Using the WWweb to Hunt


Platanthera lacera, Rhode Island

Using The Web to Hunt Orchids
Published in the Connecticut Orchid Society Newsletter, June 2007.

If you want to find orchids growing wild in CT, how do you find them?

Besides networking with people who know where they are and may be open to telling someone who will show up with cameras and no collecting gear, the web is your best friend.

Go to any search engine and put in a keyword like "orchids" and you will get thousands of web sites that have that word in there.

Narrow it down by being specific. What do you want to find? Where, especially and particularly.

One of my favorite orchids is the Ragged Fringed Orchid. By putting in the scientific name "Platanthera lacera" in quotes, you tell the search engine to look at only examples of both of these words occurring together in this exact order. Adding the location word Hartford outside of the quotes, but next to it gives you much more productive results. 6 potential web sites.

Once on a site.use the Edit drop-down to search the document for the word "Platanthera" and it will bring you to the place on the web-site where the word Platanthera is located, in one case, buried on page 34..but nope, Suffield County is in Long Island, New York.

The other 5 "hits" prove useless, too.

Changing to "P lacera" or "P. lacera" still with Hartford didn't add any possibilities.

"P lacera" with CT yielded 7 sites, not fruitful.

"Platanthera lacera" CT yielded 104 possibilities.

The very first site has a lovely photo. It is the website of the CT Botanical Society and includes the information that the plant blooms between June and August.good information for when you actually get out there with your cameras. http://www.ct-botanical-society.org/galleries/platantheralace.html

The next site, http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=PLLA2 has more photos as well as some alternate names to try for this plant. This information is useful as most older documents are uploaded in entirety; the fact that botanists have changed the name is no guarantee that documents will be updated. So knowing that alternate names for this plant are Blephariglotis lacera and Habenaria lacera will give you alternatives to search for historical sightings.

About hit number 55, http://fp.orchidmagic.f9.co.uk/300704ds69lac.htm notes that the photograph was taken July 30, 2004 in CT.but doesn't say where in CT. Nothing else in this search

Still no good information for any focus for my hikes.

I'm not done, but I can see it's going to take more than 30 minutes to find some sort of notation of specific places. I make a list for myself of what combinations I've already tried. As I go along, I add new ideas to that list, and click each one off as I try it.

The next step, once sites have been identified, will be to get out the topographic maps and look over specifically where an orchid such as Platanthera lacera might grow.full sun, wet grassland. And keeping in mind that some of the sightings I have found were from 1890, those grasslands may now be deep forest.but other grasslands nearby are certainly worth investigating.

Happy hunting