Finding the Lady’s Slippers

The wide, winding boardwalk accommodated Karen, Coggin, and me easily, as we remarked on the deep shade of the cedar forest while listening for birds and keeping our eyes open for neat plants. These two seasoned naturalists were excellent guides on my recent trip to the Door Peninsula, and they spotted the coralroot orchids I wrote about a few weeks ago.

A splash of color up ahead, in the wetland just off the side of the boardwalk, had us quickening our pace. Here was another orchid, one they’d been sure we’d find here, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper orchid. The big yellow pouch was plump and sunny, glistening with raindrops from a passing shower. The lateral petals were gracefully twisted and artfully striped with maroon. Deeply veined leaves framed the flower perfectly.

And then we saw them everywhere! A dozen – at least – in a single wetland. Pairs and triplets in the forest shade. We’d hit peak bloom. And they were everywhere, in all different habitats.

Here, at The Ridges Sanctuary in Bailey’s Harbor, Wisconsin, there are quite a few habitats to choose from. The sanctuary protects about 30 narrow, crescent-shaped, sandy ridges, with damp hollows and wetlands in between. They represent a progression of beach lines from 1,500 years of changing water levels in Lake Michigan. With the lake as an air conditioner, the area supports plants who typically thrive much farther north – and near Lake Superior.

Spruce, fir, and pine mix with an abundance of northern white cedar. The sand ridges also support unusual species, like creeping juniper and dwarf lake iris. The valleys hold boggy mats of Sphagnum moss or fens filled with gracefully arching sedges. And Yellow Lady’s Slipper orchids seemed to grow everywhere!

Creeping Juniper on the left, and Common Juniper on the right. Photo by Emily Stone.

Dwarf Lake Iris

I suppose that shouldn’t come as a big surprise. According to the Minnesota Wildflowers website, Yellow Lady’s Slipper orchids are the most common wild orchid in the U.S. and are found in almost every state. They seem to make themselves at home in quite a range of habitats, from sugar maple forests, to wetlands, and even prairies. That list runs the full spectrum of soil moisture!

Winding our way through the network of trails and the pattern of habitats, I was also delighted to find a few blossoms of Bird's-eye Primrose who hadn’t faded completely. After seeing them in Alaska and on the North Shore of Minnesota, I felt like I’d achieved a trifecta. The pure sand they grew from looked quite different than the mossy pockets of bedrock or tundra where we’d first met. Just like with the Yellow Lady’s Slipper orchid, they seem to find what they need in disparate places.

Bird's Eye Primrose

Our next target species would not be so easy to find. Ram’s Head orchids are clearly related to Yellow Lady’s Slippers, in the genus Cypripedium. Although their floral pouch is white with raspberry-colored veins, the general shape is recognizable. I tend to think they look more like yet another lady’s slipper, or perhaps a fairy’s slipper, instead of the head of a charging ram.

These orchids are rare throughout their limited range, but still manage to occupy a surprising variety of habitats. In Minnesota, they like jack pine and red pine forests, which tend to be dry. In Maine, they grow in mixed conifer/hardwood forests. And here in The Ridges, they are found in the darkest corners of the cedar and black spruce swamps.

The Minnesota DNR, on their page describing the orchid as a state threatened species, explains that, “the underlying habitat elements that are of greatest importance to C. arietinum are probably the health of the mycorrhizal community and the composition of the pollinator community.”

Indeed, like the coralroot orchids I wrote about previously, both of these orchids require a mycorrhizal community – fungus (myco-) attached to their roots (-rhizal). First, dust-like orchid seeds need a fungus to provide them with water and food while they germinate. Then the fungi continue to provide additional resources to the orchid while they grow in the deep shade with few leaves of their own. The orchids don’t seem to provide a benefit to the fungus…unless mushrooms also like beauty?

Beauty seems to be the only reward for the pollinators of orchids. Many plants produce sweet nectar and protein-rich pollen to entice bees to visit their flowers, but orchids produce no nectar and package their pollen into tight bundles that the bees can’t use. To achieve pollination, the flowers rely on their gaudy beauty, the scent of vanilla, and naïve queen bees who’ve just woken up from hibernation.

A bee follows lovely patterns of nectar guides down into the flower’s pouch, drops a pollen packet off (if she has one) on the stigma where it will fertilize thousands of seeds, and then passes by the anthers, which glue a new pollen packet from this flower onto her back. To add insult to injury, bees who are too big might become trapped if they can’t fit through the flower’s exit hole.

The Trail

Our noses not being sensitive enough to detect the vanilla, Coggin and I followed Karen’s memory through the dark swamps in search of this rare flower. The dirt path wound around spruce, fir, birch, and cedars. A hint of color caught my eye. There, almost crushed by the tip of a spruce tree blown off in some strong wind, the white and pink of the Ram’s Head orchid glowed through the gloom.

Ram’s Head orchid

Since the fungi, forest community, and pollination have to coalesce perfectly for an orchid to bloom, we felt lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Summer Calendar of Events is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Old Turtle

This week I’ve been driving all over the backroads of Bayfield County while leading a Wisconsin Master Naturalist Volunteer Training Course. Often, van conversations about our favorite sea creatures are interrupted by exclamations of “turtle!” as we pass yet another big snapper either crossing the road or trying to dig her nest in the shoulder. Wanting to remind myself of how cool snapping turtles are, I looked back at this article from 2015. Then I realized, you might want to read this again, too! Enjoy! –Emily

The old turtle scraped at the sand with her naily toes as the kids gathered in a wide circle around her. Sometimes I get questions about dinosaurs on field trips, but they don’t fit into the Museum’s focus on Northern Wisconsin species. Today, instead, the first- and second-graders got a close-up look at a creature whose species has existed on Earth for over 40 million years, with direct ancestors much older than dinosaurs.

Quietly and respectfully, the students observed as the mother slowly finished excavating a depression for her precious cargo at the edge of the boat ramp’s asphalt. We commented on her smooth, algae-covered shell and enormous claws on her webbed feet. Once, I caught a glimpse between her hind leg and knobby tail of a smooth, white eggshell sliding into the nest.

The size and age of a female snapper, and the number of eggs she lays each year, are all connected. A mother turtle will only lay a clutch of eggs equal to about 7% of her body mass each year, and some years not at all. This helps make sure she’ll have enough energy to survive the winter, and translates into somewhere between 11 and 87 eggs, with an average of 34 eggs per clutch in northern populations. (Exciting research from 2017 found that when September and October are warm, snappers lay more eggs the following spring!)

Female snapping turtles don’t mature until they are eight inches long – big enough to support a clutch of about 22 eggs. With our short growing season in the north, that can take 19 years. This big mamma was well over a foot long. How many years must it have taken her to grow that big? Snappers often live 40 years or more, and may reach over 100 years old!

One reason that snappers grow so slowly is that they are ectotherms who use their environment to regulate body temperature. In the summer, they sun themselves to warm up. After a long winter, they have to wait until the shallows reach at least 40 degrees in order to become active. Even then, they don’t start eating until the water temperature reaches about 60 degrees. This means that in cold northern lakes, snapping turtles may go nine months without eating.

Once they do warm up enough to eat, over half of their diet is aquatic vegetation. Snapping turtles are important scavengers as well, and may improve fisheries by eating the slow, bottom-feeding fish (which are generally unpopular among anglers). Although baby ducks do make the occasional tasty snack, they are a much less common part of the snapper diet than many people think. Over the course of a year, a snapper will only eat their own bodyweight in food. That isn’t a recipe for quick growth.

One consolation for their stingy diet may be that snapping turtles rarely become food for something else. The eggs and little guys are vulnerable, of course, but once their carapace reaches three inches long, they have no more natural predators. Getting there is the tough part.

The eggs we just watched being laid have almost no chance of reaching maturity. For one, their location at the edge of a driving surface is pretty risky. But even in a good location, only about 14% of clutches hatch each year. Temperature variation and dehydration are constant dangers, as is nest and hatchling predation by other turtles, great blue herons, crows, raccoons, skunks, foxes, bullfrogs, water snakes, and fish.

Temperature is especially important. The embryos won’t develop at temperatures cooler than 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Above that, interesting things happen. Because turtles evolved before x and y chromosomes, they developed a system to use temperature to determine the sex of the babies. At 83 degrees Fahrenheit, the number of males and females will be equal. Cooler temperatures will produce males, and higher ones will develop females.

Turtles are survivors, after all. Fossils of the most primitive turtle put the age of this group at 215 million years old – about 100 million years older than dinosaurs. Turtles survived the meteorite impact and the dinosaurs’ great extinction.

Reluctantly, the students left the great mother to her important task, and began one of their own. With nets and enthusiasm, they caught critters in the weedy shallows. Soon a shout rose above the rest, “I caught a turtle!” With their spiky shell, just over an inch long, this new stage in the life of a snapper – a baby hatched last year – captivated the kids’ attention just as thoroughly as the big one.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Summer Calendar of Events is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

A New Coralroot

Thickets of balsam fir and hemlock crowded along the wide, flat trail, cocooning us in their shade. Sunshine beckoned up ahead, and wetlands filled many swales. The Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal Nature Preserve in Door County protects unique habitats and allows access on lovely trails.

“Oh look!” exclaimed Karen, as she knelt to take a closer look at a delightful stalk of raspberry-striped flowers. On each of the dozen flowers, five graceful petals and sepals fanned out above a plump, pear-shaped lower lip. The upper petals seemed to be made of frosted glass with dark pink stripes, while the lip was deeply blushing with white highlights. Even the stem was purple. One color was conspicuously absent from this plant: green.

We knew them right away as striped coralroot. These orchids don’t have leaves or roots. Instead, their coral-like underground stem, called a rhizome, connects with fungi in the soil and steals all the nutrients the flower needs for survival. The network extends beyond, because the fungi are also partnering with trees. That relationship is more reciprocal, with the fungi providing water and nutrients to the tree and the tree feeding sugars to the fungi. Once the coralroot taps into the pipeline, they get sugars from the tree through the fungi, as well as nitrogen, without giving their partners anything in return.

This mode of acquiring energy is known as myco-heterotrophy. All of the Earth’s 30,000 orchid species rely on fungi to provide energy for their dust-like seeds to germinate and grow. Most species eventually sprout green leaves and start making some of their own food, but even they may continue to supplement with nutrients from fungi. At least 100 orchid species are like striped coralroot and do not photosynthesize at all. This strategy allows orchids to live in deep shade where few green plants can survive.

A minute later, Karen exclaimed again. This time she’d spotted sprigs of spindly chartreuse-yellow plants near the base of a fir tree. Already a few steps ahead, Coggin found a more robust group of the same flowers. This is what happens when three naturalists go “hiking”! Coggin Heeringa is a founding naturalist at Crossroads at Big Creek, a local nature center. Karen Newbern was the naturalist for Clayton County, Iowa when I was growing up there. Before moving to Door County, she taught me how to touch snakes and dissect owl pellets. These two friends were the perfect guides for my first experience on the Door Peninsula!

Karen’s iNaturalist app confirmed what we’d suspected. This was a type of coralroot orchid, too. The fleshy stem bore no leaves, just a sprig of beautiful little flowers on the upper half. Each blossom looked like a whimsical elf. One greenish sepal stuck up straight and resembled a head, while two matching ones drooped below like bowlegs. A roundish white petal formed a pot belly, and two small petals the same green as the sepals looked like arms about to pat that belly. The flower column, hosting a reddish stigma, nestled right where her little heart should be.

Even though I can’t remember ever finding this flower in the woods before, I recognized it from a photo a Museum member sent me the previous week. She’d found the orchid with buds still tightly closed, and I’d helped her identify them as Early or Northern or Yellow Coralroot (pick your favorite!) using iNaturalist.

After snapping many photos, we hurried on. Karen and Coggin are also co-chairs of the Education Committee for the Wild Ones Chapter in Door County, and they’d invited me to give my “Finding the Stories in Nature” talk at Crossroads that evening. We couldn’t all three be late!

Once home, I had to investigate this new coralroot. While the rest of the dozen or so members of the Corallorhiza genus grow only in North America, Northern Coralroot is circumboreal. This means they occur all around the top of the globe, from Canada, to Russia, China, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal, and almost every country in Europe! They even occur south of their current main range as “glacial relicts” in cool micro-habitats leftover from the last ice age.

Perhaps it’s their other unique trait that grants them the ability to travel. Northern Coralroot contains three orders of magnitude more chlorophyll than other coralroots, and they manufacture a good portion of their own sugar through photosynthesis. The rest of their nutrients come through parasitizing fungi in the genus Tomentella.

Coralroots exist underground for much of their lives, and their flowering stalk may not pop up every year, or in the same place. So, while widespread and not uncommon, coralroots can be hard to spot – or at least that’s my excuse for never having seen one before this year! Their lifestyle makes coralroots difficult to cultivate, and they won’t survive an attempt to transplant them into your garden. Plus, it’s illegal to dig or pick orchids on most public land.

Back in Cable, Sarah, the Museum’s new Summer Naturalist Intern, asked about the highlights of my trip. When I mentioned seeing a beautiful new coralroot, they pulled a photo up on their phone, taken near the staff house over the weekend, and asked “like this one?” I couldn’t believe it! Even shade-loving Northern Coralroots are having their moment in the Sun.


Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Summer Calendar of Events is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Flowers from Stone to Sand

Scraggly jack pines flew past the windows while I took one hand off the steering wheel to scratch a mosquito bite. My wildflower hike to the North Country Trail Hardwoods State Natural Area a few days prior had been absolutely lovely, but there had been bugs. Now I was heading out for another adventure – checking on the pink blossoms of bird’s eye primrose I’d spotted on Artist’s Point in Grand Marais, Minnesota, earlier in the spring.

Bird's Eye Primrose still blooming!

In this section of my drive, north of Barnes, Wisconsin, I knew I was miles from any gas station. So, when the need for a pit stop arose, I simply turned off on a forest road. Soft, sandy anthills shifted under my feet, and the lovely smell of warm pine needles rose up from beneath the trees. A little serviceberry shrub with floppy white flowers glowed on the edge of the dim shade.

Then some brighter white flowers caught my eye. With five symmetrical petals joined in a rosy center and a cluster of anthers bursting from the heart like fireworks of golden pollen, I knew this was a member of the Rose Family, just like the serviceberry. A closer look at how the flowers attached to the stem in small groups, the glossy leaves, and knee-high stature told me that this was sand cherry, Prunus pumila.

Sand Cherry

As their name implies, sand cherry prefers sandy, well-drained soil. They spread by horizontal underground stems called rhizomes, which help to hold loose soil in place. Although the plants themselves are much smaller than other types of cherries, the shiny black fruits of sand cherry are bigger! An ant crawled over one blossom while I snapped some photos. They are just one of many species of insects who visit this plant, including moth and butterfly adults and larvae, beneficial flies, and native bees. Forty species of birds, plus foxes, coyotes, skunks, mice, and humans also eat the cherries.

Sand Cherry with and Ant!

As I bounced from one cherry stem to another to find the best light for photos, some purple on the roadside caught my attention, too. Soon I was looking at a clump of dusky blue violets with unusually large flowers. A tight bundle of orange stamens in the center of each blossom – with a runway of linear nectar guides pointing right to them – perfectly complimented the blue.

Birdfoot Violet

It was the leaves at the base of the flowers that gave them away. Instead of the normal broadly heart-shaped leaves, I found leaves divided into three graceful, narrow lobes, not unlike the toes on a bird’s foot. This, of course, was birdfoot violet. They need sandy soil to keep their feet dry and avoid rot. And they are programmed to bloom when the days reach a certain length in spring. Occasionally you’ll find one blooming in the fall, too, as day length revisits the same milestone on our way to winter.

Once the violet flowers are pollinated by bees or butterflies, the seeds that form each come with a little packet of fatty goodness attached to the outside. Ants love these elaiosomes and carry the seed back to their nest to nibble them off, then toss the clean seed in their compost pile. Elaiosomes are essentially a bribe for the ants’ seed dispersal services.

A splash of apricot orange among the short grasses next caught my eye. Each flower in the cluster was composed of five petals who met in the center and formed a little tube. Upon close examination, the round, yellow buds and skinny, blunt leaves were covered in downy hairs, giving them a silvery, “hoary” look. The hairs of hoary puccoon can provide both warmth in early spring, and shade from a glaring Sun – a good adaptation for this open, dry habitat. Puccoon is the misspelling of a Powhatan or Algonquian word that means a plant who can be used to make dye. The long taproot, which likes to wiggle down into sandy or silty soil, produces a purplish juice.

Hoary Puccoon

As I climbed back into my car with a camera full of more lovely wildflower photos, I smiled at my good luck. Here in Wisconsin and Minnesota, we have quite a variety of habitats and soil types in a relatively small area. I can explore rich soils and maple forests filled with trilliums, wild oats, and large-flowered bellwort one day, then delight in the bedrock home of bird’s eye primrose (and a not-yet-booming mystery plant) the next. And now here I was enjoying prairie flowers in a barrens!

What do we have to thank for these riches? Why the glaciers, of course! The trillium’s rich soil developed from glacial till. The primrose enjoys bedrock scraped clean and exposed by the powerful ice. They also take advantage of climate control provided by the cold waters of Lake Superior – whose basin was deepened by the glaciers and filled with melt. The drought tolerant cherries, violets, and puccoons benefit from a huge pile of glacial outwash debris, in a landscape called the Northwest Sands.

Even though we’ve taken down our geology exhibit at the Museum, I won’t stop noticing how geology underlies everything! If you want a refresher on that topic, you can find a link to a PDF with all the text and diagrams from our geology exhibit at https://www.cablemuseum.org/exhibit/. Here in the Northwoods, geology is the foundation for flowers as well as fun!

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Summer Calendar of Events is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.