William Dampier: Pirate Botanist

Piracy and botany are two words that do not usually occur together in a sentence. But in the golden days of exploration, seafaring men were not always vicious rogues intent on thievery. Well alright, a lot of them probably were. But one man among them combined piracy with a love of plants and that man was Captain William Dampier (1651-1715).

Although Charles Darwin is the naturalist usually associated with the Galapagos Islands, Dampier was actually the first Englishman to describe their flora and fauna. Unlike Darwin though, Dampier came to the islands as a deckhand on a stolen frigate! Dampier’s descriptions were often practical in nature, noting which trees could used to make fires (buttonwood!), and which plants and animals were edible. Sadly on the Galapagos, the edible animals turned out to be the extremely rare “land turtles” which sailors often brought on board their ships for fresh meat.

Later on Dampier’s voyages took him to the Indian Ocean where he was marooned by his crew near Sumatra. He eventually made it back to England where he published his memoirs in the 1697 book entitled “A New Voyage Round the World” which became an instant hit!

Dampier’s book was so popular that the British Admiralty gave him command of a ship, H.M.S. Roebuck. His mission was to sail to Western Australia to determine if it could be colonized, and collect some botanical specimens while there. Unfortunately Dampier’s ship was a bit of a lemon; it sank near the island of Ascension taking most of his precious dried plants and notes down with it. The 24 plant specimens he rescued were eventually donated to the Oxford University Herbarium where they still remain in a collections facility not unlike the one we have here at the Manitoba  Museum.

After a summer filled with ticks, mosquitoes and biting flies, I was ready for a pest-free pollinator survey at the Nature Conservancy preserves near Riding Mountain National Park this September. Autumn field work can be quite lovely with the beautiful fall colours, comfortable temperatures and migratory birds moving through. But you can’t always get what you want. The vicious thunderstorm that pelted my car with hazelnut-sized hail and forced me to pull over onto the side of the road just as I was leaving town forebode what was to come: crappy weather. I suppose that it was simply too much to ask for four weeks of rain-free field work this year though. I consider myself lucky to have had such nice weather in June, July and August.

After the relative calm of my June field work on Nature Conservancy land near Riding Mountain National Park, I was kept very busy observing insects in July and August. In total I saw approximately 64 insect species making over 1200 flower visits during my 24 hours of observation over an eight-day period. So far it seems that in the fescue prairie the bees (particularly the bumblebees) are doing most of the work. This is in contrast to the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve where flies are the most common flower visitors and Spruce Woods Provincial Park in which sand wasps are abundant pollinators.

Unfortunately, the pollinators weren’t the only hungry insects in the prairie; several of them were out for blood-MY blood! When I first got to the preserve, I had no idea what the mosquito situation would be like. I decided to wear my bug jacket and gloves just in case because if I didn’t need them, I could always take them off but if I needed them and didn’t have them, I’d end up doing the “I’ve-got-the-mosquito-willies-boogie” all afternoon. The gamble paid off. Shortly after reaching the hiking trail I was covered with a cloud of mosquitoes, black flies, and deer flies all trying to nip my flesh! Thank goodness for nylon field pants! After I got to one of my plots and stopped walking, several dragonflies noticed the insect buffet hovering around me and began dive bombing the blood suckers. Thank-you dragonflies!

The mosquitoes weren’t the only things biting in August; the plants were too! Mid-August is when the fruits of speargrass (Stipa spartea) ripen and fall off. Unfortunately they also have a habit of planting themselves in my socks and I had to stop every few minutes or so to pick them out! Ouch!

So why am I doing this? The purpose of my research is to identify which wild plants are most popular with pollinators so that appropriate seed mixes for restoration of fescue prairie can be identified. Restoring a prairie is expensive; by selecting a seed mix with the most popular flowers you can encourage the colonization of the maximum number of pollinator species, and hopefully create a more resilient ecosystem.

I’ll be back in the field in mid-September for one last pollinator survey. Is it too much to hope that the mosquitoes will be gone by then?

Last year I was able to attend a moss identification workshop given by Dr. Richard Caners. I had largely been ignoring the mosses because it is really hard to be good, all-around naturalist these days. My specialty is vascular plants. When I first started working here at the Museum, I had to learn how to identify fungi and lichens. Then I had to learn how to identify pollinators for my research (and trust me that’s not easy!). This year though I’m determined to collect and identify some mosses for an upcoming exhibit.

This July I spent several days hiking through the forests and rocky outcrops in Whiteshell Provincial Park. Although you’d think rocks would be devoid of life, there are all sorts of creatures making themselves at home on the granite outcrops out there. First the lichens show up, forming a thin crusty, coating. Then in the small cracks where there is a little bit more moisture, the mosses show up. Flowering plants like blueberries (which I thoroughly enjoyed eating!) then germinate in the moist, tiny pockets of soil that the lichens and mosses have created.

Instead of flowers, mosses produce tiny capsules that contain millions of spores. Some of these capsules explode, flinging the spores away from the parent plant; wind helps to disperse them further away. When I’m in the field looking at these unusual ecosystems I find myself wondering what it would look like if I were an insect. Suddenly these tiny plants would be huge trees with massive spiky leaves. Their intricate flying spores would be dangerous projectiles. Among the mosses there would be a stunning diversity of minute insects and bizarre animals like water bears, rotifers, and velvet worms. It would be like getting sucked into a Dr. Seuss book!

So if you’re planning on going hiking in the woods this summer, take a moment to look closely at the moss forests that you’ve probably never noticed before.

The highlight of the project was travelling to some of the remaining native prairies in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to film short videos with pollination biologists. One of the biggest problems with filming plants on the prairie is the unrelenting wind. Videographer Robert Zirk had to try to film flowers that kept flopping around, and insects that were getting blown off course. Further, the sound of the wind in the microphones sometimes made it difficult to hear what we were saying. Hauling equipment around in the brutal 30 degree heat during our trip to Spruce Woods Provincial Park wasn’t all that fun either.

Our worst luck occurred down at the Tall-grass Prairie Preserve where we very nearly missed the blooming of the rare Western Prairie Fringed Orchid. Although we did get some images of it, it was a very dry year and the poor little plants we found were looking a little parched! Fortunately, 2013 was a good year for another rare orchid we filmed a video on: Small White Lady’s-slipper.