Sundews In The Wild

Day 347: Today, I lived a naturalist's dream. Any of us who is seriously interested in native plants will have a list of rare species we long to find but hold little hope of discovering. Among the top five on my Elusives List was Round-leaved Sundew, Drosera rotundifolia. I thought some day I might make a trip to Oregon specifically to look for it since it occurs with greater frequency there, or to the Olympics where I know it has been reported. I did not expect to find it almost in my back yard.

Four new "paddle caches" (geocaches requiring a boat to reach) were published yesterday, all of them on Lake St. Clair near Yelm where I had been only a week or two ago. Since I had been planning to go for a paddle today anyway, I let my geocaching partner convince me to join him. We met at the lake at 9:30, found the caches (one of which was a First To Find for us) and then set off to do some exploring. Before we'd gone very far, his phone gave out the distinctive set of noises which told him that a new cache had been published locally. It turned out to be very local indeed! It was back up the way we'd just come down. With no other contenders on the lake at the time, the two of us paddled our 'yaks like maniacs, racing to claim a second and easy First To Find of the new release.

Dan was beginning to suspect that there might be another as-yet-unpublished cache somewhere in the northwest arm of the lake. His hunches are usually pretty good in that regard, so again moving north, we retraced our route, this time examining every stump, stick, overhanging branch, bit of rope or plastic or chain on the off chance that we could locate a cache without coordinates. It was during this minute examination process that I was working my way along a half-submerged log and discovered the Sundews. I'm sure my yell made Dan think I'd found a cache site, but if so, he concealed his disappointment and came abreast on the opposite side of the log so he could hold one end of my paddle while I hooked the other end under my knee, stabilizing the boat and freeing up my hands for photography. If the focus in this image isn't quite perfect, it was the best I could effect under the circumstances.

Discovery of one colony of Sundews led to another and another until over fifteen minutes, I had finally mapped the microenvironment at approximately 1.5 feet by five feet. The delicate and specialized little insect traps did not occur at any other location I examined. With five five-star caches in the bag, two of them First To Finds, I had my priorities straight whether they agreed with Dan's or not. I babbled happily all the way back to the boat launch: "I can't believe it! I found Sundews in the wild!"