“I am constantly surprised and enthralled by nature’s unending ability to amaze. This summer, I am interning at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut, where my work is specifically focused on the Ecotype Project, an initiative working to create sources of truly local native wildflowers in Ecoregion 59 by sustainably harvesting and growing wild-collected seed. Ever since I first learned of the Ecotype Project back in my senior year of high school, I have been absolutely dedicated to native plants and pollinators. They are my passion. This internship has provided me with the opportunity to delve deeper into that passion by learning from the best. My task is to meet and interview many of the key stakeholders (farmers, nurserymen, botanists, non-profit organizations) that are involved in the initiative to learn from them how they do what they do. This will allow us to make protocols for each stakeholder archetype as the Ecotype Project builds this movement towards a replicable model.
Each week, scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Station visit the home-base farm for the Ecotype Project. At this farm, rows of 200 individuals per wildflower species are grown to create living seed banks. The scientists perform pollinator surveys on these plots each week as they bloom throughout the year, and I had the opportunity to shadow them and help them with their study last week. The most fascinating thing I learned was about an observation we made as we watched the luminescent pink blooms of Swamp Milkweed. We watched a miniscule one-millimeter hoverfly circle the bloom, bouncing from leaf to leaf, but never going for nectar. This was extraordinary, in the original sense of the word. After wild bees like bumblebees, flies are the most important pollinator group. A few days later, I was sitting on my front step watching the new blooms of my Black-Eyed Susans when a hoverfly appeared. It circled the bloom, bouncing between the leaves of abutting plants. And I watched it and followed it and photographed it. All of a sudden, a female hoverfly landed on the bloom. The two became entangled, and they zoomed off to a nearby leaf. At that moment, I realized I had just observed the behavior that the scientist had explained to me back at the Swamp Milkweed. Male hoverflies emerge earlier than the females, and they employ a mating strategy called patrolling that involves circling new blooms and waiting for females. I was absolutely fascinated, and quite thrilled that this extraordinary event had taken place right outside my door, all because I had planted the right plant in the right place, had opted not for ornamental and sterile traditional plants, but instead for native plants fit for these majestic wild pollinators.”