On the Hunt for Lady Slippers

The Weston Conservation Commission provided the press release below.

This May, the Weston Conservation Commission will be conducting our first town wide lady’s slipper census.  We are planning to monitor lady’s slippers on conservation land because this favorite New England spring wildflower is, unfortunately, also a deer favorite for lunch. Lady’s slippers can provide a sensitive barometer of deer browse in our woodlands. Members of Weston’s garden clubs will be helping us collect data, and all residents are invited to participate by reporting lady’s slipper sightings.

Lady’s slippers (like all orchids) are protected from picking by a Massachusetts state law passed in 1935. Fine: $5. Many of us can remember that they had become quite common a few decades ago. Today, they are seen much less frequently. Of course wild flowers and other woodland species can fluctuate for many reasons, but botanists point to rising deer populations as a leading cause of lady’s slipper decline across much of the Northeast.  This also applies to many other flowers such as Solomon’s seal and trillium.

The Conservation Commission has established transects of several species to give us long-term measures of whether deer browse is increasing or decreasing in our woodlands.  Because lady’s slippers are perennial and easy to recognize, we have an opportunity to gather data all across town by noting changes from year to year in their numbers at every colony we can find.  Like other large-scale “citizen science” efforts, such as the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, this will not give us a precise index of change for any single year.  But over a longer period significant trends will emerge.

We invite residents to visit places where they remember seeing lady’s slippers in the past, and report what they find.  Teams will revisit many sites to collect precise data, and we will add a map layer showing the locations on the Town’s GIS website.

If you would like to volunteer with this effort, please submit your name and email address to: www.tinyurl.com/LScensus. You will be contacted shortly with the specific instructions on how to collect your lady slipper data. If you wish to be a member of one of the teams making regular sweeps and collecting data on lady’s slippers, please contact Robin Reisman at rreisman@heroix.com.