicious plant. You climb up the stem, and although it’s a bit sticky, you don’t think much of it, very few things that are worth getting are easy to get – you rationalize to yourself. “What is this, what is going on??” As you step onto the leaf, you find yourself stuck in the glandular hairs. You can’t move. Your body starts to tingle, and you come to the realization that you are not leaving.

The English Sundew strikes again. Drosera anglica uses its long tentacles to trap another victim. At least – this is what I imagine happens with this carnivorous plant, although it’s likely much less dramatic than this. On one of our monitoring projects this month, we checked out a population of this English Sundew, and found that is was more than double the size that it was presumed to be a few years ago, and whether it has actually grown that much, or if it just wasn’t documented, we are unsure, but the population size was massive – possibly up to 10,000 individuals! I have seen very few carnivorous plants in person, and this was so amazing to see such a huge population of this sensitive species. This species is cool because it can actually be found in many places throughout the world from Alaska to Hawaii to Japan to Southern Europe at higher elevations. This plant also specifically grows with sphagnum moss, which is not very common in Montana, so this is an interesting find. Because this is a carnivorous plant, it does not photosynthesize, and relies almost solely on the nutrients obtained from insects that find themselves caught in their hairs. They also self fertilize, so they do not need to be pollinated, therefore saving maximum amount of food for their sustenance. Overall this plant is really amazing, and it never ceases to amaze me that nature always finds a way to survive!

https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/drosera_anglica.shtml

This past month has truly been a rollercoaster of emotions. The job itself is incredibly rewarding and as the time goes on I become more confident in my abilities here. Of course there have been plenty of downs to the position but as we further into the season it is much easier to mitigate them. 

We have had some difficult work this past month which included the removal of some of the most annoying invasives to exist including himalayan blackberry and slender false brome. One you have to dig into the roots to completely treat the issue while the other you get to crawl on your hands and knees hand picking along a river bed for hours. The grueling heat certainly didn’t help. Although the conditions were less than pleasant, the work was redeeming because of the basic concept of removing pesky invasives for the natives to flourish. If there is one thing that I can take away from this job it’s that one can take joy just from the moral output of the activity. Even if the task itself is incredibly arduous you can at least remember the fact that the work you’re doing has some sort of purpose. 

Seed collection this past month has fastly ramped up as well as the heat. The work only seems like it will become more involved and busy which is quite exciting. Of course some seed collection species are more interesting to collect than others. For example, when collecting the columbine (Aquilegia formosa) it is really fun to watch all of the tiny seeds drop out of the flower head into the bag sort of wondering how many will be in the batch. On the other hand there are collection species like big deervetch (Hosackia crassifolia) pods are picked off like apples and transferred to a big bag. While this collection is pretty efficient it can get tedious quickly. Then there are species that are just an absolute pain to collect like farewell to spring (Clarkia amoena). My distaste for this collection solely comes down to how difficult it is to spot these guys. The seed collection itself isn’t actually terrible, similar to that of a pea, however it is the identification and monitoring that can cause strife. These little pests are always hiding in the crags and are incredibly low to the ground blending in with just about every other basal flower or stem. Still it can be nice when you find a big stand of them in a rather unassuming place. 

Time is going by fast now and with only a couple months left in the internship I’m still hoping to expand my knowledge within the plant world. It’s been an incredible experience so far not just in knowledge but also community and like-mindedness. The work starts to feel like a widely connected network of people all working towards the same goal. You learn and you just keep learning. The people that you meet endow unto you the knowledge unknown prior while you are able to do the same to them. It’s hard to think of a more broad learning environment than a national forest and if anything I can simply just be grateful for that. 

By and large, seed collecting here in central Idaho has been going quite well. We’ve picked bags and bags of fleabanes, needlegrass, wheatgrass, and fiddlenecks. The season has been a bit behind so far, but the last few weeks, our plants must have finally heard the wake-up call of summer and decided to finally get in motion. All of a sudden, we went from having no seeds to gather to running all over the forest, trying to keep up with everything!

There are a handful of plants that are still evading us, of course. One of those is Lathyrus lanszwertii, the Nevada pea. We’ve followed a handful of leads for it, all of which turned out to be dead ends – including a half-hour drive on a very bumpy mountain road to be taunted by a patch of Lathyrus pauciflorus, the few-flowered pea. (Guess how much luck we’d have trying to collect 30,000 seeds from that?) And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so Dan and I have been on high alert for anything that vaguely resembles this enigmatic legume. Our curiosity (read: desperation) led us last week into a decent bit of misadventure.

Early Wednesday morning, while scouting for wild mint (Agastache urticifolia), I followed the trail a little farther up the streambank to find a string of brilliant purple flowers growing among the alders. Could this finally be our pea? I hopped over the rocks to pick a flower off and scour our field guide. It had five petals, reflexed backwards, pinnate leaves, a vining growth form – this had to be it. But the stamens grew in a dense, tangled knot around the center of the flower. That’s strange, I thought. Fabaceae has just a handful of stamens and they’re fused to each other.

We started searching the guide for any kind of purple flowers. Suddenly, Dan insisted, “Drop that thing on the ground right now.”

“What?” I said.

“Get rid of it! That’s called monkshood. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”

“No…?”

“It’s, like, the most poisonous plant in the West. Eating one flower is enough to knock you dead. It’ll absorb through skin, too.”

Holy moly! This stuff is no joke. I did some digging on the internet, and sure enough, the lethal dose of monkshood is about a gram. It turns out its Latin name, Aconitum, means “without suffering” because its symptoms appear within minutes, and you die within a few hours. People have actually died from just skin contact with it, although all the reports seemed to be from gardeners who planted it (!?) and were working amidst it for hours on end. We hopped in the jeep and quickly drove back to our house to shower off. After scrubbing our hands with every kind of soap we owned and satisfying ourselves that we weren’t likely to die, we headed back out to cautiously get back to work – and, as any good botanist would do, to get a picture of it for our own plant photo album.

As they say, an adventure is a story that is miserable while you’re creating it and fun to tell in comfort later. And this sure was one of those! Make sure you know the poisonous plants that grow where you’re working and how to avoid them – and definitely don’t eat things you don’t recognize!

😉

Since last month, things have been moving along quite well, and quite as expected. We’ve started a handful of collections, and we’ve been keeping a close eye on scouted populations as we continue to keep eyes out for any new populations that may be coming up as summer hits us full force. As with any new job, there is a lot of information to take in and a lot of discrepancies in the small details as compared to other places. These small differences are easy to become acquainted with once you’ve become acquainted with them, and especially when you have kind and patient coworkers to help you along.
The same can be said for the plants. They are similar everywhere you go. You can see in most of them some familial resemblance that ques you into their relation. You remember the general trends and fashions of things, but it is the tiny details that can trip you up. Each key has different breaks that can cause trouble for us botanists. Of course each plant presents it’s own set of genetics that may or may not allow it to hybridize within its community and so on and so forth. The troubles you can run into are endless and all part of the “art” and the FUN of keying as many botanists, including myself, would tell you.
It turns out that much like becoming acquainted with coworkers, one can quite quickly become acquainted with the surrounding plant life. Running through the key each time we see someone on our list is incredibly fun. What is even more entertaining, and confidence-boosting is being so familiar with these individuals that we know which features to look for which set them apart from others. This also allows us to be more efficient with our time spent in the field, if we can pinpoint those key features. Many plants on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forests so far have been kind “coworkers,” if you will. Geum triflorum has three pronged leaves that make it obviously “triflorum.” Green gentian has green flowers as opposed to the white flowers of the other Frasera in our area. And Geranium viscossissimum is quite sticky and the only pink-flowered perennial geranium around, and G. richardsonii is the only white-flowered perennial geranium, so those are both simple enough to get to know.

I cannot say the same for Penstemon albertinus. Penstemon albertinus is like that person in the office who is incredibly shy and reserved, yet you know they’re REALLY cool, so you invite them to every party, but they are always busy doing other things and so you never get the chance to actually know them. Oh, and they have a twin named Penstemon attenuatus who often shows up to your parties, but you think upon first seeing them that maybe, just this once, it could be albertinus. The anthers are glaborus, the verticillasters are open. You note the acute tips on the stem leaves and hope it’s just a morphological difference. But as you get closer, you find the basal leaves to be quite thinner than Albert’s and you know you’ve again been fooled by Attenuatus.
When this occurs over and over, it can be quite frustrating, and makes you question your abilities as a budding botanist. In this case, we asked the botany techs based out of Helena. They so kindly invited us out for a couple days together in the field so they could share some of their experience and knowledge from four years on the forest. During this time, we did spend some time with Penstemon. Both Dayna and I were relieved to find that we are not the only ones Penstemon rejects. In fact, Nate mentioned there are many conversations had over the exact differences between the two species, and even with his four years of experience in the area, he still has to return to the details each year to refamiliarize himself with the need-to-knows. So we’ve begun to accept that we may just never be on very good terms with Albertinus. We may just have to take a key to this particular individual each and every time we meet in order to truly ensure we’re accurately identifying. Which is great practice and it makes you appreciate the more “firiendly” and straightforward plants all that much more, and forces you to really hone in on those botancial skills and instincts. I’m looking forward to finding more challenging individuals throughout the season, and hope to learn a lot from them!