Stressed and flushed, Cathy Pollack arrived at the designated location at the appointed time with the precious cargo in a blue Coleman cooler. The federal fish and wildlife biologist was on a mission.
It was another exceedingly and unexpectedly hot day on the tallgrass prairie. In her cooler, Pollack — dressed in white and wearing “tick gaiters” — carried pollen sacs from 106 miles away. She had brought them here to Nachusa Grasslands to hand pollinate and help stave off extinction of the rare and endangered eastern prairie fringed orchid.
Pollack conferred with fellow scientist Elizabeth Bach of The Nature Conservancy, which manages Nachusa. Bach gave her, and a handful of sunscreen-drenched volunteers, the nod. The early season heat had triggered orchid flowering about two weeks early, and the window for hand-pollinating was open.
“It’s on,” Bach said.
By pollinating the plants by hand, the humans were trying to fill in the gaps left by the primary natural pollinator, the sphinx or hawk moth, which has a long tongue uniquely adapted to the fringed orchid flower. Both the moth and the orchid, like so many other species, the scientists said, have been in decline due to the loss of wetlands and other natural habitat.
“The eastern prairie fringed orchid is one of those plants that can thrive in our future — if we make a place for it in our world,” Bach said.
Buttoning up their gear amid small talk, the group of about 10 jumped into a pickup truck and bounced down a dirt road leading into the 4,000 acres of restored and remnant tallgrass prairie in northern Illinois near Franklin Grove. Purple coneflower looking ready to launch poked up in all directions, surrounded by a sea of green grasses and 700 native plants in yellows, pinks, violets and whites.
The eastern prairie fringed orchid is not your windowsill orchid. But it is in the same family as the greenhouse-cultivated orchids often given as house-warming gifts — the ones with the thick, wiry roots that grasp at the air. But the fringed orchid is special. The locations are hush-hush. And it is very picky about where it grows. It needs wetlands and the right soil harboring the right beneficial fungi.
Turns out the plant is right at home in a patch of Nachusa marsh where the first fringed orchid seeds were sown in 1996, a spot where corn and soybean had grown in neat rows for half a century. It’s the largest wild population in Illinois.
Today, The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife are working together to give the little yellow orchid a helping hand. By cross pollinating the plants with pollen from distant orchids, they will produce greater quantities of viable seed.
Propagating a plant such as this helps to reverse a spiraling cycle of plant and animal decline, Bach said. “The orchid is a symbol. If it is healthy, then it is a sign the ecosystem is healthy.”
From the bed of the pickup, a volunteer pointed out a “bison wallow” — a large patch of dirt where the 2,000-pound animals roll around and work dust into their thick coats to repel insects. Bison, in their eating habits, are unwitting partners in the prairie restoration.
But unlike domestic cattle, they are also unpredictable and cantankerous. “Beware of Bison” signs ring the fenced perimeter, depicting a person being heaved into the air at the point of a horn.
Amy Brewer, 59, a retired schoolteacher from Mendota, has volunteered for years and, despite her serene exterior, admitted she is “terrified” of bison.
The truck pulled to a dusty halt, no bison in sight. Team Fringed Orchid walked single file into the marsh. Alert eyes scanned the lush growth for single short stems with little yellow flowers above heavily veined leathery leaves. Knee boots lifted out of the black muck and stepped forward carefully, popping and squishing. One by one, the members of the ad-hoc team hopped a tiny stream that drained off the weekend’s rain.
“When people ask me what I did today, I can tell them I was a plant sex worker,” Brewer joked.
The first orchids were spotted, about knee high.
“Whoah!” exclaimed Tim Ngo, 48, a volunteer docent and business owner from nearby Rochelle. “Orchid central.”
Pollack put on a headband magnifier, whipped out a stool and sat down. From her cooler, she pulled a small piece of styrofoam bristling with dozens of toothpicks. On the end of each wooden toothpick was a barely visible yellow dot, about the size of a pinhead. With surgical precision, she removed a pollen sac from one of the dozen orchid flowers, stuck it into a separate styrofoam block, then inserted the long-distance pollen from orchids at Somme Woods in Northbrook.
The humans beat the moth to this flower, she concluded.
The volunteers paired up and sloshed off with their toothpicks and upturned buckets to find more orchids. The pairs worked quietly, hunched over, barely moving, keeping track of pollen removed and added. Two Tims were a pair, Ngo and Mescher. They conferred.
Ngo: “We took out two and we put in two.”
Then, Mescher: “Did you lose it?”
Ngo: “It’s stuck on the petal.”
Mescher: “Just move on to the next one.”
“Every time I come out here it’s like I’m on vacation,” said Mescher, a DeKalb resident celebrating his 60th birthday with a prairie workday. Now he takes care of the electric fences as a volunteer with Friends of Nachusa.
Pollack brought around a tupperware of watermelon from her cooler. Temperatures rose.
Brewer shed her insect vest; too hot. She worked the toothpicks while her pollen partner, Marcia Heuer, held the styrofoam in the shadow of her pink John Deere hat. Brewer worked quickly; it was her third year pollinating.
Growing up they were “free-range” kids, Brewer said, but “now, we’re a bunch of old ladies here. It’s social. You learn a lot from the people who know.”
Heuer, 77, a master gardener and landscape designer, handed Brewer another toothpick.
After a couple hours of pollinating in the shadeless prairie, the group rode back. Two herds of bison were visible in the distance, one munching grass, one galloping in the other direction.
On the second floor office of a modestly air-conditioned red barn, Bach reflected on the work of volunteers that she relies on to put in 9,000 hours of labor each year, cutting out invasive plants and seeding in disappearing natives like the fringed orchid.
“We had a great time,” she said. “People were enjoying themselves, and the population I thought looked really good. This year seeing 70 orchids out there is a great number; that makes us happy.”
Zachary Nauth is a freelance writer who lives in Oak Park.
Brittany Sowacke is a photographer based in Chicago.
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