Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service no longer categorizes the Ute ladies' tresses orchid as endangered. The story has been updated to reflect that the service still considers the flower endangered, but recommended removing it from the list.
Every August, volunteers at the Mendon Meadow Preserve count and record the current number of Ute ladies' tresses orchids, a flower listed by the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service as threatened.
Mark Brunson, the science director at the Canyonlands Research Center, has a Pioneer Day tradition that’s probably a little different from yours.
“My wife and I, our Pioneer Day tradition is we come out here and we look for orchids, because we know that's the earliest that they could possibly be blooming. And this year we found two,” Brunson says.
These orchids are called the Ute ladies’ tresses and, just last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended delisting the flower in its 5-year review. Volunteers have now counted around 80 flowers blooming on the Mendon Meadow Preserve so far, and will continue searching the area until the end of the month.
“It's a beautiful part of the valley. It's largely agricultural, and it was one of the first communities established in Cache Valley back in kind of the late 1800s,” says Gabe Murray, director of the Bear River Land Conservancy.
In 2013, the organization purchased about 30 acres of this land after discovering several of these orchids growing on the property.
Every year since the property was purchased, volunteers come out once a week in August to scour the meadow in search of the flowers. Logan Kanigan is one of those volunteers, and this is his first year hunting for orchids at the preserve.
“You have to slowly search to make sure you're not stepping on any of the flowers,” Kanigan explains.
He points to a small plant sprouting out of the grass. It’s about eight inches tall and has just over a dozen white flowers spiraling upwards around a singular stalk. This plant would be easy to miss in the tall grass. Kanigan takes one of his stakes and drives it into the ground right next to the flower.
“You plant stakes with little ribbons on them to identify where all the flowers are," he says. "That way you can see where they're clustered, because those areas tend to be where more of them are going to be. And it also just makes it easier to count later on.”
Each stake planted by a volunteer is carefully counted by the Bear River Land Conservancy and its GPS point is mapped to keep track of where the orchids are growing. This process is also helpful in monitoring how the plant population ebbs and flows from year to year.
Last year, volunteers counted 1,424 of the Ute ladies’ tresses, according to data from the Bear River Land Conservancy. This was a huge increase from the only 64 flowers that were found the previous year.
But Brunson says this is fairly common. The count tends to vary wildly from year to year, and one of the goals of the preserve is to find out why exactly that is.
Despite the varying count, a study committee with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife services recommended that the orchid be removed from the threatened species list, stating that the plant was now both common enough and protected enough to no longer be at risk of extinction.
But Brunson is still recruiting volunteers to help keep track of the orchid.
“There are surely places in this valley where this plant is growing, but we don't know about it,” he explains.
He encourages Utahns to keep an eye out for the evasive flower and says there are many ways to report a sighting.
“The best place would be to tell either the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," Brunson says. "Or they could tell the Bear River Land Conservancy, and we'd make sure that the right people found out.”
Brunson says that the best time to spot the Ute Ladies’ Tresses is in mid-August when the flower is at its peak bloom.
