Why I Hate This

At least I got to see this moose.  She looks like she got into it with some kind of predator in the past- she's got some pretty serious scars.

I spent the day driving around the woods looking for brooms and whatever other mutants I might find.  I was still getting over a pretty bad cold, so I wasn't able to walk very far.  I'd borrowed my dad's truck, which was not working well.  The muffler had come parially loose, and change in pressure in the exhaust system was making the computer wig out.  It died every time I let up on the accelerator.  Annoying.

I think I got spoiled last year.  I found a number of things without really spending much time at it.  This year, I I think I'm making up for it in the luck department.  I didn't see so much as a broom caused by disease.

Days like this make me wonder why I keep doing this.  It is frustrating and I really start to hate it sometimes.  Of course, I know why I do it- and why people do things like gambling.  Back in grad school, I had some coursework on behavior managment.  And as an undergrad, I had certainly learned plenty about Behaviorism.  There is something especially compelling about an intermittent reward schedule.  If you can't predict when you are going to get a hit, you just keep mashing that button in the box.  I feel very much like one of Skinner's rats.  When you win, it sure feels good.  You are filled with the sense that you are doing something truly fulfilling and good.

When no reward comes from pushing the button, however, it is maddening.  Who knows.  Maybe it really isn't worth it.  When I feel like this, I remind myself that any time spent out in the forest is not wasted.  I try to relax and enjoy my time out there.  Even if I don't find any botanical treasure, I often get to see wildlife like the moose.

Besides knowing that I'm being hooked by an intermittent reward schedule, I'm also aware of how my human brain tries to form patterns and predict events that are truly random.  Our brains just do this.  Over the eons, most people have unaware that our brains do this, and we get a plethora of irrational beliefs and superstitions as a result.

Some examples in this case are the superstitions about witch's brooms themselves.  In the old days in Europe, people believed that brooms were caused by witches landing in the trees.  More recently, among broom hunters, you can sometimes encounter similarly irrational beliefs.  Some people think that brooms are more common in cemeteries.  In my own anecdotal experience, this just hasn't been true.  It also just reeks of quaint superstition.

We have pretty cool brains that struggle to make sense of an unpredictable world.  As I'm driving or hiking around looking for plants, I can feel my brain generating irrational ideas about how to predict the next cool find.  There is an urge to believe that I can magically manifest something by wishing it to be so.  Sometimes I find myself imagining that my chances of finding a mutation increase with every trip to the woods.  (The latter is such a common fallacy that it has a name- the Gambler's Fallacy.)

Ultimately, I know these thoughts are pretty much bullshit.  They give my brain something to do while I'm staring at an ocean of green foliage, though.  And it gives me a chance to observe my own primate brain doing what it does.  By spending time in the woods letting my irrational thoughts just run, I feel like I get to know myself better.  I like to think that I can carry this insight into other parts of my life.  By knowing how my mind tries to form irrational beliefs, I might be able to avoid making mistakes in my thinking in other areas.

Regret

I caught sight of this spectacularly weeping Engelmann spruce from the highway in northern Washington.  It was standing alone in a field, so it really stood out.  I am guessing that whomever cleared the trees in that field noticed this unusual tree and spared it.

The following winter, I stopped by a house across the road to try to find out who the owner was.  A woman answered the door.  I was nervous- you never know how people are going to react to you when you want to shoot a tree on their property.  The lady knew exactly which tree I was talking about, and she seemed curious about what I wanted to do.  She yelled to her husband inside the house to see if he had any objection to me shooting twigs out of their spruce.  He did not, so I went across the road to the tree.

There was snow on the ground- maybe a couple of feet.  It was a little bit difficult to get over the barbed wire fence- though not as hard as it was wading in the chest-deep powder that you'd find at higher elevations.  I shot several twigs out of the tree and collected about 20 cones that had fallen onto the snow.

Only one seed from the cones germinated, but it died a few days later.  Two of the grafts took, however.  Now I must observe the grafted trees for a decade or two to see if this form can be duplicated by grafting.

I have decided to name this tree 'Regret', since it seems sad- albeit in a dramatic and spectacular way.

Fine Gold

As we left the meadow containing the Phlox, I caught site of the Abies grandis above. The bright yellow new growth really stood out.  I had Dad stop the truck and I waded out through the tansy to have a closer look.  My feet got wet as I crossed the creek in the middle of the meadow.  I was wearing shorts, and my legs got very itchy from contact with the tansy and other herbs.

Up close, I noticed that only the top half of the tree had the gold foliage.  The very top had some dead twigs in it, which could have either indicated sun burn from gold foliage or else death from disease.  At this point, I am not leaning in either direction.  Maybe someone with more experience would have a better idea- but from my perspective, I'm guessing that there is a 50% chance that it is in the process of dying (its close neighbor is already dead) and a 50% chance that it is a cool mutation.

I think I'll go back next year at about the same time to see what the tree looks like.  I don't want to try propagating it unless I have a better idea of whether it is worthwhile.  The bonus is that I'll get to visit the rare Phlox in bloom again :)

If it does turn out to be a good one, could you imagine this contrast of color in your yard?   

Extinction

This post is about an endangered species.  Since much of my blog is about collecting mutants, let me make something very clear at the beginning here.  As I've stated before, I do not collect rare plants.  When I visited this plant last weekend, I took nothing but photographs.  (I think that most of you would already know that- I just want to avoid having anyone get weird and accuse me of something.)

The Clearwater River in Idaho is home to forests of Taxus brevifolia, the Pacific Yew.  In that area, the yews comprise the dominant forest species.  Everywhere else in its range, the Pacific Yew is a minor component of forests.  Ever since I read about that, I've been wanting to go visit.  I suspect that there are wonderful brooms to be found...  perhaps ones even cooler than the golden one I found last year.  

In my readings, and through conversations with people familiar with the area, I learned that there are a handful of endemic species in there.  Apparently, the deep canyons in that watershed served as refugia during the last ice age.  While species froze out elsewhere, some were able to hang on in there until the ice sheet and glaciers retreated.  One such species is Phlox idahonis.  Since I love exploring wetlands, I was highly interested in seeing this plant in the wild.  It is very, very rare, living in three or four wet meadows in a very tiny area.

I did a number of Google image searches to see what it looked like.  Not many images are available.  One person had a fairly nice shot of the flowers- claiming that he could tell you where the plant was, but then he'd have to kill you.  

Such melodramatics might have had more weight if I hadn't been able to find directions to exactly where the plant grew in about 10 minutes.  There are published papers, describing the process of monitoring the populations.  Happily, this plant is a fairly plain cousin to our gawdy garden hybrids, so I imagine that there is basically zero collection pressure.

For comparison, try doing a search of the following three plants- all three are roughly the same in terms of rarity:

Phlox idahonis

Sarracenia oreophila

Nepenthes clipeata

You'll notice that not only is there are whole lot more material on the latter two, but there are significant conservation efforts underway.  Those plants are under significant collection pressure.  In the case of the Sarracenia, which grows in Tennessee, you will most assuredly not find directions to its wetland abodes.  I'll have more to say on that in a bit.  (Oh, and Nepenthes clipeata grows in a remote area of Borneo.  You could find out exactly where it is pretty easily- but good luck driving to it!)

Dad told me that he had always been curious about that area.  A family friend had worked in the logging operations that cleared the land for the Dworshak reservoir, and he had often spoken of how beautiful it was down there.  Last Sunday, we decided to take the drive.  

It took forever.

The most striking feature of the land there is how deep the river canyons are.  We are talking a couple of thousand feet deep.   At the lower elevations, dryland vegatation is dominant- with forests of Pinus ponderosa.  As we drove along the river, I tried to imagine the landscape 12 thousand years ago.  The plateau above was probably tundra and snowfields, while the bottoms of the canyons were green- filled with fir and the kind of vegetation that we see at higher elevations today.  

We climbed out of the canyon again and headed up into farm country, then montane forest.  The road was paved nearly the entire way.  Finally, we turned off the paved road and went a few miles down a gravel road.  It gradually petered out into a small dirt road with a dead end.  When I got out of the truck, I spotted the Phlox in about 10 seconds.  Our trip was well-timed, as the plants were in full bloom.  The foliage looks similar enough to other upright Phlox species that I could have recognized it out of bloom, but it would have taken some careful searching.

I looked around the meadow a bit.  Eurasian exotics such as Centauria maculosa and Tanacetum vulgare were colonizing the area.  These are the botanical equivalents of the Borg from Star Trek, or maybe the aliens from the Ridley Scott films.  In other words, they are bad-ass mother-fucking invasives from hell.  The Centauria didn't seem to tolerate the wet conditions that the Phlox prefered, but the Tanacetum was right in there, choking the life out of it.    

This disturbed me greatly.  While people are out there carefully cutting brush away from carnivorous plant habitats and jealously guarding the über-secret locations of their populations...  this plain-looking little Phlox is languishing in a meadow with redneck pickup tracks and invasive weeds.  

So much of our attention as humans is directed to the pretty, the exotic, and the cosmetically pleasing.  Hobbyists righteously crusade to save plants that are far less imperiled than this one, but that have more aesthetic appeal.  In short, nobody gives a shit about a spindly little Phlox that lives in Idaho.  It doesn't eat bugs, or have ridiculously large, beautiful flowers or leaves.  And it certainly doesn't have the stately, otherworldly presence that certain species of owl have.

I've been thinking a lot about this plant- and my relationship to it as a human.  I have plenty to say about that, actually, though I'm not sure today is the day to say it.  

What I will offer- as a question/ food for thought...  This species, and others like it, were likely in severe decline before humans arrived in North America- let alone by the time European settlers showed up.  Extinctions happen.  The vast majority of species that have lived on earth are now extinct.  Only a tiny, tiny minority survive- or rather, their descendants survive- the slow, grinding algorithm that is natural selection.  

I doubt that we are going to be the ultimate cause of this plant's extinction, though it seems pretty clear that Eurasian exotics (our fault) are going to finish kicking its poor butt out the door.  This makes me sad.  But to expand that sadness into some grand statement about the natural order of things is, at best, deluded.  The Phlox itself is incapable of suffering, or of any thought at all.  There is no larger order to be offended or violated.  Likewise, there is no god-given right to kill and exploit.

The real issue here isn't so much one of right and wrong- of following some imaginary moral code-  as much as deciding what kind of world we want to live in.  Do we want to eat and displace most other species, and let our grandchildren inherit a world of rats, cockroaches, algae, spotted knapweed and tansy?  Do we want to preserve some of the molecular kaleidoscope that we were born into so that future generations can see it?  Should we try to approximate what the world would look like before we evil primates showed up and spoiled the magical and fictional Eden?   (My vote is for the kaleidoscope option, btw.)

Ultimately, I think that as our species continues to grow into the role of caretaker of this planet, we will need to grapple with these ideas.  Anyone who claims to have the corner on truth and moral certainty with these issues is full of shit.  

I hope that made sense.  It has been a long week and I'm very tired- but I wanted to get a post ready on time, especially since I saw some cool stuff to share.

Oh, and by the way- I still haven't made it to the fork of the river where the yew trees are.  I wish that I could spend my days wandering the woods.

Golden Boughs

Sorry for the shitty picture.  One of these days I should take a photography class or something.  That takes money, however...  and since I no longer have a predictable income, I can't splurge on such things.  It is hard to get rich as a substitute teacher.

The boughs I'm talking about are on the grand fir (the tree on the right in the picture.)  There were several bright yellow branches on this tree- bright enough that I was able to see them while going by at 45 miles per hour.

My dad was driving, as usual.  I had him pull over and back up.  The tree was right next to some power lines, and the gold branches were about 60 feet up.  I had no idea how I would get to them.

Dad had a neighbor who worked as an arborist.  The next January, we stopped in to see if we could talk him into climbing the tree.  It soon became apparent that the man was a blow-hard.  He talked non-stop for a good hour, espousing the full compliment of anti-government conspiracy theories that seem to be prevalent up there in the woods.  I wanted to get to the door and escape, but my dad was sitting there politely listening.  I was just waiting for him to start into some kind of creepy anti-gay rhetoric (I'm a gay guy, so I was starting to get a little nervous) but he never got around to that.

We eventually got around to planning a time to go get pieces from the tree.  The guy was going to have his son meet us and climb the tree.

On the way out the door, he shook my hand and said, "You know, you're a good-sized man.  I like you.  I like a good-sized man."

What in the fuck did that mean?  Was it some kind of weird redneck come-on?  Did it mean that he wanted to take me out back, tie me to the tractor and cut me into pieces?  Have a romantic encounter in the hay barn?  Both options seemed equally ghastly, so I was glad to get in the truck and head back down the driveway.

Of course, no one was home a few days later when we were supposed to meet the son and get the scions from the tree.  It was at that point that I decided that I needed to learn to climb trees myself.

The following winter, Dad and I happened to stop by when the owner of the property was home.  It actually turned out to be someone that Dad knew, so he gave me permission to shoot some twigs out.

It took about four shots, but I got a few pieces.  In this picture, you can see one of the variegated twigs, complete with damage from the shot from the gun.  Most of the buds were fine, so a little needle damage didn't matter that much.  At least one of them took- the buds are breaking as I write this.

I've been told that irregular variegations like this are unpredictable.  The only way to find out if it is stable is to grow it out for several years.  It might continue to throw out yellow branches here and there throughout the tree, or it may simply revert to green.

The waiting will probably drive me nuts.  I suppose that the only thing to be done about that is to go out and find more plants to obsess about this summer.