Summer 1999

Beauty and the Beast
Orchid photo by Casey Galvin. Photo of Wolf Road Prairie in Westchester, Ill. by Todd A. Bannor. Words by Stephen Packard.

Sometimes rare insects eat rare flowers. Naughty bold trees may shade out defenseless rare grasses. Sometimes the fires that revive the prairies kill rare snakes.

The photo of Wolf Road Prairie shows the area at sunrise — in more ways than one. A girdled dead tree marks the spot where an ancient ecosystem, recently dying of shade, is happily growing its way back to health.

The photo of the orchid shows a different drama: grass pink and a katydid eating it. The rare grass pink (Calapogon) is our only "upside down" orchid. (You'll notice that, unlike most orchids, the fancy petal is on the top.) A katydid is enjoying the flower buds, at least its favorite parts of them.

Most orchids are rather rare. Never are they, like grass or oaks, the dominant vegetation. If certain types of plants do too well, then their consumers do too well. They eat the plants massively, and the population crashes. Some species can only prosper as relative rarities. Yet not too rare. When the population gets a bit too small, its genetic diversity (and with it the population or species) flickers out. Thus, populations need a certain tippy balance. That means, in many cases, they need large habitats — or many interconnected small ones. That's the only way that low-frequency species can sustain sufficiently many individuals to maintain their gene pools.

Thus, invading common trees — though they may kill off only a portion of a fen — may doom some of the low-frequency animal and plant species that have lived there for millennia. As the habitat shrinks, some species drop below sustainable numbers. One solution is to cut trees and herbicide stumps. But, killing a tree by girdling (removing a strip of bark) leaves a standing snag which ends up being recycled multiple times. Like the twin trunks at Wolf Road, snags first serve as home for varied woodpeckers, crested flycatchers, eastern bluebirds, deer mice, beetles, and mushrooms, in fact, an uncountably long list of temporary tenants. Years later, the fallen trunk hosts a different menagerie. And when the old log ultimately burns, it prepares the way for rare fugitive plant (and probably animal) species that live in the brief habitat of char. Ancient ecosystems have diverse niches, which is why the biodiversity of those systems depends on the ancient processes (like fire, grazing, predation, flood) that maintained all those niches.

Thus, the stark silhouette of a burned or girdled tree evokes a profound idea. Without the harshness of consumption, predation, fire, and disease, we would not have the juicy richness of nature.

In the new discipline of the stewardship of creation, people learn to re-start natural processes, or provide substitutes for them. We plant precious seeds and carefully tend fires. We reverently nibble at the bark of selected trees as destructively as a katydid nibbles at orchids. Like hunter-gatherers, stewards become a force within nature. When we successfully restore balance, we celebrate the countless species of ancient systems that we have discovered are our friends and neighbors.

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