Finding the Wicky

Field Notes: Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge, June 3, 2019

This is another day in which Peg and I have been volunteering at the refuge welcome desk. During a break I hiked the entrance road out to the highway. The 1.4-mile round trip offers the opportunity to engage in wildlife viewing, and I record any new observations and post them on the iNaturalist database to help build a growing list of refuge biota.

This morning I observed some plants not previously reported from the refuge. Not far from the main building I noticed a blossoming yucca, later tentatively identified it as a weak-leaf yucca (Yucca flaccida). Two kinds of yuccas might occur here, and I will have to wait for review by an expert before I am sure about this identification. Then I saw several plants with large white blossoms and purplish centers. I thought they were hibiscuses but couldn’t get a good photo. Next, I photographed an engaging little plant I later identified as a marsh pink (Sabatia stellaris). Moving on, not far from the trail I spotted two of the big-blossomed plants I was unable to photograph earlier. Scrambling through bushes and getting snagged by brambles, I was rewarded by an excellent photo of the plants later identified as pineland hibiscus (Hibiscus aculeatus).

 

Marsh pink (Sabatia stellaris), upper image, and pineland hibiscus (Hisbiscus aculeatus), lower image. Both are common wildflowers of pine flatwoods.

 Continuing along the trail, I noticed a tiny blossoming shrub. Using the camera in my iPhone, which is good at close-ups, and bending toward a cluster of blossoms near the ground, I took a couple of shots. Back indoors at the refuge’s reception area and out of the bright sunlight, I got a first look at my photos. The ones made of that last plant provided a hint of recognition. “I know that plant,” was my first thought. And “What is it doing here?” was my second.

 

The tiny shrub first observed on June 3, 2019 on the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge's Tram Ridge Trail. The cluster of flowers is less than knee high (about 20 cm) above the ground, and each blossom is less than a half inch (1 cm) across.

Putting a jumble of thoughts together it dawned on me that this little shrub was another new species for the refuge list. The blossoms were distinctive and familiar, and ‘mountain laurel’ immediately came to mind. Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) is a dramatic shrub I would expect to see on Appalachian mountainsides. The flowers of this new plant looked like mountain laurel, but it would be far out of place in our pine flatwoods. Nevertheless, the cup-like pale pink blossoms unmistakably said ‘mountain laurel’…or so I thought.

 

Stock image of the flowers of mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), a shrub commonly associated with Appalachian mountainsides.

Later consulting my guidebooks, I found that I was almost right. I easily identified the new little plant as Kalmia hirsuta, not the same species as mountain laurel, but in the same genus and in that sense a sibling.  As with many plants, this new one has multiple common names none of which is widely accepted as “correct.” It is sometimes called ‘Wicky,’ ‘Hairy Wicky,’ ‘Hairy Laurel,’ or ‘Sandhill Laurel.’ I regarded the wicky as the prize among the new plants I saw that day. Only later did it dawn on me that its distinctive flowers are tiny, and only a fraction of the size of those of mountain laurel. If the close-up hadn’t made them seem much larger in the photo than in life, I might not have made the connection. Regardless, finding a close relative of the familiar mountain laurel in pine flatwoods in the Florida peninsula was a surprise.

 

Flowers of the wicky, Kalmia hirsuta. Compare them with those of mountain laurel in the previous image. The close resemblance may be easy to miss because flowers of the wicky are many times smaller than those of mountain laurel and the low-growing plant tends to be much less conspicuous.

Another connection made discovery of the wicky intriguing. I was engaged in some informal research concerning the resemblance of landscapes of the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State to those of the far north. Northern boreal (i.e. spruce-fir) forests circle the globe at high latitudes, and extend into parts of northeastern North America in only a few places, including the Adirondacks Two kinds of laurels may offer clues. Sheep laurel (Kalmia angustifolia) also known as ‘sheep kill’ because its foliage is poisonous to livestock) occurs in boggy areas in northeastern North America. Bog laurel (Kalmia polifolia) is a true northern species that occurs across Canada and a few northernmost parts of the United States and is regarded as an indicator of boreal forests.

After discovering the wicky, I wondered what southern pine flatwoods, Appalachian mountainsides, northeastern bogs, and boreal forests have in common that makes them attractive to this group of relatives in the genus Kalmia. The wicky and bog laurel seemed almost like bookends, anchoring the southern and northern North American limits of the laurel family.

The laurels are members of a large family of shrubs and small trees known as heaths (Family Ericaceae) that includes blueberries, huckleberries, staggerbushes, rhododendrons, azaleas, and others. Some of these are common across broad swatches of the east, others are restricted to certain habitats. In the north, at least, they are often found in boggy places.

So, how to explain the varied climates and landscapes that are attractive to the laurels and their relatives?  It didn’t take much research to dig up some clues. Heaths, including the species of Kalmia that drew my immediate attention are known to specialize in soils poor in nutrients. They have symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi in their roots which help to extract nutrients from poor soils and make them available to the plants which would otherwise be unable to absorb them. Nutrients in the soil are scarce in areas of the far north and in bogs where it is too cold or too wet, and slow to decompose dead materials become tied up as peat. They are also acidic, resulting in double jeopardy because acid soils make it difficult for plants to take up any free nutrients that might be present. Appalachian mountainsides may similarly be acidic and poor in nutrients owing to thin soils leached of nutrients by flowing water. Southern pine flatwoods and sand hills often have acidic soils and abundant rainfall may leach nutrients from them.

Before my discovery of the wicky deep in the south, I remained under the impression that heaths are primarily specialists of bogs and northern landscapes. I was aware that blueberries, staggerbushes, and other heaths are common in Florida flatwoods, sandhills, and scrub, but only after discovery of the wicky did it dawn on me that these plants are no less at home in these southern landscapes than they are in northern bogs. Their importance in flatwoods was underlined a week after discovery the wicky when I found one more interesting heath. Tarflower (Bejaria racemosa) is yet another common shrub of flatwoods. Named for its showy sticky flowers that trap insects, it has been speculated that the remains of ensnared insects fall to the ground and help the plants by releasing nutrients from their decomposing remains.

So, boreal forests, peat bogs, Appalachian mountainsides, and pine flatwoods are separated by latitude and topography and seem to have little in common. Nevertheless, they share challenging soils in which the Kalmias and other heaths, including blueberries, huckleberries, tarflower, and others can thrive.

 

Traces of the Ancients in the Lower Suwannee Region Part IV. Shell Mound: Ecology

 Our Shell Mound and others in the southeast are significant archaeological features, and they also have created biological environments unlike any others on our coastlines. And it seems likely that the Ancient people who built them and relied directly on nature and its bounty understood the values of these new environmental features.

 On an early visit to Shell Mound, I spotted a curious looking small tree with large, vaguely walnut-like compound leaves with long, dark green crenelated leaflets, I identified it as soapberry, Sapindus saponaria.  Found on shell mounds, among other habitats, an extract of its fruits has soap-like qualities useful as a cleansing agent. Later I learned that their soapy extract is a potent fish toxin (but harmless to people), and various cultures have used this quality in related plants to capture fish. People washing clothes along the shore might have discovered paralyzed fishes floating on the surface nearby. We’ll probably never know if Shell Mound’s people discovered this use, but the thought is tantalizing.  And might ancient inhabitants having learned of this, carried the plants from one occupied site to another?

 

Soapberry tree on Shell Mound, showing the berries that contain a substance that is a natural detergent and also a potent fish toxin.

By 2018 a new set of interpretive panels was being developed by Dr. Sassaman and his students to tell the recently unraveled and much richer story of Shell Mound. A rerouted trail with signs points out significant sites, taking visitors through the process of discovery. A long section of trail had no signs to inform visitors and seemed to be a good opportunity to include a panel telling of the unique vegetation. I took on the task of developing the vegetation panel.

Originally identified as saffron plum (Sideroxylon celastrinum), this plant is probably instead an individual of its common relative, gum bully (S. lanuginosum).

Snowberry (Chiococca alba) is a low-growing, almost vine-like shrub that specializes in shell mounds. I looked for the iconic saffron plum (Sideroxylon celastrinum) and didn’t find it, but the related gum bully (S.  lanuginosum) is much in evidence, and clearly is adapted to the conditions provided by Shell Mound. Summer grape (Vitis aestivalis) thrives on the mound. Two kinds of cacti with edible fruits were discovered including the shell mound cactus (Opuntia stricta) and the common and widespread devil’s-tongue (O. humifusa). Collaborator Collete Jacono and I discovered Florida swampprivet (Forestiera segregata), another species commonly found on shell mounds. Climbing buckthorn (Sageretia minutiflora), a plant frequent on shell mounds in the southeast may have been used for its rattan-like vines. Many common and widespread plants occur on Shell Mound, but a significant subset of these same plants do not occur in adjacent habitats or in any place close to the edge of the Gulf.

 

Summer grape (upper image) and a cactus (Genus Opuntia--lower image) on Shell Mound. Grapes are uncommon in most of the coastal habitats surrounding the mound, and the fruits of cacti are edible. Together with grapes, they provide a source of sugary food rarely found in coastal regions.

Red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) was of interest because it is abundant on Shell Mound, was used by Native Americans, and became important in the economic development of the area after the arrival of Europeans. Red cedars occur from southern Canada throughout eastern North America and invade tall grass prairies in Kansas and Nebraska. Growing in abandoned fields, on the edges of fresh- and saltwater marshes, and in waste places, they tolerate droughts, floods, and occasional saltwater inundation. In few places are they as abundant as in the Cedar Keys, however, and pencil manufacturers in New York City turned to the Cedar Keys to supply red cedar wood for their product because of their unusual abundance on the islands and adjacent mainland. Thriving in well-drained neutral or alkaline soils, they are vulnerable to fire, and Florida habitats least prone to fires are islands and shell mounds.

This redcedar near the pinnacle of Shell Mound may be hundreds of years old. As with many plants that are intolerant of shade, leaves comprising the thin canopy are clustered near the top.

Location, topography, and vegetation all interact to make Shell Mound practically invulnerable to fire and a safer site for a village than any nearby locations. This and other factors probably made Shell Mound an attractive place to live and to visit for hundreds of years. It protected residents from floods and fires, its elevation provided protection from winter winds and summer heat, and its thick mantle of vegetation provided deeper shade than anywhere else along the coastline. It may also have served as a kind of garden, supporting the growth of useful plants like red cedar, soapberry, climbing buckthorn, shell mound cactus, and surely other plants whose uses we do not know. Some of the plants on Shell Mound may occur there now simply because they benefit from its growing conditions, or their arrival may have resulted from actions of people, who modified and improved their environment by carrying useful plants from site to site.

It is also possible that the biological community supported by Shell Mound may have affected the people who built it in ways that encouraged them to enlarge the mound. They may have been motivated to continue building once they realized the role of Shell Mound in supporting useful plants.

Traces of the Ancients in the Lower Suwannee Region Part III. Shell Mound: The Story

 

Enter Dr. Ken Sassaman and his students from the University of Florida’s Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology. Shell Mound became a subject of intense study in 2013. To learn the detailed story about Shell Mound, visit the site and follow the marked trail that explains the significance of the mound to ancient peoples. Accounts of the story are also available on the Friends of Refuges website, the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology website, and in various writings by Dr. Sassaman. The following only touches on some of the highlights.

  

Initial findings indicated that the mound was not seriously altered by removal of shells for road construction as formerly believed, but instead was purposefully built amphitheater-like, with a rounded level spot open on one side that Sassaman calls “the plaza.” The crescent-shaped mound was more than a simple refuse heap, and multiple lines of evidence indicate that not only was it deliberately built, but at one time was partially rebuilt.

 

 

Schematic of Shell Mound developed to orient visitors to the walking tour. The stippled areas are open water or salt marsh, the white area is part of a large sand dune, and the crescent shaped mound is shaded light gray. The open area on the southeast (lower right) part of the mound was previously thought to have resulted from removal of shell for road building.

What I thought looked like a causeway was the arm of an ancient sand dune. Strong prevailing winds during the ice ages produced massive parabolic (U-shaped) dunes, orienting the arms of the “U” in southwest to northeast directions. Shell Mound is at the tip of one of those dune arms, which is aligned with Palmetto Mound, the island site of the ancient cemetery.

 

Google Earth image of Shell Mound (lower left) and the "causeway" leading to it. Although the mound is obscured by vegetation, the "plaza" is seen as an open area. A small part of Hog Island, site of Palmetto Mound, is seen at the far left, partially covered by the label for the observation deck.

 

The alignment of Shell Mound, the archaeologists realized, has cosmological significance. From there the sun is seen setting behind the cemetery on Hog Island's Palmetto Mound on the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year and rising toward the landward origin of the dune arm on the summer solstice—the longest day of the year. Ancient southeastern Native American cultures drew spiritual strength from remains of their ancestors, and saw the movement of the sun at the winter solstice as its symbolic entry into the underworld where their ancestors dwelt, and the summer solstice as its reentry into the world of the living. The march of the changing seasons as seen from Shell Mound mirrored the progression of the years and connected the generations.

 

 

Shell Mound, December 21, 2018. The sun is seen setting behind Hog Island, site of the cemetery on Palmetto Mound on a cloudy and cold Winter Solstice.

Excavations revealed that Shell Mound served as a gathering place for pilgrims from throughout Florida and the southeast. Visitors celebrated the summer solstice when the sun emerged from the underworld and began its arc toward the cemetery on Palmetto Mound, symbolizing and sustaining connections between the living and the dead. This world view may be related to the Day of the Dead celebrations persisting in Mexico and Central America, said to stem from adaptation of a traditional Mayan summer festival to coincide with the Christian All Souls Day.

 

Sunrise seen from Shell Mound on Summer Solstice, June 21, 2020. The camera is looking northeast, back toward the origin of the dune arm.

Investigations showed that Shell Mound is much younger than formerly believed, having been completed only a few hundred years before the arrival of Europeans. The village was inhabited for less than 1,000 years by at most a few hundred people at a time, and abandoned about 650 A.D. Burials at Palmetto Mound continued until about 1,300 A.D., and materials from the cemetery have been dated as early as 500 B.C., a full 1,800 years earlier. Evidence that some burials in the area have been moved and reburied suggests that environmental events, including sea level fluctuations, caused people to move the relics of their ancestors to protect them from inundation and loss to the sea. Conceivably some sites were abandoned when inundated by rising seas, and re-occupied when the shoreline advanced or retreated.

 

We know little about the occupants of Shell Mound, and without the work of Dr. Sassaman and his students, we would know only that they left behind a huge pile of discarded shells. Questions often asked by visitors (What was their name—what tribe lived here? What did they look like? Where are they today?) have no informed answers. They must have had a name for themselves, they probably looked much like the Native Americas first encountered and described by Europeans, and although extinct as a people, some of their genes may persist in people alive today. More revealing information is now forever lost.