Loading...

Sauble Beach's endangered plants

Posted by bub on February 19, 2005 - 6:30pm


Awhile back, May(KeeMay) had posted a recipe , in which she had picked wild watercress growing along Sauble River.(I cannot seem to find the post)I did not know watercress grew wild anywhere in SBP at the time, in fact I thought watercress was something that surfers did out on the waves of Sauble. Then I found out, it was that stuff I always used to take off cucumber sandwiches when I was a kid. I can honestly say I have never knowingly tasted it, but then I have also not knowingly tasted a corn borer either, but I’m sure both are very nourishing. In fact, maybe its time to Take a weed to lunch It got me to thinking though, what other rare plants grow in our area. I came across some we see everyday, at the dunes. Namely the rare beach grasses

Then I came across some information on the VERY rare plant called the Tuberous Indian plantain, of which there are only 5000 plants at 13 known sites, Sauble Beach being one. Keep an eye out for this come Spring, you may be thinking you are killing a weed!

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Endangered flora

Submitted by sabrinus on February 21, 2005 - 5:36pm.

As a lifelong naturalist, I had to comment on this post bub! Thanks muchly for writing about our endangered plants.

There are a lot of rare and uncommon plants in Grey and Bruce. The Indian Plantain (Cacalia plantaginea) is listed as uncommon in Bruce County and very rare in Grey County. It is most commonly found along the Lake Huron shore between MacGregor Point to Dorcas Bay. It is most common at Oliphant.

Our Sauble dunes host a truly rare plant called the Hairy Puccoon (Lithospermum caroliniense). Known only from Chief's Point to Inverhuron, this plant is most prevalent within 2 km of the mouth of the Sauble River. Even in this small area it is considered very uncommon! I have personally photographed them in the dunes at North Sauble around 10th and Lakeshore.

Ginseng (Panax quinquefolieus) is also considered rare, and if you ever find any, tell no one. These plants are prized by certain unscrupulous factions and are decimated once located.

For those interested in learning more about our flora and fauna, the Owen Sound Field Naturalists produce fantastic books, one of which is entitled "Rare & Endangered Species of Grey and Bruce Counties". Visit OSFN for details. You can purchase all of their publications at the IDA in Wiarton or direct from OSFN.

I have always been puzzled by the apparent "who cares" attitude by locals who scream their snowmobiles all over the dunes, ripping up rare species and destroying many plant communities. There IS a bylaw that states NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES on the beach or dunes, but no one gives a damn. Not the so-called "Friends" of Sauble Beach, not the OPP, not Lyle Ransome the bylaw officer. Ignorance and selfishness has destroyed much of the original dune ecosystem, and we are well on our way to destroying what little remains...which brings me to this account, taken from OSFN's "Ferns of Grey and Bruce" guide:

"Most intriguing, and intermediate in date, is Schizaea pusilla, or Curly Grass, which was reported from the Sauble Beach area on Lake Huron in Bruce County in 1928 by Eugene Moxley, an Owen Sound resident who was a keen, and very knowledgeable, amateur bryologist and a member of the Sullivant Moss Society. Accounts vary as to what actually happened, but according to the annotation with the specimen in the herbarium in Toronto (TRT), the story goes something like this. In the spring of 1928, Moxley was asked by a botanist named McColl to collect some Selaginella selaginoides (a spikemoss) for him. He knew that this spikemoss grew in the wet swales between the sand dunes at Sauble Beach, but when he got there, he found that the ground was still frozen so he hacked out some lumps of soil and took them back home. When he thawed them out, he found not only the Selaginella but also a curious little plant consisting of wiry, curled, grass-like fronds with taller, erect structures looking in profile rather like toothbrushes. By July 1928, it was pressed and mounted, and he had identified it as Curly Grass, but when he proudly showed it to his botantical friends, no one believed he had found it at Sauble Beach. They said he must have mixed up his specimens with some from elsewhere. It was well known to be an Atlantic coastal species found only in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the New Jersey Pine Barrens where it grows in sandy or peaty depressions, in habitat similiar to that found at Sauble Beach.

Naturally, Moxley was very upset by the reception of his news so he packed up the specimens and put them away, refusing to discuss the matter further. Luckily, being a typical botanist, he did not throw them away. By coincidence, a management shuffle in the firm for which he worked caused him to move to Toronto very shortly thereafter, and he deliberately left his specimens behind in the attic of his house, where they remained until someone had a good clean out in 1945 and returned them to him. He promptly sent them to his friend Hubert H. Brown who believed his story implicitly and published an account in volume 35 of the Fern Journal. By then, development of the Sauble Beach area had taken place and the drainage patterns had changed. Exhaustive searching by knowledgeable botantists has failed to reveal any more specimens.

Prospective collectors commented on the similarity between Sauble Beach and the Pine Barrens. Atlantic coastal species, relicts of post-glacial lake shores and past climates, do occur not too far away in Muskoka. Aspidotis densa has been found in the mountains of the Gaspé Peninsula so it is possible, in both cases, that these were the last lingering remnants of much more extensive post-glacial distributions. On Hubert Brown's death Moxley's specimen, among other collections, was donated to the University of Toronto herbarium, now managed by the Royal Ontario Museum, where it may be seen to this day.

Note: A more detailed account by William G. Stewart, who was well acquainted with a close friend of Eugene Moxley, may be found in The Field Botantists of Ontario Newsletter, Volume 10(3), Fall 1997."

============================

"The Earth does not belong to Man.  Man belongs to the Earth.
Man does not weave the web of life.  He is merely a strand it it.
Whatever he does to the web,he does to himself."

Chief Seathl

I guess they ignored our plea..

Submitted by bub on February 25, 2005 - 11:32pm.

Before the winter, Gary and I had discussed this, amongst other things.In fact we would have solved all the worlds problems that night, but to implement it, we needed a third, and MIP was busy (
You can read that here

Sabrinus..could you share your pics?

Submitted by bub on February 24, 2005 - 11:28pm.

Could you share your hairy puccoon pic? You can post it free at
http://imageshack.us/, then put a link or insert an img src= (make sure the pic isnt TOO big .
Thanks

Catalog Pictorials of the SBP

Submitted by garym on February 25, 2005 - 3:12pm.

I never dreamed someone would ask for a photo of a hairy puccoon on one of my websites :) ... but this raises a very good issue for anyone who's a fan of anything SBP-ish and happens to find themselves sitting on a mound of great content and has the use of a scanner:

You can post 'em here, y'know.

It's not only OK, it's FAB. It's what this website is all about, telling our stories, sharing what we know about SBP, adding our own unique perspective into the mix.

And it's not totally simple, but it's relatively easy, easier than running your own complete website: Adding an item to the SBP is just a matter of choosing your topic categories and filling out the story form, and as Bub points out, you can use imageshack.us (who will graciously even give you the code to plunk into the SBP story-edit form) or use the Canadian photoblog flickr.com (where you'd have to drag and drop thumbnails into the SBP editor). Just post in a few words about what the photo is all about and there you have it, you're done!

What's more, I haven't mentioned this before, but the SBP website software does have the facility for members to create online books (with pretty-print PDF page production!) so if you post the plants you find and add a few words, we could conceivably compile those posts into a field-naturalist's guide to the dunes. Get yourself a photo-ready cellphone and hook into our mobile-posting stuff, and you could write your field guide live from the field.

Now how cool is that?

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever