An Afternoon with Organisms, Evolution, & Ecology

It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, and my car bounces along a dirt road. I’m on my way to the Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA), Grinnell College’s ecological field station, to join Professor of Biology Liz Queathem and the students in her section of Organisms, Evolution, and Ecology. Today, they’re surveying the oak and hickory forest on the property to identify the spring ephemeral wildflowers in bloom. Grinnellians have been coming to this forest to document spring ephemerals for over 100 years. For many, it has been and continues to be a favorite field exercise:

1:15 p.m. En route to CERA I see a red-tailed hawk swoop low over the road. The 252 students aren’t planning to birdwatch (not today, at least), but this is a nice nature encounter to kick off the afternoon.

1:21 I pull onto CERA’s winding gravel road and arrive at the Environmental Education Center (EEC). The prairie that surrounds me is just beginning to green up after a season of underground dormancy.

1:23 Two sprinter vans arrive at the field station and 23 Grinnellians in long pants and closed-toed shoes tumble out. I notice that I’m the only one wearing shorts … embarrassing.

1:25 In the EEC, students pore over maps of the property. They’ve been assigned specific plots in the forest to survey with their lab partners today.

1:29 “It’s a beautiful day to be out here,” Queathem announces to the room. “This time, we probably won’t have any tornadoes.” It seems like the bar for “good lab weather” might be quite low.

1:30 Mindy Sieck, biology technical assistant, runs the class through the protocol for the day. “Soil cores taken from these woods show that it’s been forested for about 1000 years,” she tells us. In a region as transformed by agriculture as Iowa, that’s a remarkably long-standing forest.

1:32 “117 years ago,” Sieck continues “Henry Conard started bringing students here to look at spring ephemerals. He and his students would take the train to Kellogg and then walk the rest of the way … more than three miles.” I’ll never complain about a commute again.

1:36 It’s time to head out to the forest. Students clamor to grab paint buckets filled with tape measurers, neon flags, and segments of PVC pipe.

1:37 “We want to wrap up by 3:05 so you have time to wash up for poison ivy,” Queathem announces, and I now understand why everyone wore pants.

1:40 A quarter mile or so of gravel road takes us to the edge of the forest. At the trailhead, students break into clusters around the botany experts who’ve joined us today.

1:42 “This is the gooseberry,” Stephanie Roush, Grinnell’s greenhouse manager, points. “And ooh! Here’s a violet!” She shows us a small yellow flower.

1:43 “Oh? But it’s yellow ….” Eva Cuevas ’25 says what we’re all thinking.

1:44 Roush explains that not all violets (Viola odorata) are violet in color and that they can be purple or yellow. Counterintuitive but also kind of cool.

1:45 “This flower that looks like an upside-down pair of pantaloons, those are Dutchman’s breeches,” Queathem points. Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). Now that name is apt.

1:47 “Wait, did you say these were Dutchman’s briefcase?”

1:49 Sieck kneels by a flower with spotted leaves — a trout lily. The spotted leaves are named for their resemblance to the speckling on the side of a trout, she explains.

1:52 After 10 minutes of careful observation of the forest floor, we’ve reached the post marking the first experimental plot.

1:53 Students head to their assigned plots, drop their buckets, and get to work. With two tape measures (staked into the ground via screwdriver) and a collection of flags, they begin to set up a grid of randomized points.

1:56 “20! 21! 4! And 11!” Oscar Angell ’25 shouts to his lab mate. She’s barely visible as she trails a tape measure over a ridge.

2:00 The forest looks like a crime scene right now, with students stalking through the brush and planting flags as though marking evidence.

2:05 Random coordinates marked, student assemble their PVC quadrants and begin the daunting task of identifying the spring ephemerals in the one-meter square at each point.

2:09 Kneeling on the forest floor, Henry Liu ’25 jots notes while his groupmates inventory the blooms in their quadrant. Queathem stops by to offer them some ID help: “Recognize this one? ‘Oh! Hans! I’ve gone and put my pants in the dike!’ … Dutchman’s breeches!”

2:22 The plant identifiers are starting to find their groove. Mostly. Sometimes their guidebooks don’t help much. “Is that one just … grass?” a student asks Roush. It’s not.

2:30 “This one that’s not cutleaf toothwort, I’m pretty sure it’s black snakeroot,” Cuevas says. “Slayyyyy,” her partner exhales in celebration.

2:40 A student is now barefoot. “I’m hot,” he offers by way of explanation. Alrighty.

2:41 I find a massive patch of violets that are indeed violet in color. Some order is restored to my world.

2:43 I am startled out of my wildflower reverie by a scream of, “Ahhh! Tick! Tick! Tick!!!” “What did it look like?” Queathem is on the case.

2:44 “It was red! Oh. You know what …? It might have been a beetle. My bad.” False alarm. Alarming, nonetheless.

2:47 Angell discovers a cluster of hard shelf mushrooms on the trunk of an oak tree. An impromptu fungi drum session breaks out.

2:50 Students have reached a steady and rapid rate of shoot identification: “We’ve got dogtooth violet, spring beauty, some donkey ear, liverwort … that’s it. Boom. Next!”

2:53 “Mayapple looks like a cocktail umbrella,” a student points out. And, you know what? He’s right.

3:04 We’ve been out in the forest for over an hour. As students finish up in their plots, they deconstruct their PVC quadrants and collect the blue and orange flags. The vista looks a bit less crime scene-esque.

3:10 On the walk out of the woods and back to the EEC, Roush reminds students of a wildflower walk to be hosted at CERA the following weekend. “If you go, you’re going to already know a bunch of the species.”

“Yeah, and we can intimidate everyone with our knowledge,” a student adds. Intimidation is, of course, the primary reason anyone studies wildflowers.