In the 70s, when Rufino Osorio was just a teenager, he used to take the Montrose Avenue bus west out to the Des Plaines River. He would scout the woodland openings for remnants of the vast prairie that once spread out there, before O’Hare and Woodfield and Morton Grove existed. That is what Osorio liked to do, comb the groves for native plants and grasses, newts and foxes. On one of these searches he found an isolated colony of orchids, lovely, creamy white, showy things raising up their stalks in a sun-spattered opening. Later he called the Audubon Society, told them about his discovery, and asked if they couldn’t help protect it.
Part of the problem was that P. leucophaea was having a hard time finding its pollinator, moths of the Sphingidaea, or hawkmoth, family. (I wrote about one member of that family last month, Manduca quinquemaculata, the common tomato hornworm.) The hawkmoths have evolved in intimate association with orchids. Their long proboscis and powerful flight muscles allow them to hover before the blossom and reach down into the long orchid column for a sweet dollop of nectar. The proboscis comes out with the orchid’s pollen-bearing organs, the pollinia, attached, ready to dust the next blossom. Shrinking prairie habitat had reduced populations of both species to the point where they weren’t accomplishing the rendezvous, and most P. leucophaea plants were failing to produce seed.
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By 1989 the plant qualified for federal protected status as a threatened species. Under the federal law a recovery plan was required, and it was subsequently written by Bowles and approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is being implemented under a small grant to the Volunteer Stewardship Network, a statewide initiative of the Nature Conservancy modeled on the North Branch Prairie Project. Packard, now science director at the Nature Conservancy, and Laurel Ross, northern Illinois field representative, have organized a band of human hawkmoths to hand-pollinate the blossoms, collect and broadcast seed, gather data, and survey sites for new plants and old colonies. The plan aims to bolster existing orchid population numbers through the techniques described above; to establish new colonies on the basis of Packard’s successful efforts; to protect privately owned sites that are subject to the vagaries of economic pressure and land use; and to initiate ecological management at selected sites: brush removal, weed management, and controlled burning to maintain habitat that will support the species.
These not-too-shabby accomplishments were reported in the July 1993 issue of Science, the journal of the American Academy of Sciences.
“Packard’s work is a case in point. It is well documented and reflects not only meticulous attention to the outcome of innumerable experiments but also a close relationship with large numbers of projects carried out under a variety of conditions and over considerable periods of time.
In August, as you stand in the prairie on a sunshiny day, especially after a rain, a scent rises up from the ground warm and sweet as your lover’s breath, mountain mint and yarrow. In those prairie openings people like Rufino Osorio and plants like the prairie fringed orchid find open ground to take root and thrive. Prairie restoration is not only about plants and butterflies and coyotes. People are being restored there, too.
