Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011 - 53

Park, even though it lives on sand dunes throughout the Great Lakes area. This species is one of many Presque Isle species listed as Pennsylvania rare by the Pennsylvania Biological Survey. Beach wormwood or mugwort (artemisia campestris ssp. caudata), another coastal dune species that is related to western sagebrush, is listed as Pennsylvania endangered. So, too, is hairy puccoon (Lithospermum caroliniense), still another plant found only at Presque Isle in Pennsylvania. Known also as hispid gromwell and golden puccoon, it displays clusters of oneinch, yellow-orange flowers in mid-May. A species that Bissell couldn’t show us is bearberry manzanita (arctostaphylos uvba-ursi), also called kinnikinick, mealberry, hog cranberry and sandberry. This circumpolar species grows in northern Europe, Asia and North America, but is now extinct in Pennsylvania, even though it was common on Presque Isle back in the 1930s. A lovely, evergreen, prostrate ground cover shrub, it has white, urn-shape flowers in spring and bears bright red berries in late summer. Bissell blames its demise on deer, which “outdo breakwaters in terms of damage” to plant species. Back in 1949, O.E. Jennings, a botanist and former director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, writing in the Pennsylvania Park News, discussed what he called the “bearberry heath” at Presque Isle State Park and added that, “unfortunately there are now too many deer and the bearberry and many other plants of the unusually varied flora of the peninsula are being exterminated.” In 1987, speaking in front of the Presque Isle State Park Authority, Bissell also warned about deer damage, especially to hairy puccoon, beach mugwort and wild blue lupine (also Pennsylvania rare), but he said that “the exotics [invasives] really are the greatest threat in the park.” Twenty-three years later he reiterated that same message to us and mentioned the same invasive he had warned about then — phragmites or common reed (Phragmites
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australis) — a widely distributed clonal grass that grows on every continent but Antarctica. In Europe, it’s protected because of its important ecological functions. In the United States, it is considered a threat to native wetland plants. At Presque Isle, it competes with a host of rare, threatened and endangered species. Phragmites can grow 13 feet high, and its large flower plumes, which persist into winter, are filled with seeds. Worst of all, though, Bissell said, are its incredible rhizomes or lateral roots. They can grow 60 feet in a year, with new plants sprouting at each node, and when they are removed, they will recover in a few months. We have been coming to Presque Isle State Park periodically since 1983, and on every visit we are struck by how phragmites has spread on the peninsula. Usually our botanical host is Evelyn Anderson who writes “Nature’s Way” for the Erie morning News. She has shown us dozens of rare and unusual plants growing in the six ecological zones of this 7-mile-long recurving sandspit. Much of what she has learned has come from her association with Bissell, so I was pleased to finally meet and learn from him, if only for a few hours. The Dune Walk was one of several field trips offered at the Wild Resource Festival last May 1. As a member of Pennsylvania’s Wild Resource Conservation Program’s Advisory Committee, I had wanted to attend one of these nature-oriented events, which first began in 2005. I was also curious to see the Tom Ridge Environmental Center at the park. I remember the beginning of what was then called the Wild Resource Conservation Fund back in 1982. That’s when Governor Dick Thornburgh signed the Pennsylvania Wild Resource Conservation Act, designed to support the management and protection of nongame wildlife and native wild plants, and funded by citizens’ voluntary donations of part or all of their state income tax refunds. My filing cabinet contains all the issues
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Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011