On a hike in the Sonoma hills in the spring of 1993, Peter Connors was, as usual, ignoring the view for the wildflowers—when he spotted a lone purple-and-white clover that stopped him in his tracks.
Connors, who was then managing UC Davis’s Bodega Marine Reserve, had just spied the first living showy Indian clover (Trifolium amoenum) in 25 years.
He returned to the lonely flower with a chicken-wire cage, which he placed around it for protection, and came back daily until it produced seeds he could harvest. He mailed some to seed banks and researchers; others, he planted in his garden. By 1997, his rediscovery got the flower a spot on the federal endangered species list.
This year—27 years since it was listed—the clover is finally getting a recovery plan, along with two other endangered North Bay flowers, thanks to Inflation Reduction Act funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Draft plans for the showy Indian clover, Pitkin Marsh lily (Lilium pardalinum ssp. pitkinense), and yellow larkspur (Delphinium luteum) are all open for public comment through October 25. “It’s sort of a last-ditch moment for these [plants],” says Bruce Baldwin, the curator of the Jepson Herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.
This story is part of Wild Billions, a Bay Nature project exploring the impact of big federal money on Bay Area nature.
From left, a Pitkin marsh lily, on private property (Scott Yarger via iNaturalist, CC0); yellow larkspur at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Berkeley (Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0).
The recovery plans for the clover, lily, and larkspur open new fields of possibility for their survival. “It allows us to start dreaming bigger,” says Sarah Gordon, a conservation biologist with the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, a nonprofit working in the Laguna de Santa Rosa watershed.
The point of putting a species on the list is, of course, to get it off the list, by kickstarting recovery efforts. But for many endangered species to date, listing has been their final stop. Since the Endangered Species Act was enacted in 1973, only 78 species have been delisted by recovering; hundreds of others have been delisted by going extinct. Some 1,366 plants and animals are federally listed as endangered or threatened today, according to Fish and Wildlife data. And it’s especially hard being an endangered plant: an investigation last year from High Country News found 5 percent of listed species, mostly charismatic animals, were getting 80 percent of the endangered species funding. Eighty percent of the species—including many plants—got 5 percent of the remaining funding. Asked how much had been spent to date on these three flowers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Cal Robinson said it was a complex question that “could take months” to answer.
Right now, these species all live on the brink—often literally. Habitat loss has driven all three species out of their historic ranges; grazing animals and invasive species have restricted where they can survive even further. The clover survives today, in the wild, on a cliff by Dillon Beach, in populations (also discovered by Connors) clinging to a windswept, briny seaside perch. The Pitkin Marsh lily and yellow larkspur have hung on through similar combinations of luck and adaptation. The yellow larkspur, a delicate buttery flower with a parsnip-like root, may have been partially shielded, from both people and deer, by a thick stand of poison oak around its Bodega Bay home. Listed as endangered in 2000, its range likely once extended across coastal Marin and Sonoma. The tall, fiery red Pitkin Marsh lily, meanwhile, may have found refuge from the grazers that threaten it by growing within a native azalea, nestled in a marsh outside Sebastopol. Scientists believe it used to be more widely distributed across Sonoma County wetlands; it was federally listed in 1997.
Get Bay Nature’s Free Weekly Newsletter
Peter Connors examines seeds of showy Indian clover (Trifolium amoenum), an endangered species he rediscovered in 1993. (Tanvi Dutta Gupta)
With only a few locations left where each plant survives, any stroke of bad luck—from a herd of hungry deer to a parasite tracked in by someone’s boots—threatens total extinction. What is lost, when such specialized plants wink out? Millennia of evolutionary adaptations, Baldwin says, as well as every organism depending on the plant for survival, many of which have not even been described yet.
IRA’s $62.5 million in funding for endangered species nationally allowed the Fish and Wildlife Service to hire over 30 biologists for seven years to make a major dent in recovery planning for species in the Service’s backlog. Though people had already been pecking away at recovery plans for these three flowers, the new hires dramatically accelerated the laborious process. “It’s a new way of doing things here at the service,” says Caitlin Manley, one of the newly hired biologists.
Plant recovery plans are complex to produce. They must define what a non-endangered future could look like, often when we have only ever known the plants in a threatened state. Then, the biologists must figure out what—and how much money—it will take to get there. These assessments take years of collaborations between Service scientists and non-government partners, many of whom have already spent decades protecting the endangered species.
Sign up today!
But roadmapping recovery is only the first step in a long journey ahead. Putting the plans into action will require a lot of money that doesn’t exist yet. Each flower’s recovery is estimated to cost more than $10 million, mostly to buy the land needed to grow more populations. “It is going to take a lot of work,” says Summer Howland, a Service biologist who helped develop recovery plans for the lily and larkspur. While Fish and Wildlife will help partners find grants, the money and time will have to come from a patchwork of sources and organizations. Despite the challenges, conservationists are optimistic. The money needed for these flowers is a “drop” compared to predicted spending for other endangered species, says Gordon. Even at their most abundant, these flowers would never have been widespread spring spectacles. Recovery means just establishing a couple more populations. “With active partners, it’s very possible,” Howland says.
Gordon, one of those partners, has spent years working with the Milo Baker chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) on a shoestring budget to protect and monitor the Pitkin Marsh lily. One bright morning in September, she takes me walking through a Sonoma County backyard that just happens to be where the last lilies survive. We ignore barking dogs, wade through velvety knee-high grass, and pick around volunteer-pruned blackberry thickets before reaching a large cordoned-off shady area. Outside the fence, the sun beats down harshly; inside it, a tree the volunteers have nicknamed “the grandmother oak” watches over 90 percent of the world’s known remaining Pitkin Marsh lilies.
Left: Sarah Gordon picks through a private yard to a spot where Pitkin Marsh lilies are not only hanging on but increasing. Right: Pitkin Marsh lily seed heads in September; the lilies bloom in spring. (Tanvi Dutta Gupta)
In the black oak’s cool shade, Gordon, her colleagues at the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, and CNPS members have carefully stewarded this lily population to bloom from 20 individuals to the hundreds of chest-high flowers I now see swaying in the light breeze. They’re not blooming right now, but some of the closed seed heads are burnished pink—an echo of the brilliant blossom that spring will open. Because their protectors have kept out both invasive species and grazers, several other native species, including other rare ones, have sprouted over the years around these lilies.
Still, one errant wildfire would easily destroy this lily population. In Gordon’s most optimistic visions, she imagines four populations of lilies like this across marshes in Sonoma. For her, recovery is more than a number. “It’s an actual feeling,” she says. “When the lily is in this state, I’ll be able to sleep better at night.”
