“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,

and things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!”

As an aside, I would love to hear Cornish actress Kristin Scott Thomas recite this ditty!  She’s one of my favorites with her accent and stage charm and talents.

I’ve been enchanted by this Litany because of its raw mix of metaphors, so to speak.  Few of us have encountered ghoulies and ghosties, whatever these may be, but I’m betting nearly all of us have stumbled upon long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night.  Spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, roaches, mice, and bats all seem to qualify.  In our imaginations, these represent the ugly side of nature.  They’re not eagles and pandas.  They’re not out of inspiring vistas of wild landscapes.  They’re creepy things, hairy things, blood-sucking things, repulsive things, nightmarish things that seem to emerge from filth and decay.  How can any reasonable person love such lurid aspects of the natural world?  Further, how can anyone argue their importance in human settings?  Yet that is exactly what I’m going to argue in today’s column.

In the economy of nature, the long-leggety beasties play as significant a role, perhaps even more so, as eagles and pandas.  In fact, Pulitzer-prize winning scientist E.O. Wilson has argued convincingly that “it’s the little things that run life.”  Instinctively, we identify with the world’s sexy megafauna because they’re most like us; after all, at least they have a backbone … and they’re warm-blooded!  Yet in their hidden worlds the creepy-crawlies effect changes in ecosystems fundamental to system health and integrity.  They pollinate, decompose, recycle, build, and control populations in ways that instill a sense of wonder about their overall disproportionate importance in the Earth’s ecology.

As many of my readers know, my professional training is as a tropical ecologist.  Years ago, while on expedition into the cloud forests of Ecuador, I picked up a nasty parasite called a botfly.  In its larval stage, the botfly is a flesh-eating maggot that breaths through a snorkel and feeds on the living muscle of its host – my wrist, in this case!  The little monster could not be easily extracted due to its powerful anal hooks and rows of tiny black barbs that held it firmly in place.  Eschewing surgery or other modern medical practices, I employed what the locals called the “meat treatment” to remove the beastie.  I used a piece of raw steak, fixing it over the breathing pore with Vaseline and gauze.  As it began to suffocate, the botfly maggot then wriggled its way into the slab of bloody meat that I later pulled off – a sinister kind of Bruegelesque birthing process.

I can imagine the scurrilous tabloid headlines: “Man gives birth to fly maggot through his arm.”  Later I fixed the maggot in a little jar of preservative … that I still occasionally pull out to entertain my students!  And what about the hole in my wrist?  While inside me, the botfly maggot exuded a natural antiseptic to keep the wound clean.  From an evolutionary point of view, this made perfect sense.  Otherwise, the larva would find itself in an infectious soup of pus and dead tissue that might kill it.  Thankfully, for my dozens and dozens of expeditions into the tropics, this was the only instance to-date of parasitism.  Yet what a story!

One of my favorite “mind games” that I play with my students is to pretend that they have absolute power over any species on Earth, that with a mere blink an entire group of organisms could be wiped off the planet instantly.  If you had such power, would you use it to rid us forever of … mosquitoes, ticks, spiders, roaches, or, in this case, botflies?  I am happy to report that most of my students wisely refuse to accept such power.  Most understand that such “long-leggety beasties” play significant ecological roles and, in their absence, might disrupt entire natural systems irreparably.  But would the average American exercise such wisdom?

We didn’t think twice about the human-caused extinction of the passenger pigeon or the Caroline parakeet in the early 20th century so why would we give a thought to the demise of a disease-carrying mosquito or a meat-eating fly maggot?

It’s time now to reorder our thinking about the natural world.  The natural world is more complex than we can ever imagine so it’s important to save all the cogs and wheels, no matter how distasteful we find them, as we tinker with Earth’s living systems.  Let’s change that Cornish ditty to “For ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, we thank Thee!”

That old adage about curiosity killing the cat seems a ridiculous image for us scientists, supersaturated as we are with inquisitiveness about the natural world.  I loved the witty retort to this maxim by Chicago symbol Louis “Studs” Terkel who told an audience, “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”  As a species, we are naturally curious; and that curiosity is not Earth-bound.

In the aftermath of our 1969 extraterrestrial experience, what have we learned about our relationship with Earth, especially its rich biodiversity and its air, waters, and soils?  Have we learned to honor Earth as cradle and our only home?  Have we learned that life is sacred in all its wondrous diversity?  Have we learned that our species – all 6.7 billion of us – has gifts, collectively and individually, to make for a better world?

I asked these questions throughout the day on 21 July 2010 to numerous colleagues.  Most replied with nearly overwhelming pessimism or, worse yet, with conviction that we may be incapable of reform in our relationship with our ancient home planet.

I am, however, an unrelenting optimist.

As an ecologist, educator, and explorer, I believe that we can turn things around and conserve Earth’s resources sustainably for generations to come.  We gathered our abilities and resources as a nation in the 1960s to put a human on the Moon.  We can do this again to excel as stewards in an age of ecological crisis.

Sustainability is all about making decisions today that will not adversely affect the decisions of those who follow us tomorrow.  For example, is our national energy policy sustainable?  Are our lifestyles and life-choices sustainable?  Perhaps American essayist Henry David Thoreau summed it best by instructing us to “simplify, simplify, simplify.”  To simplify our lives is not just about sacrifice, but it does include an element of surrender for the greater good.

As an American, I’m very proud of our country’s work in space, especially of our role in the development of the international space station.  Arguably, we can point to 21 July 1969 as the alpha point for our outward push into the universe at large, like the early 19th-century Lewis and Clark expedition undertaken by the United States to the Pacific coast and back that laid much of the groundwork for our subsequent westward expansion.

I fully support the space station because of its incontrovertible benefits for monitoring Earth from above, but I cannot justify manned efforts to explore Mars and beyond – at least not at this time.  The costs will be astronomical and already threaten to divorce us powerfully from our home planet.  Our current global woes, including human-caused climate change and biodepletion, are compounding themselves daily and, consequently, loading the dice progressively toward a point of no return: perhaps as early as 2050.  Thus, we need to focus all our resources on solving the problems at hand.

Why this distinction between near and far exploration in space?  Since Earth is our home, we need to instill an absolute respect for it and all its biological richness in each and every man, woman, and child.  Near-space exploration can help us do that.  Further, just because we can go to Mars, should we go?  As a scientist, I am naturally curious about that remote environment; but perhaps we should take care of matters at home first before setting off physically for remote regions in the Solar System.

Thus, our choice is lunacy or enlightenment.  During this 41st anniversary of NASA’s lunar landing, particularly as we edge closer toward 2050, it’s incumbent upon us all to take our role as planetary stewards much more seriously than we have heretofore.  Since 1969, we’ve traveled to the Moon and launched satellites into deep space.  A wise maxim seems apropos: “Your journey home must begin by leaving it.”  We left Earth 41 years ago.  It’s time now to return home – to help heal our ailing planet.  Let 2050 be the start of a new Age of Enlightenment for humankind!

British poet and theologian Thomas Edward Brown called them “wretched bits of being.”  Lichens are unique in the world of vegetation because they’re not plants.  In fact, lichens are not a single entity, but a symbiotic association between a fungus and photosynthetic organisms like green algae or cyanobacteria.  Their evolutionary interrelationships are so successful that scientists have identified close to 14,000 “species” worldwide, of which about 3600 different types reside here in North America.  Lichens are found from the tropics to the poles, from coastlines to the peaks of mountains, and on every kind of surface imaginable including gravestones, monuments, the tops of leaves, and even insect wings – inexorably reducing the planet’s surfaces into their elemental components for later recycling.

Who can explain their bizarre symbiosis?  Though their components can be grown separately in the laboratory, they need each other to manifest their easily recognizable physical forms.  How they do this represents an important biological question that is relevant to scientific studies about cell transformation, including cancer research, thus making lichens a potentially significant research tool.

Globally, lichens have a rich and varied relationship with people.  Food, clothing, dyes, perfumes, medicines and poisons, models and decorations, and even an esoteric science called lichenometry (a method to date artifacts using established growth rates of lichens) represent some of their applications.  The most significant modern use of lichens, however, is the monitoring of environmental quality.  Varying from species to species, lichens are known to be extremely sensitive to air pollution.  Components of acid rain such as sulfuric and nitric acids as well as ozone, hydrocarbons, and metals affect lichens.  Thus, a “lichen desert” exists around a pollution source with pollution-tolerant species farther away and, still farther, a standard array of lichen biodiversity.  If you see lichens, then it’s a good bet that the air is pretty clean where you are.  Thus, they’re considered a good “indicator species” as we monitor environmental quality throughout our region.

In his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, the great land ethicist Aldo Leopold wrote famously: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”  When working in the field of conservation, who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?  Every sliver of Creation is important for the health of the planet: not just the so-called “sexy megafauna” like eagles and pandas, but also those diminutive, less glamorous species such as lichens.

What’s necessary at this point in our conservation efforts is what Field and Stream once called a “refined taste in natural objects.”  As Brown’s wretched bits of being, lichens can exact profound changes over time on their surroundings and, thus, deserve an inclusive refinement in our respect for the natural world.

Eleven human deaths.  Thirty species of birds and more than 400 species of other kinds of wildlife threatened.  At least 3 million gallons of oil, creating an oil slick that’s 130 miles long and 70 miles wide by 17 May 2010.  Nearly 600,000 gallons of an oil dispersant called Corexit to break it up.  Twelve thousand Louisiana residents who have filed for unemployment since the spill began.  As of 14 June 2010, the confirmed cost: $1.6 billion.

And one other nagging statistic: 30% of the nation’s oil production is derived from the Gulf of Mexico.

These numbers stand as unequivocal condemnation of BP, an oil company already found twice guilty of negligence here in the United States.  At its Texas refinery in 2005, a massive explosion occurred that killed 15 workers and injured 170 others; the company was fined $87 million for negligence.  Just a year later, BP was cited for leaking 4800 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and was fined another $20 million for ignoring opportunities to prevent the spill.  One can hardly imagine another antagonist in this story so uncaring, so removed, so profit-driven as this company: the corporate equivalent of the Marquis St. Evremonde in Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities.  BP is, perfectly, the image of the uncaring, even predatory aristocrat of the ancien regime “across the pond.”  Of course, I don’t think there’s any single multinational petroleum company with its hands clean; they all seem cast from the same nefarious mold.  A quick look across the globe, especially into remote areas of Amazonia, corroborates my umbrella condemnation of the entire lot wherever they haul out the Earth’s guts.

What especially concerns me about this oil spill is the volume of dispersant spread so dispassionately across the Gulf’s waters.  Recently, one toxicologist called dispersants “deodorized kerosene.”  EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco admitted in a recent conference that the effects of the dispersants are largely unknown.  At best, the chemicals seem an environmental tradeoff; at worst, their hoped-for “cure” could prove to be as lethal as the “disease” itself!  Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, asked why chemical dispersants used to break up the oil were not tested prior to the incident.  Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said at a hearing in May, “What I see is a company not prepared to address the worst-case scenario but a company that is flailing around, trying whatever [it thinks] of next.”  Would any of us administer an untested medicine to our children suffering from ill health?  Why then would we think it acceptable to apply such untested substances to an entire ecological system?

As an undergraduate at VA Tech, I completed an independent research project on petroleum pollution and waterfowl, specifically 6-week-old mallard ducklings, through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  I divided hundreds of animals into four groups: a control group confined for 8 hours in a trough of clean water, a second group confined to a trough of water with crude oil on its surface, a third to a trough with a mix of crude oil and Corexit dispersant, and a fourth to a trough with dispersant only.  When I had designed the study and sought approval, one of the on-site scientists informed me that it seemed an unnecessary waste of taxpayer money because the research had been completed long ago.  I retorted that the supposed studies, all published as multi-color, glossy handouts, were conducted by a USA-based petroleum corporation with no peer-review or independent confirmation.  When this same scientist observed my experimental results at the end of the day, he changed his attitude instantly, swallowed his pride, and helped to initiate a new phase of federal research on dispersants.  The outcome of my little study?  All control animals survived, all crude-oil animals survived, about half of the animals exposed to the oil-dispersant mix survived, and all dispersant animals died.  That’s right: 100% mortality for those mallards exposed solely to Corexit!  To be fair, I used an early version of Corexit no longer applied in the field.  It’s discouraging, however, that so many years later we’re still asking the same question: why weren’t these chemicals tested prior to their application in the Gulf of Mexico?

It’s almost enough for me to lose faith that we can EVER live sustainably with our ancient planet, especially its jaw-dropping, irreplaceable richness of species and ecosystems.  How many more warning signs do we need to reform our appetites for nonrenewable natural resources?  Three decades ago, we had the oil embargo.  Then Exxon Valdez.  Now BP.  And how about those horrific stories from the remote corners of the Earth where such companies too-often operate covertly without much public scrutiny?

It’s time that we all learned our lesson from the “Black Death” spreading across the Gulf of Mexico:  It’s an international failure of the highest order.  Let us always remember 20 April 2010 as a day of infamy for the Republic, the starting point of reform – real reform – in our nation’s energy policy as we move toward individual and collective sustainable solutions.  Enough is enough.

Broadly, their taxonomic group includes turkey vultures, black vultures, and relatives such as California and Andean condors.  In prehistoric times, there was even a giant condor in North America with a powerful bill and a wingspan of 17 feet.  That’s the length of a small-sized school bus!

All of them have a number of features in common: featherless heads and necks; long, broad wings; stiff tails; slightly hooked beaks; and clawed but weak feet.  Many of them also have the unusual habit of defecating on their legs to cool them evaporatively, a behavior called urohidrosis.  Storks do this, too, a point used by some ornithologists to suggest a close evolutionary relationship between these two groups.

The scientific name of their family is Cathartidae, a term derived from cathartes, a Greek word that translates roughly as “I purify.”  As scavengers, they gulp down carrion, fruit, eggs, and garbage like living, hissing vacuum cleaners for the natural world.  The turkey vulture has a highly developed sense of smell for detecting ethyl mercaptan, a characteristic but repugnant gas produced by the rotting flesh of dead animals.  Other species such as the black vulture have a weak sense of smell and so find their food by sight, but they’re often clued by the indicative behaviors of turkey vultures.  Regardless, the bald heads of vultures are a twofold adaptation for thermoregulation and for feeding on dead stuff.  As they stick their heads deep into decomposing carcasses, tissue and sinew will not get caught in feathers; and their naked skin can later be disinfected by sunlight.  Their ecological niche to purify the landscape is a blessing recognized by diverse cultures around the world, including ancient Egypt – the recent troubles of some farmers and residents in southwestern Virginia notwithstanding.

Years ago, I led a backpacking expedition along the Potomac River from its source in West Virginia’s panhandle to a point near its mouth into the Chesapeake Bay.  While in the Washington, DC area, our group camped by the river’s shoreline in Great Falls at the base of a well-known cliff.  While exploring the nooks and crannies of the rocky face, Melissa, one of my more precocious students, raised herself over a ledge and stared directly into the eyes of a turkey vulture chick.  She then learned intimately about one of its most effective defensive behaviors: with breathtaking accuracy, the surprised little bird – looking for all the world like a young turkey – disgorged its stomach contents on the face and shoulders of my student, just missing her eyes and mouth.  Can you imagine her bewilderment … and the stench?

Vulture stomach acid is exceptionally corrosive to allow them to digest putrid carcasses that might be infected with nasty strains of bacteria such as botulinum, cholera, and anthrax.  This adaptation also enables them to use their malodorous vomit as defensive projectiles when threatened.  After regaining her bearings, Melissa became ecstatic about the encounter and quickly labeled it a “bazooka barf.”  “I could even make out the remains of a liver and something that looked like a lung,” she exclaimed to our group.  Of course, we all went back to the spot of the attack and found reeking flesh all over the ledge.  The bird had run off to a distant spot and watched us from afar.  Later we departed with a renewed appreciation for all that vultures do for our planet.

The natural world is not always about lovely landscapes, heart-warming wildlife drama, and bouquets of pretty wildflowers.  The natural world is a 3.5-million-year-old web of life on Earth that doesn’t give a hoot about our sensitivities and predilections.  Vultures are just one of the principal fibers of that complex web with all its glorious diversity: 30 million different kinds of living things of which we humans are “E Pluribus Unum,” one out of many.  I purify.  That could be an aspiration for humankind as we attempt to countermand the far-reaching, relentless effects of our abuse of the planet’s resources.

It’s a member of the plant family, Anacardiaceae, that includes cashews, mangos, pistachios, and the gum mastic tree used in chewing gums and dental adhesives.  One of the commonalities of all these plants is the presence of that nasty allergen, urushiol.  All of them have it somewhere in their lovely plant bodies so they’re often peeled, roasted, or otherwise altered in the manufacture process to rid the product of this chemical.

Though it’s an important food for wildlife such as white-tailed deer, black bear, cottontail rabbits, game birds, and woodpeckers, most people – an estimated 85-90% of the human population – are highly susceptible to the skin irritant produced by poison ivy.  Even one billionth of a gram of the sticky, resin-like urushiol will trigger a skin reaction.  In fact, one-quarter ounce of the stuff would be enough to cause a rash for the entire human population on Earth!

Thus, we all need to recognize poison ivy in all its variations.  Various mnemonic rhymes describe its appearance to help us avoid the plant altogether:

• “Leaves of three, don’t touch me.”

• “Hairy vine, no friend of mine.”

• “Berries white, danger in sight.”

Urushiol remains active in poison ivy throughout the year, even in the dead of winter.  So beware!

And now for some scary news about Toxicodendron radicans.  Due to climate change, it’s spreading like wildfire.  New research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Duke University, and other organizations suggests that poison ivy is growing faster and producing more potent oil compared with earlier decades.  Apparently, rising ambient levels of carbon dioxide create ideal conditions for the plant, producing bigger leaves, faster growth, hardier plants, and an oil that’s even more irritating.  Studies have already found that a higher level of carbon dioxide doubled the growth rate of poison ivy, and it made for hardier plants that recovered more quickly from the ravages of grazing animals.  In other words, because of human-accelerated climate change, we’re inadvertently creating “super poison ivy” across its range in North America.

The naysayers about climate change have their heads in the sand.  Not only do we have incontrovertible, systemic evidence about the physical changes in the global atmosphere, but now we have ample biological indicators that point to the insidious, long-lasting consequences of poor land management and our maddening reliance on carbon-based industries and transportation.  These responses in poison ivy provide just a few indications that human-accelerated climate change is upon us.  Until we transition away from heavy deforestation and near-exclusive reliance on oil, coal, and natural gas, we will continue to see similar reactions in biodiversity across the planet’s living landscape.  There’s a hint of poison in the air that’s beginning to transform life itself.

If you like the idea of poison ivy becoming a super-organism, then turn your back on global climate change.  If you do not, then let’s demand a responsible energy policy for the nation that considers our grandchildren more highly than the quarterly stockholder statements for supercilious oil company executives and fickle politicians.

Last year, while a friend and I noticed the up-and-down animated flight of a bumblebee (a lumbering flight, it was) over a small plot of wildflowers, he informed me that “it’s impossible, you know, for a bumblebee to fly.”  I was astonished since we were both looking at a flying bee immediately in front of us.

I could not help but recall the much-touted whisper of Galileo, “And yet it moves,” when he was forced by the Inquisition to recant his belief in Copernican theory that the sun was the center of the solar system and then to accept the Church’s false claim that the Earth was unmoving.

And yet there it moved – our bumbling, buzzing bee.

It seems a silly question to ask in retrospect: aerodynamically speaking, is it impossible for the bumblebee to fly?  Somehow the question has embedded itself in folklore, like so many other myths (for example, frog urine causing warts, bats getting entangled in your hair, the daddy-longlegs spider having deadly venom, elephants fearing mice, and numerous others).

According to one account on-line, the story was initially circulated in German technical universities in the early 20th century as a dispute between physical scientists and life scientists.  For example, Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, once declared flippantly, “In science there is only physics.  All the rest is stamp collecting.”  That kind of assertion did not endear him to biologists and helped to initiate a long-lasting, agonizing dispute among scientists.  In response, biologists reveled at every opportunity to trounce their opponents.

Supposedly, during a wine-laden dinner, one biologist asked an aerodynamics expert about insect flight.  The aerodynamicist did a few calculations and found that bumblebees cannot generate enough lift to fly.  A bumblebee weighs nearly a gram, has a wing area of one square centimeter, and flies about one meter per second.  Thus, he replied, its wing area is too small in relation to its mass to provide enough lift at its flying speed.  The story then circulated far and wide about an inductive chasm between physical scientists and reality.  Once he sobered up, however, and reworked his equations, the aerodynamicist realized that the problem was a faulty analogy between bees and fixed-wing aircraft.

Bees’ wings are small relative to their body size and are built more like helicopters than like airplanes.  Rather than having an aerofoil shape to generate airflow over the upper wing surface, such as the wings of aircraft or birds, the flat wings of bumblebees are simply hinged like a door to flap up and down, generating just as much downthrust as they generate upthrust.  Bumblebees bring their wings together over the back so they clap, forcing out all the air between the wings to create a partial vacuum.  Atmospheric pressure then pushes air rapidly back into the void, flinging the wings apart and generating enough trailing edge turbulence to provide lift.

Bumblebees buzz because their wings clap!  The louder the noise, the better the vacuum and the more lift on the downstroke.  Further, the wings of bumblebees move faster than the firing rate of their nervous systems.  The thorax muscles that control wing movement do not expand or contract as much as they quiver when a nerve impulse fires.  Like a plucked guitar string, the stimulated muscle vibrates the wing up and down a few times until the next nerve impulse comes along.

Temperature regulation is critical to the flight of the bumblebee.  Apparently, bumblebees cannot fly if their muscle temperature drops below 30 degrees Celsius.  In bumblebee folklore, this little fact may have been extrapolated somehow to its supposedly impossible flight altogether.

Seeing is believing.  That idiom represents a core article of faith for us scientists as we use our senses and our instruments to reveal the secrets of the universe. Only physical or concrete evidence is acceptable.  Of course, “seen evidence” can sometimes be misinterpreted so we scientists also rely on repetition of results and peer review to construct our conclusions about natural phenomena.  The aerodynamicist in our story could see a flying bumblebee but then predicted its impossible flight through his faulty calculations and presumptions.  The biologist challenged, “And yet it moves.”  Healthy skepticism seems appropriate when confronting all societal myths as we piece together our understanding of the natural world and our roles in it.

During a recent ramble in a Roanoke City park, however, something happened that seriously challenged the sensibility of my second rule.  First, we nearly trampled a pink lady’s slipper orchid directly on a public footpath, the only one within sight.  Second, we were faced with the gut-wrenching decision about moving it to safety.

This native orchid is known in the scientific world as Cypripedium acaule.  It has two broad basal leaves from which emerges the flowering stem carrying a single magenta-colored pouched flower.  Typically, the plant grows in mixed hardwood forests in deep, well-drained soils here in the eastern United States and north into Canada.  Because of its obligatory fungal association needed for healthy growth, C. acaule is difficult to grow in gardens and is unlikely to survive attempts at transplantation.  You may find more information about this plant, including its distribution and select images, at http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=CYAC3.  Simply put, it is a queen among our numerous spring wildflowers.

What’s more, C. acaule is listed in Georgia as unusual, Illinois as endangered, New York as exploitably vulnerable, and Tennessee as commercially exploited and endangered.  In other words, throughout its native range, the pink lady’s slipper orchid is beginning to succumb to anthropogenic change.  Habitat fragmentation, along with indiscriminate collecting, has begun to leave its ugly mark on this lovely wildflower.

When discussing the ecological status of wild orchids, two pieces of legislation in the United States come to mind: the Lacey Act of 1900 (amended in 2008) and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.  The former is the first federal conservation law to protect wildlife; its 2008 amendment expanded its protection to include plants and plant products, including wild orchids.  The latter is an exemplary law to protect critically imperiled species from extinction, thereby acting as a model for similar laws across the planet.  On an international scale, to prevent illegal trafficking in endangered species, the USA and other countries are signatories of CITES, an acronym for the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna.  It affords varying degrees of protection to more than 33,000 species of plants and animals, wild lady slipper orchids among them.  CITES is enforced in the USA via its Endangered Species Act.  Contrary to some extreme viewpoints, such laws have proved essential to protect endangered or threatened species from exploitation.

So, for ecological and legal reasons, please do not pick native wildflowers on public land, leaving them for others to enjoy and allowing them to propagate in their natural settings.

Did we move that pink lady’s slipper orchid from the public trail?  No.  It is unlikely that it would have survived transplantation.  Aside from its ecology, however, remains the simple fact that wild orchids are provided varying levels of protection throughout their native range here in the United States and abroad.  Only with official permission (that includes all the incumbent scientific justifications) should one tamper with wild orchids on public lands.  Thus, we left it alone on the side of the trail with the hope that others will not harm it.  It was a tough decision, but the correct one for the plant.

It was also an important moment for my students who have spent the year learning about environmental conservation and stewardship of natural resources.  Wild flora and fauna are not provisions for human comfort and happiness.  They have their own intrinsic right to exist in the economy of nature … and deserve our protection for the generations who follow us.

Jack-in-the-pulpit has long fascinated naturalists, herbalists, botanists, and even artists.  Perhaps the most famous artistic depiction is Georgia O’Keefe’s oil-on-canvas portrayals that she painted in the 1930’s, sensuous renderings wherein O’Keefe believed that the most profound knowledge of the subject revealed its abstract form.

This native plant, also called Indian turnip, is unmistakable in our moist woods and bottomlands: an herbaceous perennial growing from a corm with trifoliate leaves and a flower contained in a spadix, or club, covered by a striped hood reminiscent of an old-fashioned pulpit.  Taken together, the spadix and hood supposedly look like a Sunday-morning preacher ready to deliver his sermon from his lofty podium to passersby.  To me, however, this other-worldly wildflower seems like a meeting place for woodland imps and naughty spirits.  Just a quick peek at its various names in folklore tells you that it’s held us spellbound for generations: Brown Dragon, Devil’s Ear, Dragonroot, and Memory Root.

Jack-in-the-pulpit blooms from April to June and is pollinated by gnats, flies, and mosquitoes attracted to its smell and heat, the production of which is typical of arums.  The fruit ripens in late summer and fall, turning from shiny green to bright red before the plant goes dormant.  Along with mayapples, trilliums, bluebells, bleeding heart, and Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit is a dramatic addition to our spring palette of wildflowers throughout the region.

Most folks do not know that Jack-in-the-pulpit has the extraordinary ability to change sexes from year to year, depending on its nutrition during the growing season.  If poor soil conditions, or if transplanted, then it will set male flower buds and one set of leaf buds.  If good soil conditions, it will produce female flower buds and an extra set of leaf buds, thereby increasing its ability to photosynthesize sugars and fortify its seeds with nutrients.  So one trifoliate leaf indicates a male flower and two trifoliate leaves indicate a female.  Perhaps then we should rename this wildflower as Jack-or-Jill-in the-pulpit!  Sexuality, it seems, is much more laissez-faire among the plant and animal kingdoms than our prudish tastes might otherwise prescribe for the economy of nature.

But who in the world was Jack?

I searched my botanical references and scoured on-line sources to no avail.  Then it dawned on me.  The name, Jack, is common in folklore: Jack-in-the-box, Jack o’lantern, Jack the giant slayer, Appalachia Jack, stingy Jack, even Jack Torrance in “The Shining.”  It’s a generic signal, if you will, for everyman.  First recorded in Europe in the 13th century, the name appeared in the United States in Virginia prior to 1800, signifying an ill-disciplined or mischievous young man, a trickster-hero often motivated by poverty, quick-witted, fussy, sometimes naïve, always successful.

So there’s Jack, standing in his pulpit, ready to wreck havoc on an unsuspecting world.  But what kind of mischief might he cause in this seeming innocent, even reverential, setting?

Let me draw your attention back to two other common names for Jack-in-the-pulpit: Dragonroot and Memory Root.  The first connotes fire.  The second portends something unforgettable.  Both are accurate descriptors of the horrific sensation you will have if somehow you eat the corm of this plant.  It’s a fire in your mouth that you will never forget!

Years ago, while standing in the middle of a West Virginia swamp, I was handed a large corm of Jack-in-the-pulpit by two so-called friends who raved about its exquisite flavor and then encouraged me to eat the darn thing … which I did promptly, completely, naively, regrettably.  Within moments, my mouth was under attack, thousands and thousands of tiny crystalline knives plunging into the moist lining of my cheeks and throat.  No matter how much spitting and gagging, I could not stop the fire in my mouth.  The pain continued for 5 or 10 minutes, eventually diminishing from an intense burning sensation to mild irritation and then to just a horrible memory.  My friends rolled with wicked laughter at my demise.

The chemical reaction in my mouth resulted from the water in my saliva mixing with crystals of calcium oxalate found in Jack-in-the-pulpit.  Even a small dose of calcium oxalate is enough to cause intense burning sensations.  In greater doses, however, these crystals can cause severe digestive upset, breathing difficulties, and even convulsions and death.  Recovery from oxalate poisoning is possible, but permanent liver and kidney damage may also have occurred.  Good grief, Charlie Brown!  It was a nefarious prank indeed that my friends played on me in that remote West Virginia swamp!

Its other name, Indian turnip, refers to its varied treatments by Native Americans for sore eyes, rheumatisms, bronchitis, snake bites and even sterility.  One account from the Meskwaki Indians, the “people of red earth” of Algonquian origin, maintains that they used the plant to poison the meats of their enemies.

No matter its usage by us humans, Jack-in-the-pulpit is an intriguing native plant with a long-standing mythology.  It also introduces a phantasmagoric beauty to our woodlands and swamps during the spring emergence of wildflowers.  Above all, it provides us with an important lesson about the natural world: like animals, plants have defenses to ward off their predators.  Let us all exercise caution when tempted to sample the emerging vernal banquet throughout the Roanoke Valley!

In 1935, American naturalist and author Donald Culross Peattie wrote An Almanac for Moderns in which he described the song of the wood thrush on 20 June: “Then it was that the thrush spoke to us out of the depths of the woods, a song inimitable by human syllables, but with the ring in it of old silver lightly dropped.”  Old silver lightly dropped.  What a breathtakingly accurate description of this bird’s unrivaled song!

When I was an undergraduate at VA TECH, my mentor John Trott and I had a friendly competition each spring about the first person to hear a singing wood thrush.  He lived in McLean on 13 acres of a thick mix of tulip poplar, white pine, oak, maple, spicebush, and holly with a little stream meandering through the property.  Though I lived much farther south in the Commonwealth than did John and his wife Lenore (and, thus, more likely to hear the bird first), John was an intrepid ornithologist and bird photographer who was often in the woods at the crack of dawn until late morning and then back out in the late afternoon until early evening.  Consequently, John often won the competition!

It was sometimes a near-spiritual struggle for me to be confined to class, listening to my economics or literature professor prate on and on about markets or a writing assignment, all the while knowing that the wood thrush was singing out its heart in nearby Jefferson National Forest.  That friendly competition between John and me endured for years until his sad death in 2000 and my move to Florida for a decade.  Wherever John’s spirit may be this spring, I’m sure he will note with inimitable and joyful accuracy the arrival of the wood thrush in Virginia, challenging Heaven’s angelic choirs to mimic its ensemble of flute-like phrases and guttural trills.

Here’s a poignant postscript, however, to my reference to John Trott.  Those 13 wooded acres where he and his wife lived in McLean are now gone, occupied by 12 McMansions on postage-stamp lots with hardly a trace of its previous avatar as a sanctuary for singing thrushes.  Imagine what angst these little neotropical migrants must have experienced when they returned that April to find uprooted trees, bare soil, and noisy bulldozers.  Given widespread habitat destruction throughout its winter range in Central America and its breeding range here in the United States, the wood thrush is often portrayed as a “poster child” for declining migratory bird species. According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the wood thrush has declined 1.8 percent per year since 1966 throughout its entire breeding range – more than a 70% decline here in Virginia since 1985!  I do not think that I’ll be able to walk confidently through our forests here in the Roanoke Valley unless I know they provide a safe haven for the wood thrush.

I will never hear the call of the passenger pigeon, globally extinct in 1914.  I will never hear the call of the presumably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker (though I did search for it vainly on an official American expedition into northeastern Cuba about eight years ago).  Will there come a time that I will never again hear the song of the wood thrush?  For me, such a travesty would bring down on our forests a winter-like pall that will forever haunt us for our poor stewardship of an ancient planet.

During the Civil Rights Movement, I was heartened by the collective voice of our various houses of worship to demand equality and justice for all our citizens.  Will those same houses of worship now speak out against our egocentric ruin of our country’s natural resources and instead promote wise conservation for the generations who will follow us?  The right to hear a singing wood thrush ought to be a right as inalienable as free speech.  It is truly the song of the American spirit flying wild in deep woods and swampy bottomlands.