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<img src=http://www.toledoblade.com/assets/jpg/TO66067417.JPG> <b><font color=red>VIEW FULL PAGE:</b></font color=red> <a href="/assets/pdf/TO73083728.PDF" target="_blank "><b>Wild Orchids:Like hunting for a needle in a haystack</b></a> July 25, 2010
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Wild orchids: Like hunting for a needle in a haystack

Wild orchids: Like hunting for a needle in a haystack

When local naturalist Eric Durbin goes hunting, he stuffs his pockets with a small GPS unit, a mini-camera, and mosquito repellent, but takes no license.

For he is hunting orchids, and his hunting grounds are the preserves of the rich and rare Oak Openings region of western Lucas County. It is a hotbed for wild orchids.

“I have found records of 28 species, some of which may be bogus, some of which are extirpated,” says Mr. Durbin, a well-known and respected member of the Toledo Naturalists' Association. He kids about his somewhat esoteric pursuit.

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“It took me 30 years to be recognized as an expert in birding. I became an orchid expert in three weeks.” That is because few individuals take the time, or have the patience, for the tedious detail of tracking down orchids.

Mr. Durbin differentiates “monitoring” orchids — checking known sites — from “hunting” them, in which he says you can exhaust hours and hours in boring searching in hopes of mere seconds of elation at a find. In that, he adds, it is something like hunting deer.

Orchids, like money, just do not grow on trees. They are fussy about where they want to live, inhabiting micro-habitats with micro-climates.

The field work is challenging, if pleasant, to say the least. For one thing, wild orchids are hardly cooperative. Over time a patch of several plants may be shaded out, or they simply may go dormant and seemingly disappear, only to return in force later, maybe years later, “often after a disturbance.” The latter can be anything from cutting to burning the landscape.

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On a recent field trip at Lou Campbell State Nature Preserve, he summed it up well: “There are a lot of mosquitoes out here, a lot of water out here, and not many orchids.” Bring rubber boots.

Mr. Durbin inherited his interest in questing for wild orchids from the late icon of area naturalists, Lou Campbell, for whom the preserve is named. Mr. Campbell, well into his 90s, turned over his orchid files to Mr. Durbin in the early 1990s. The files included a 1975 article in the TNA yearbook by naturalist Jeanne Hawkins, who listed 21 species.

The Hawkins writings served as a basis for Mr. Durbin to begin, and his own list now stretches beyond those 35-year-old records. He has reconfirmed 20 species, considers as good the records of five other species, and the records of three more as “up in the air.”

The orchid hunter notes that “besides the field work you have to do the research.” And that means painstakingly poring over pages of old records.

“Most people don't even realize we have wild orchids growing in Ohio,” said Greg Schneider, manager of the state biodiversity database for the Ohio Division of Wildlife. Typically “orchids” are thought of only as the larger, showy tropical flowering plants that gardeners sometimes try to cultivate, or which end up on prom or wedding corsages. The individual flowers of some wild orchids can seem lost resting on a thumbnail.

The database includes just 47 species statewide, so Mr. Durbin's Oak Openings records reflect the tremendous variety of the habitats there, Mr. Schneider said. Indeed, the oak savannas of the Openings have been declared globally rare.

“Most of our native orchids do very poorly in cultivation,” said Mr. Schneider. “That's why we really frown on people digging them up and trying to grow them at home. It's unethical, in some cases illegal, and most of all, futile.”

Orchids can be found from April into November, but only five or six species may be in bloom at any given time.

“Orchids are rare enough and hard enough to find,” Mr. Durbin said. “So you look for indicator plants that might be a good spot to look for orchids.” The colic root, for instance, shares habitat with the state endangered grass pink orchid.

The grass pink is one of the reasons that the Lou Campbell Preserve was designated, Mr. Durbin said. Its 210 acres encompasses wet meadows, one of the least preserved of habitats. “[Grass pinks] are here and at Kitty Todd Preserve [owned by The Nature Conservancy], and that's it. They used to be all over the Oak Openings and in any railroad ditch.”

But, whipsawed by drainage and development, grass pink numbers have plunged since the 1980s.

Perhaps grass pinks have just pulled one of those orchid disappearing acts and will reappear in force some day. Till then Mr. Durbin will just keep hunting.

Contact Steve Pollick at:

spollick@theblade.com

or 419-724-6068.

First Published July 28, 2010, 5:27 p.m.

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<img src=http://www.toledoblade.com/assets/jpg/TO66067417.JPG> <b><font color=red>VIEW FULL PAGE:</b></font color=red> <a href="/assets/pdf/TO73083728.PDF" target="_blank "><b>Wild Orchids:Like hunting for a needle in a haystack</b></a> July 25, 2010
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