Category Archives: Plants and Plant Communities

The Plenteous Summer

Prairie planting Oshtemo Township August 2010. Photo by Richard Brewer

When I go outside this summer I’m impressed by the amount of greenery. I don’t have data, but it’s the greenest summer–the largest volume of foliage–I remember.

This makes sense. The limiting factors for photosynthesis, Biology 101 tells us, are temperature, light, and carbon dioxide. Translating photosynthesis into plant growth–that is, new biomass–also involves availability of water and soil nutrients, such as nitrogen.

This growing season has been, day after day, one of the most consistently warm years–hot, I’d say–that I remember.

As for sunlight, I doubt that one summer is a lot different from another. Certainly, day length is the same from one year to the next. There may be a few more cloudy hours one year than another, but all in all I suspect that the light this year has been about the same as last year or the one before.

Water, though, I think may have been in better supply than usual. I haven’t tried to check weather station figures, but from my own rain gauge and how often our garden needed water, it seems to me that we’ve had a lot of well-spaced soaking rains.

Nitrogen is sometimes a limiting factor for plants, including several field crops. I don’t know that it was any more or less abundant this year. Nitrogen compounds from agriculture are generally increasing in the environment. For some plants an increase in nitrogen could encourage growth; however, many plants have modest soil nitrogen requirements. Included are many prairie species. For such species, a lot more nitrogen doesn’t increase production.

However, the compound nitrous oxide is increasing in the atmosphere as a result of current agricultural practice. Nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, so it’s likely that more nitrous oxide is a part of the equation for global climate change in general.

More influential though is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. As everybody knows, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone steadily up, probably since early in the Industrial Age and certainly since 1958, when the systematic recording of atmospheric carbon dioxide began. Lately, the concentration has been rising about 3% per year. This implies a doubling in about a quarter century, roughly one human generation.

So, maybe high temperatures, lots of rain, and more carbon dioxide than ever made 2010 a banner year. My guess is that the luxuriant growth this year is mostly tied to the warmer summer and the plentiful and effective rainfall. The carbon dioxide level would have only have changed a couple of parts per million from last year.

Poison ivy growing up an oak, Oshtemo Township August 2010. Photo by Richard Brewer

However, increased carbon dioxide is probably the primary agent for a great increase in the growth of some plants in the past decade or more. I’m thinking particularly of the vines, specifically the lianas–vines that can spread across the ground but can also climb trees. Poison ivy, the several species of grapes, and Virginia creeper are native examples of lianas. There are a number of introduced lianas that are invasives in some natural areas. Local examples are Asian bittersweet and European ivy.

A little more than twenty years ago, a friend asked me whether I thought that wild grapes were a serious pest in local forests; specifically, how frequently did they climb into the crown of a tree and kill it by shading its leaves? I had spent a lot of time in beech-maple forests and told him that in my experience such a thing was rare. I went on to say that having a tangle of grapes in the forest canopy had its benefits, among them providing cover for barred and horned owls to hide from crows and blue jays.

No more than five years later my advice would have been different. At least by the mid-1990s, the grapes, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy were creeping up tree trunks in much greater numbers and the trees were suffering. These trends continue.

Lianas are, of course, a prominent life form in the forests of the Tropics, and it’s possible that their success here in recent years is just one more result of global climate change. But temperatures are erratic. The general trend in this part of the world is up, but any given year may be unchanged or even down. Carbon dioxide, by contrast, is a little higher every year. My guess fifteen years ago when I began to notice the increased liana growth was that it was related to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Research in the past few years supports that hypothesis. This link is to a study of poison ivy.

Despite what’s been happening with the lianas, my impression is that most herbs and shrubs within the forest didn’t join in this year’s burst of growth, not the way plants of the edges and the open spaces have. Perhaps this makes sense too. In the forests, the limiting factor for plant growth most of the time is light. Despite our atmosphere’s extra carbon dioxide, despite this year’s good supply of water and the high temperatures, light at ground level within the forest is dim most of the growing season. In the oak woods here, sweet cicely, white avens, tick trefoil didn’t look any more robust than they did last year.

It was just an average year in the woods.

The 2010 American Columbo Census

Last week I finished my annual American columbo census. Every year in June, I check up on a marked population of American columbo (Frasera caroliniensis) plants in the oak woods near where my wife and I live in Oshtemo Township. Here in southwest Michigan, columbo was an oak savanna plant. I suspect that today this township, which was mostly savanna at settlement, has more columbo remaining than anywhere else in Kalamazoo County.

Rosettes of American columbo. Last year's dried flowering stalk from another plant is the diagonal between the two rosettes. Photo by Richard Brewer

The usual way a person encounters columbo is to find one or a group of its basal rosettes. These look rather like the basal rosettes of the well-known biennial weed common mullein except that the elongate oval leaves of columbo are thin, smooth, and green instead of thick, furry, and silvery like mullein.

Occasionally one sees a columbo flowering stalk. It’s an impressive sight, often six or even eight feet tall, smooth and green, with several whorls of leaves and a great number of branches in the upper whorls bearing dozens or hundreds of small flowers on slim stems. Though small, the flowers are striking looking, symmetrical with greenish-white, purple-dotted petals. Long ago, in southern Illinois, when my friend Kenny Stewart and I found a blooming columbo, he described the flower as looking like a botany text book diagram of flower structure. Calyx, corolla, stamens, a pistil, all the parts are laid out just as they should be, plus in the middle of each petal, a fringed nectar-producing gland.

A single flower of Am. columbo. Photo by Richard Brewer

Seven years ago, I decided to follow the fortunes of one patch of 121 columbo plants spread over an acre or so of oak woods. Two other patches of similar size exist several hundred feet away, one to the east and one to the west. Ralph Babcock, a friend and former student, joined me to spend a day marking each plant by means of an orange plastic flag on a wire. We gave each plant a number, written on the flag using a marking pen with super-permanent ink, and I recorded each location using direction and distance to landmarks and nearby plants. A little later in the summer, we recorded size and other information about each rosette.

Giving each plant an identifying number allows me to follow what happens to each one individually, like birds in a banded population. Every June, I check to see which plants are still there and their size and condition and to replace weathered and missing flags.

Am. columbo plant number 52. On 23 June 2009, the rosette was composed of 30 leaves and had a diameter of 54 cm. Photo by Richard Brewer

The census usually takes me four or five days, a few hours each day. Last year I postponed replacing fading and tattered flags because I wanted to record what other plant species were within a meter or so around each plant and to note something about the topography and litter depth for each point. So this year’s census took a little longer than usual because I had to make 39 new flags and renew the writing on many others.

As to the plants in the neighborhood, the big trees are mostly white oak, black oak, sassafras, wild black cherry, pignut hickory, and red maple A few of the herbs are sweet cicely (which went from flowers to fruit just in the week when I was censusing), white avens ( in flower now), Indian pipe (not quite up yet this year), rattlesnake fern, spotted wintergreen, and lopseed. There’s a fair amount of poison ivy and Virginia creeper on the ground too, more every year.

Some of the birds I hear singing or calling while I work on the columbo are Wild Turkey (pretty quiet lately), Ovenbird, Wood Pewee, Great Crested Flycatcher, Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Blue Jay, Red-eyed Vireo, and Scarlet Tanager.

Other vertebrates are sparse. A few days ago, I saw something hop close to one of my points and was able to find it and see the cross on its back. It was a spring peeper back from the ponds a few hundred yards away, where they were peeping and mating in April.

There are plenty of deer, though less in evidence now than most of the year. The deer do not eat the columbo and also avoid stepping on them. Of course, the rosettes die back above ground in the winter, leaving the crown of the large taproot just below the soil surface, so the deer have no visual clues of the columbo from fall to spring. The deer do blunder into the orange flags, occasionally dislodging them and often bending the wires. Nothing else seems very interested in the columbo foliage either–not the chipmunks, fox squirrels or even insects. Most plants show little or no sign of insect damage.

Of the original 121 plants, 11 have flowered in 7 years. The plant then dies, just like the second-year mullein plant. Some columbo have died without ever flowering, but many of the original plants are still alive, reappearing year after year as a basal rosette.

So, American columbo looks like it could be a biennial like mullein, basal rosette one year, flowering stalk the next, then gone; but it’s not. I don’t know how long columbo takes from germination to flowering here in the oak woods, but it’s a good many years at best.

Basal rosette of the biennial common mullein. Photo by Richard Brewer

If you’d like a name for plants with life cycles like columbo you could call them long-lived monocarpic perennials. Long-lived perennial monocarp is OK also. You may think you never heard of such a thing, but you have. Some species of bamboos and century plants (Agave) act pretty much the same way. Also a few animals–sockeye salmon and the 17-year cicada, for example.

Field Trip to Big Island Woods (Cooper’s Island) Coming Up

Hackberry, a frequent canopy tree at Big Island Woods. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

Saturday 24 April I’m leading a field trip to the Big Island Woods, also referred to as Cooper’s Island. It’s a trip for the Kalamazoo Wild Ones chapter.

“Big Island Woods” refers to an “island” of forest in the middle of Prairie Ronde, southwest Michigan’s largest mesic (tall-grass) prairie. The village of Schoolcraft was founded just east of the Island. Of the Island’s original 300 acres or more, about 20 acres now remain. The site is probably the natural area in southwest Michigan most worthy of permanent protection, for its combination of ecological, botanical, and historic values.

Historically, Prairie Ronde and the Big Island are interesting because of their connection with the earliest settlers in Kalamazoo County (such as Bazel Harrison), with James Fenimore Cooper (whence “Cooper’s Island”), and with Clarence and Florence Hanes, authors of The Flora of Kalamazoo County.

Ecologically, the remnant of the Big Island that survives is of interest because of its unusual species composition, its similarity to prairie groves of Illinois, and several rare plant species. The forest could perhaps be called wet mesic and has a diverse canopy, despite a windstorm about ten years ago that blew down many large trees.

Probably the most unusual plant species is the white trout lily, known from only one other site in Kalamazoo County. Two other rare plants are the trees Ohio buckeye and blue ash. There are, in addition, many other plants of mesic forest and southern swamp forest, including a relatively rich complement of spring ephemerals.

Red-berried elder in bud, early April, at Big Island Woods. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

Down trunks and woody debris from the wind storm about a decade ago make travel somewhat difficult in some parts of the woods.

Relatively little work has been done on the biota other than plants. However, as a wooded island surrounded by agricultural fields and village streets, it could be an important stopover site for migratory birds. In less than two afternoon hours on 11 May 1996 three observers found 42 bird species including 14 species of warblers.

The trip will leave from the I-94 car-pool parking lot at Oakland Drive, Kalamazoo, at 9:15 AM Saturday. Because parking at the field trip site is limited to about five cars, car-pooling is essential. The field trip will conclude about noon.

Later on, after the trip, I’ll try to write something about what we saw and talked about at Cooper’s Island.

Kalamazoo County Spring 2010, Second Installment

I wrote the following last night. Today, temperatures jumped into the 70s–77 as I write this at 6 PM. The forecast is for highs in the 70s and 80s for the next three days. So much for stretching out the spring.

Beech-maple forest in early spring, Pavilion Township. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

A stretch of chilly weather, especially some cool nights below freezing, has kept spring from racing ahead the way it sometimes does. This is good; summer is a fine time, but there are lots of things to experience in spring and it’s more fun to have them spread out rather than all happen in a week.

When I wrote my last post, no frogs had been calling as yet, but soon after, the afternoon of 17 March, wood frogs were calling in the small kettles such as the one shown in the preceding post.

Finding another sound to match any animal’s voice is difficult. But saying that wood frog calls sound like the feeding chuckle of ducks is not a bad comparison. The frog calls are a little louder, I think, and each one sounds quite fervent, unlike the kind of absent-minded noodling of a bunch of dabbling ducks. But the comparison is a pretty good way to give other people an idea of what wood frogs sound like.

I have heard no chorus frogs or spring peepers yet. We usually think of these two as the earliest frogs here in eastern North America, but some years wood frogs have been earlier in my experience. I’m not sure, though, that–for whatever reason–peepers and chorus frogs aren’t rarer than they used to be.

Another animal that I believe was decidedly less common the past few months than in preceding years is the white-footed mouse. I don’t go out and census mice in the woods; I base this impression on how many mice I trap each winter in the house. The house here in Oshtemo Township is in oak forest. Beginning when the nights start to get cold, the mice start to find ways to get inside. I trap them with ordinary mouse traps baited with a little peanut butter with a couple of sunflower seeds stuck in the peanut butter or inserted elsewhere on the trigger of the trap. Most winters I trap a couple of dozen white-footed mice. This winter I caught a couple of mice early on and then no more through most of November, December, January, and February. I also set traps in my house in the southeast part of Kalamazoo County, in beech-maple forest. Most years I catch several mice through the winter, but this past winter only a couple.

I don’t know what may have happened to the mice this winter and I don’t know whether it’s temporary or a permanent decline. Next fall and winter may give me a clue.

Floerkea proserpinacoides, False Mermaid Weed, Big Island Woods, March 30, 2010. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. It’s early spring. The wood frogs are calling. In the beech-maple forest, harbinger of spring, our earliest spring wild flower is finishing up (a blog called Kalamazoo Seasons has a nice photo of the flower). The very first spring beauty flowers have opened. Wild leek is up.

And the little annual Floerkea proserpinacoides with its pale-green narrow leaflets is spread profusely over the ground in the few woodlots where it occurs, but is not quite in bloom yet. This odd mesic forest specialist deserves a better vernacular name than the obscure, bookish “false mermaid weed.” Maybe we need a contest for a new, better-fitting name for it.

Anyway it’s spring and will be for a good month yet, maybe longer. Let’s enjoy it.

Leaves of wild leek, March 2010, Pavilion Township. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

Signs of Spring

Open water in March in a buttonbush swamp, Oshtemo Township. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Spring began in southwest Michigan in the past few days. One sign has been the Sandhill Cranes overhead, giving their loud rattle. They could be on their way north or they could be local birds; several pairs now nest in Kalamazoo County.

Because snow cover was so continuous, and thick, some birds that are usually here by February were mostly delayed into early March. The cranes are one species, Red-winged Blackbirds are another. I saw my first redwing a few days ago and they’re now pretty well scattered over the countryside.

In Pavilion Township Saturday, Song Sparrows were singing, Horned Larks were on territory in the open fields, and sailing overhead was my first Turkey Vulture of the new year. First in Michigan anyway; we saw Turkey and Black Vultures every day in Costa Rica. Most were probably resident there, but some could have been wintering birds from North America. This morning I saw my second Turkey Vulture sailing above West Main in Oshtemo Township.

I haven’t heard any frogs calling yet, and chilly as it is I don’t expect any tonight, but warmer weather is predicted for tomorrow.

As soon as bare patches began to appear around houses, the early spring bulbs were visible, some flowering. I’ve already seen winter aconite, snow drops, and crocuses in bloom without hunting very hard. Our native early spring wildflowers grow mostly in the mesic deciduous forests, and many of them are spring ephemerals–they come up, bloom, and then die back, so for most of the year they’re invisible above ground. Right now the beech-maple forests probably have harbinger-of-spring in flower, and in the wooded low spots currently occupied by temporary vernal pools, skunk cabbage flowers will be out, though perhaps not producing pollen quite yet.

Acute-leaved hepatica, an early spring wild flower, but not a spring ephemeral. Photographed in an Oshtemo Township oak forest by Richard Brewer.

Our native early spring flowers take advantage of the brief window of full sun that opens between the arrival of warmer weather and the closing of the forest canopy by sugar maples. It would make sense that the cultivated spring bulbs we buy and plant might be the early spring flowers from the deciduous forests of other parts of the Earth, but that isn’t the case. Rather, most of the spring bulbs blooming in our front yards come from the steppes or the alpine and sub-alpine meadows of the Middle East and Asia.

The seasons follow one another in a continuous cycle. A year has no natural beginning and no end. Several groups of ancients gave the winter solstice, around December 21, special significance because it was the day they were reassured that the sun was actually coming back for another year. Our New Year’s Day, January 1 is arbitrary but since it comes not too long after the solstice, it’s not wholly unsatisfactory as a starting point in the cycle.

To me, though, the first definite signs of spring in nature, the sorts of things that have happened in the past week or so, feel like the engine of the year starting up. In our temperate latitudes, this is the start of the year’s organic production; photosynthesis really gets underway, storing sunlight that, passed on along the food chain, runs nearly the totality of the living world. For a high percentage of the creatures here, spring is the time for beginning reproduction as well as production. Eggs hatch and babies are born, and young of the year having new combinations of genes not quite the same as either parent go out to become part of a later generation–or not.

Spring has arrived in southwest Michigan–I think–and a new year has started. Happy New Year!

Costa Rica in the Dry Season, February 2010

Friday night sundown, Gulf of Nicoya, from hilltop at La Ensenada. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Katy and I just returned from two weeks in Costa Rica. As part of an Elderhostel–though the program is now called Exploritas–we visited five sites ranging from mangrove forest along the Pacific Coast to the rather chaparral-like vegetation called paramo around 11,000 feet above sea level on Cerro de la Muerte. Included were visits to several important conservation areas, including La Selva (and Selva Verde) and a site in the Savegre River valley.

Spending eight or more hours a day in the field, our group identified, or had identified for it, about 280 species of birds. On one night excursion we heard and saw the Common Pauraque (but no potoos). We also saw 2- and 3-toed sloths, howler monkeys, collared peccaries and a few other mammals plus various herp species including crocodiles and caimans, 2 species of iguanas, several other lizards, a few frogs, and the cane toad, native here but with a bad reputation in places where it has been introduced, like St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.

Interest in resource conservation is high in Costa Rica. For one thing, ecotourism, which is what we were participating in, is a major element in the nation’s economy. The subjects of ecotourism’s costs and benefits and how sustainable it is are complex, but as an incentive for setting aside natural lands, the impact has been positive and powerful.

At Selva Verde. Photo by Richard Brewer.

I’ll write more about our observations and experiences. For now, I’ll say just that they involved a lot of interesting and beautiful wildlife and plants, spectacular scenery, lots of good food, and good company.

Conservation Values of the Colony Farm Orchard, Kalamazoo County, Michigan

The following is approximately what I said in my brief remarks at the Save the Colony Farm Orchard Rally last Tuesday night, 8 December 2009. I have, however, expanded on my thoughts under point 3, adding a consideration of conservation easements.

We need to recognize three aspects to the conservation value of this piece of land. One is what’s good about the land itself. Two is its beneficial effects on the adjacent Asylum Lake Preserve, which Western Michigan says is permanently protected. Three is the broad question of how the conversion of this dedicated conservation land to commercial use affects the status of conservation land all across the state.

Apple tree in old orchard at the Colony Farm Orchard. Photo by Richard Brewer

1. The Land Itself. Although this land has been referred to as the Colony Farm Orchard, the old orchard amounts to only a quarter or so of the approximately 53 acres. The fruit trees are surrounded and in some cases overrun by grape vines. Box-elder is a common invading tree in the orchard.

The rest of the property is varied habitat with a couple of sizable wooded areas at the north and south ends. Grasslands dominated by smooth brome grass and goldenrods with invading shrubs and trees surround the wooded areas and the orchard. The land of the wooded area at the north runs down to a springy area with a couple of ponds.

One part of the conservation value of this piece of land is what used to be here. The east edge of Genesee Prairie, one of the eight tall-grass prairies in Kalamazoo County, extended to the Orchard site. This is now the only part of Genesee Prairie in public hands and with any approach to natural vegetation. The rest is gone, beneath US-131 or occupied by the west edge of Western Michigan University’s BTR park and commercial and residential areas and croplands west of US-131.

It’s unlikely that much of the original prairie flora is left at the Orchard site. However, there are still bur oaks–a good many, some fairly large and old, others young. They are all almost certainly descendants of the bur oaks that were part of the savanna fringing this tall-grass prairie. They are a genetic connection extending back 180 years to when the first settlers arrived to homestead on the prairies and savannas of Kalamazoo County. But the connection extends back much further than that, to long before Europeans reached Michigan or North America, probably to some time in the Hypsithermal interval around 9000-6000 years ago.

Goldenrods, old orchard in background. Photo by Richard Brewer.

As for animals, we know from various sources that there are coyotes, deer, turkeys, woodcock, Red-tailed Hawks, Green Herons, and many smaller birds in the summer or year-round. I will shortly put up a list of summer bird species that several observers are supplying. The spot also has all the attributes of an excellent migratory stopover site for land birds in both spring and fall. As to the small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, I think it may be time for WMU to fund a serious study to find out just what is here.

2. Benefits to Asylum Lake Preserve. The Colony Farm Orchard is properly part of Asylum Lake Preserve. From the edge of the Preserve vegetation to the edge of the Orchard vegetation is about the same distance as between third base and home plate on a baseball field. The Orchard makes the preserve a larger sanctuary by about 20 percent. This is good; bigger is better in sanctuaries, mainly because local extinction of species is rarer on bigger sanctuaries.

We could also think of the Orchard as an island near to the Preserve. It serves as a stepping stone that wandering animals not currently living on the Preserve can find and, from there, reach the sanctuary. The end result of all this is that the Orchard makes the Asylum Lake Preserve more diverse and less prone to fluctuations in populations, hence more stable.

Bur oak at Colony Farm Orchard. Photo by Richard Brewer

There are of course the other beneficial effects of buffering against the noise, noxious fumes, and bright artificial lights coming from US-131 and the commercial land beyond it.

3. Threats to Conservation Land Elsewhere in Michigan. The Colony Farm Orchard has a protective conservation covenant that many Kalamazoo residents now know by heart: “The conveyance shall provide that Western Michigan University may utilize the property solely for public park, recreation, or open space purposes, except that the legislature, by statute, may authorize Western Michigan University to utilize the property for some other public purpose.” The restrictions were placed on the land by the legislature at the time of its transfer from the state to WMU in 1977. If Representative Jones (D-Kalamazoo) and WMU can persuade the legislature to strip away this restriction, as HB 5207 provides, and if Governor Granholm signs it, WMU will be able to use the land for anything. This land, bought with taxpayer dollars and now designated for public use–specifically some variety of public open space–would be available to use as an Annex to WMU’s BTR park. But it could also be used any other way WMU chose.

If HB 5207 is passed and signed into law, what state or university land dedicated for conservation–or any kind of public use–is safe? What of the state parks? What of the arboretums, botanical gardens, and natural areas of the rest of the Michigan public universities?

What, in fact, of conservation easements? These are now the most popular way to protect land in perpetuity, widely used by land trusts and government agencies. They are discussed in many places in Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America but especially chapters 7 and 8. Very briefly, a conservation easement is a binding agreement that permanently restricts the development and future use of land so as to protect its conservation values. Conservation easements are held by conservation organizations or units of local, state, or federal government. The easement holders are charged with defending against violations of the easement provisions. As of 2005, land trusts in Michigan held conservation easements on about 55,000 acres. The amount of land in conservation easements held by government agencies is hard to determine but substantial. Conservation easements are a relatively new way to conserve land, rarely used before 1960. Most states have statutes providing the legal foundation for conservation easements; Michigan’s is Act 451 of 1954, called NREPA.

But we have seen what the state legislature, or the House at least, has done with statutes in the case of the Colony Farm Orchard. Suppose some well-connected land owner found that a conservation easement held by some land trust had become inconvenient to him. Might the Michigan legislature be willing to pass a statute saying the conservation easement on his land was rescinded? Maybe, maybe not. Suppose that this situation came up two or three times. Might the Michigan legislature decide that NREPA as currently written was becoming an unnecessary burden to worthy land owners who had changed their minds about the easements on their acreages. In that case, might the Michigan legislature amend the statute to make backing out easier–like, for example, by coming to the legislature with what seemed like a good argument, such as using the land to create jobs? Maybe, maybe not.

The land owners might still have a few hurdles remaining, with the IRS for example. But that’s what attorneys and accountants are for.

If the legislature did either of these things, a judge or two or more would decide whether what the legislature did was legally OK. Probably the judges wouldn’t say whether it was right or wrong or how much it damaged the cause of land conservation.

It is a dangerous path that Representative Jones and WMU are trying to steer the Michigan legislature towards.

Tamarack in Oshtemo Township

Spicebush, late October, Oshtemo Township, Section 9. Photo by Richard Brewer

Wetlands are scarce in Oshtemo Township. Its thirty-six square miles are mostly high and dry and the soils are mostly well-drained. A few kettles exist in the moraine-outwash plain topoography. These are depressions formed when ice blocks left behind during the retreat of the last Pleistocene ice sheet melted. Most kettles in Oshtemo Township don’t hold water today. A few do some or most years; perhaps a clay lens lies somewhere beneath them, or perhaps enough clay occurred in the surrounding glacial drift to form a more-or-less impermeable layer when it eroded into the kettle.

The kettles that hold water year round or for a few months in the spring tend to have a buttonbush swamp at the bottom; some have a band of spicebush up the bank from the buttonbush. These are features of some of the sites disturbed least by agriculture and other human activity.

A small triangle of swamp forest is still present in the northwest corner of Oshtemo Township, but several wetland vegetation types that occur elsewhere in Kalamazoo County don’t seem to be present here. I’m unaware of any examples of open bog, bog forest, sedge fen, or prairie fen. Possibly small patches of some of these might have been here at the time of settlement.

Early this November I started noticing a good-sized tamarack tree in the wetland at the west edge of the Lilian Anderson Arboretum (Section 15) as I drove by. It was only 10 0r 15 yards south of West Main (M-43). At this time in the fall, tamarack needles turn a gold color, so the species is easily spotted. I finally stopped by on Saturday 14 November, by which time many of the leaves had fallen and the few remaining ones were dull brown.

The situation where the tamarack is growing is consistent with the possibility of fen. The site is at the base of a slope where ground water feeds the sizable wetland northeast of Bonnie Castle Lake. However, I haven’t noticed fen plants at other places along the edge of the wetland on many other visits to the Arboretum. I walked around near the tamarack, but I was just wearing short leather boots and couldn’t get very far out. I didn’t see any obvious fen indicator species, but this isn’t not a good time of year for botanizing anyway. I’ll have another look or two next spring and summer.

I’ll also make a point late next October of driving around the other wetlands in the township to see if more tamaracks are evident. Clarence and Florence Hanes found tamaracks in the Twin Lakes area which is right next door to Oshtemo, but nearly all the Twin Lake low ground is across the line, in Alamo Township.

Spotted wintergreen, Oshtemo Township, Section 9. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Spotted wintergreen, mid-November,Oshtemo Township, Section 9. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Walking back up the wooded slope above the wetland at the Arboretum, I saw a few spotted wintergreen plants (also called spotted pipsissewa). It’s a small plant, handsome with dark green leaves with a whitish line running along the midrib. The line is often rather jagged looking where the pale coloration runs off varying distances along the side veins. The leaves are evergreen and were peeking through the fallen oak leaves. A good share of the oak areas in Oshtemo Township that weren’t cleared still have the species, though I’ve never seen it abundant. A plant or two or small patches pretty widely scattered is the way it usually occurs. Its geographic range is basically eastern North America, in most parts of which its occurrence is much the same as here–never common but seemingly not in serious trouble.

A Conservation Plan for the Colony Farm Orchard (=Enchanted Forest)

Button from the Facebook group

As we all know, HB 5207 put forth by Representative Bob Jones (D–Kalamazoo) is designed to strip the conservation/public use restrictions from the Colony Farm Orchard as a first step in turning the 54 acres into an Annex to Western Michigan University’s BTR Park. Here are the stated restrictions: “The conveyance shall provide that Western Michigan University may utilize the property solely for public park, recreation, or open space purposes, except that the legislature, by statute, may authorize Western Michigan University to utilize the property for some other public purpose.” The bill, introduced in mid-July with no public notice, made its way quickly to the Senate but there progress has slowed.

This delay has given conservationists and other opponents of the measure a chance to make their views known, and they have done so in large numbers. As of now, we cannot know what will happen. But we should talk about what ought to be done with the property as conservation land. I made a start on this subject earlier and concluded that the best role for the land was exactly what it’s doing now, but better.

In that post, I discussed some important ecological functions of the Colony Farm Orchard. I won’t repeat them in detail, but here’s a quick list. It’s worth taking note that all these would be diminished or lost altogether by development as a BTR installation.

Many are beneficial effects that the Orchard exerts on the Asylum Lake Preserve, such as

Reducing noise from M-131

Filtering noxious fumes from trucks and automobiles on M-131

Reducing artificial lighting coming from M-131 and buildings across the highway to the west. Research on the dangerous effects that bright artificial lights have on insects, bats, amphibians in the breeding season, and other forms of wildlife is accumulating rapidly.

By serving as a very near island of similar but not identical habitats, the Orchard adds species, lowers extinctions and enhances immigration, all of which lead to higher biodiversity and ecosystem stability at Asylum Lake.

Other positive conservation roles the Orchard plays, not necessarily involving the Asylum Lake Preserve directly, include

Allowing for the presence and reproduction of shy animals, such as foxes and American woodcock, that are likely to be disturbed on the more heavily visited Asylum Lake Preserve.

Serving as a migratory bird stopover site well-supplied with cover, water, and food supplies in both spring and fall.

Preserving land within the historic Genesee tall-grass prairie and the adjacent bur oak opening. Perhaps few herbaceous species survive from those pre-settlement plant communities, but numerous bur oaks of various ages and sizes are present that are almost certainly descended from the oaks of the original savanna.

This is just a good start on a listing of the conservation values of the Orchard. There are, for example, the marvelous asparagus patches along the west edge. Not for nothing was Euell Gibbons’s first book named Stalking the Wild Asparagus. “When I am out along the hedgerows and waysides gathering wild asparagus,” he wrote, “I am twelve years old again and all the world is new and wonderful as the spring sun quickens the green things into life….”

There are also the old trees–horse chestnut, tulip tree, maples–planted by the original farm family or by the staff or patients of the Colony Farm. Big and open grown but surrounded now by many trees of smaller diameters, these are probably what suggested the “Enchanted Forest” name to the Facebook Group. They ought to be kept as a way of conserving human history as well as natural history.

Then there is the carbon sequestration that has gone on and is going on in the accumulation of tree biomass, which acts to temper the greenhouse effect and slow global climate change. Turning this land into a BTR park extension would almost certainly mean cutting most of the trees and brush and releasing the stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide either by burning or by the slow fire of decomposition.

It’s not possible yet to come up with a complete conservation design, but here are some things we might want to do when the Colony Farm Orchard is devoted to conservation.

1. Construct a self-guided loop trail going through the property’s major habitats with the trailhead on the east side of the property next to Drake Road.
2. Next to the trailhead, construct a small bicycle parking space. Too much space for automobile parking has already been subtracted from the Asylum Lake Preserve to allow more to be lost for auto parking here.
3. Provide for safe passage of pedestrians from somewhere south of the Asylum Lake parking lot at the top of the hill on Drake by means of pedestrian on-demand lights, or an overpass.
4. Stop the dumping of leaves and yard waste from Kalamazoo. It’s a public service of a sort, but on a parcel of only 54 acres it takes up space that ought to be available for natural revegetation or restoration. The area of thick leaf mulch can be seen in one of the fine low-level aerial photographs of the Colony Farm Orchard by JaySeaAre. Locate the metal pole barn (“Butler building”) on the west border (toward the highway); the heavy leaf mulch is the unvegetated area east of the Butler building and running south toward the electric substation and north toward the old orchard. Several years accumulation are involved, ringed with rank growths of barnyard weeds.
5. Erect a signboard facing M-131 that says something like this:

Asylum Lake Preserve of Western Michigan University

A sanctuary of 320 acres protected for all time

that by education, research, and as green and open space

benefits the public and the Earth

Before describing what the trail could be like, it’s worth considering why we need a trail at all. People who are highly enough motivated have always made their way onto the Orchard for bird-watching, asparagus hunting, photography, and contemplation. And no trail is needed for the Orchard to continue its services to the Asylum Lake Preserve. But there are good reasons for the trail: One, it will make it much handier to visit the site, especially for education–classes, but also groups interested in natural history, and any strolling autodidact.

Two, if the Orchard is left as is, there will be those who say, as some connected with WMU have said, that the land is not utilized. Of course, the charge was and is bogus. But the trail is one way to demonstrate utilization. It will show most people that the land is utilized, though perhaps not that segment of humanity for whom the only meaningful way a piece of property can be utilized is to generate income.

What should the trail be like? I’d say most of it should be narrow, just wide enough for one person to walk comfortably, and unimproved. No dogs, I’d say. It’s nice that people can walk their pets on the Asylum Lake property, but the Orchard ought to continue to be a dog-free refuge, a place for the woodcocks and turkeys and other ground nesters.

There would be plenty to see along the trail, including many of the features already mentioned. Any trip would find dozens of things to look at and discourse on, as the changing seasons brought forth something new every day.

The trail should loop through the south part of the WMU Foundation property. In fact, I’d say that the south half of the Foundation land ought to be reunited with the Enchanted Forest. The eight acres extending up to Stadium Drive were regrettably severed from the Orchard property in 1957 and sold into commerce. The Foundation did Kalamazoo a service by acquiring it in 2007.

Pond with Mallards on WMU Foundation land just north of Colony Farm Orchard. Photo by R. Brewer

Having the trail run through the south part of what is now Foundation property would include a small pond and the ducks and aquatic life that could be seen there and also an area of great hydrological interest as the main source of ground water flow into Asylum Lake.

These are just some ideas of mine. I haven’t discussed them in detail with anybody. No charette was held. Nobody paid me a consulting fee; my work was all pro bono publico. Publico has been given short shrift in WMU’s proposals for the Orchard, so I’m glad to bring a little of it back.

Will the Colony Farm Orchard be allowed to fulfill these conservation aims? That depends on the Michigan Senate, or perhaps Governor Granholm. But, of course, it depends most of all on Western Michigan University, which could at any time, decide to let the Orchard live up to the purposes for which it was conveyed from state to university in 1977. That WMU has not already asked the Michigan legislature to withdraw the section of HB 5207 dealing with the Colony Farm Orchard reveals an anti-conservation, anti-environment, anti-sustainability mindset that may foretell a troubled future.

Labor Day, West Lake Bog

Mid-morning I looked out the window and saw a small bird in the shrubs, moving about pretty actively. It was an American Redstart, not in the black and orange adult male plumage, but rather the olive-backed, gray-headed plumage with yellow wing and tail patches that at this time of year could be a female or a young male.

We had no breeding redstarts in the vicinity this summer, so this was most likely a migrant. Perhaps Katy and I would have done to well stay home and see what else had arrived, but today was a holiday, hence worth a small excursion.

Marsh east of Westnedge Avenue at West Lake Bog . Photo by Richard Brewer

We drove to the West Lake Preserve in Portage. It has trails, including boardwalks (of green plastic) that run out into marshes east of Westnedge Avenue. The marshes have some cat-tails but are mostly sedges plus a great variety of other herbs and a few shrubs.

Button-bush is the most common large shrub. It’s distinctive, easily identified with its whitish ball-like inflorescence in summer which remains ball-like in fruit but turns a rosy color. Easily identified, as I said, as long as you find it in wet ground and it has flowers or fruits.

Button-bush fruits in marsh at West Lake. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Button-bush in fruit in marsh at West Lake. Photo by Richard Brewer.

Once at the Michigan Nature Association’s Black River Sanctuary near Breedsville, the sanctuary steward showed me a large shrub or small tree on dry ground–though not far from the river. It had no flowers or fruits and puzzled both of us for a while. Having finally identified it, I think I’ll know it in the future even if it has no flowers or fruits. The fact that it has neither alternate or opposite leaves but instead often has three at a node is a quick first clue.

We were hoping for migrating warblers and other small birds, but the first birds we heard were two Sandhill Cranes. They were coming from the south and we heard the rolling rattle they make while flying a minute or so before they came in sight over the trees behind us. They might have been planning to land in the large patch of marsh through which the boardwalk runs if we hadn’t been there.

As it was, they flapped a little harder, regained altitude, passed over a line of trees and came down out of sight ahead of us. Not long afterward, a Great Blue Heron, another big bird though not as big as the crane, flew in from the east. It did park in the patch of marsh we were passing through, but out of sight in a strip of water on the far side.

It turned out that we saw and heard only a few song birds. The birds that bred here this year are mostly quiet, some still completing their fall molts. A few Red-winged Blackbirds were still noticeable in the marshes. The largest concentration of birds we saw was in a black gum tree. Its leaves were already red and the ripe dark blue fruits were being visited by a good many largish songbirds. We saw Blue Jays and catbirds, but may have missed other species.

Relatively undisturbed wetlands are always interesting botanically. There are often a lot of species, and some are in groups that present some identification difficulties. But the set of species that can handle really wet ground and especially standing water is circumscribed. You don’t have to look through the whole plant manual to identify hydrophytes; instead you can pretty much confine your search to the specialized books on aquatics.

I don’t know what the best such manuals are today. I still have a copy of Norman Fassett’s A Manual of Aquatic Plants from 1957 and it serves the purpose. A little updating of scientific names may be necessary, but that could be true if you use a manual published six months ago.

Several plants were blooming in the marshes. In fact, flowering late in the season characterizes the wetland flora. Among plants in flower were pickerel-weed with blue flowers, white-flowered arrowheads, and yellow-flowered bur-marigolds.

The water level was lower than we had seen in recent years, when it had come up to or over the flexible boardwalks. Bladderworts were growing and flowering on the exposed peaty surface alongside the boardwalks. They were tiny plants. Some species of bladderworts have purple flowers and some yellow. These plants had tiny bright yellow flowers. I thought they might be Utricularia gibba, but I wasn’t in a serious plant-identifying mood today.

A blanket of sphagnum moss in West Lake Bog. Photo by Richard Brewer

We continued to where the boardwalk loops back to the dirt path and followed that to the boardwalk that runs out into the sphagnum bog fringing West Lake. The flora of bogs is even smaller and more specialized than most other wetlands, but includes many striking and beautiful species that can be seen in no other habitat. The West Lake boardwalk is probably the best local opportunity to see this community with such things as tamarack, leatherleaf, cottongrass, pitcher plant, and sundew.

After the bog, we hiked back out to the parking lot. It was 12:30 and we had plans to continue our holiday with lunch at the Lebanese buffet.

Tamarack bog with leatherleaf and cottongrass. Photo by Richard Brewer