Two of Georgia’s rarest wildflowers are taking different routes when it comes to being added to the federal endangered species list.
The yellow-flowered whorled sunflower is expected to be added this summer. The purple-flowered Georgia aster is a candidate, but federal officials said this week that they hope to avoid its listing because of special agreements with landowners, corporations and local governments who pledge to protect it.
The plants’ statuses led me last week to take a look at efforts to save them from extinction.
Both plants, which bloom in the fall, favor similar habitats — open, sunny savannahs and prairie-like areas of woodlands.
Large swaths of those natural areas once existed in the Southeast. Their clayey, calcium-rich soils were conducive to prairie grasses; occasional lightning-set fires and grazing by bison, elk and other wild herbivores kept other unwanted vegetation at bay.
But, then, foresters began suppressing wildfires wherever they sprang up; the large, grass-eating animals disappeared from the region. With fewer controls on unwanted growth, the prairie/savannah habitats — and many of the plants that thrived on them — became rare.
Now, biologists are trying to restore the habitats by regularly employing prescribed burning and other methods that imitate the way nature once maintained them.
At the Coosawattee Wildlife Management Area in North Georgia’s Murray County, Adam Hammond and Nate Thomas of the Department of Natural Resources showed me a 50-acre swath of open savannah that underwent a controlled burn in January. It is now a lush green and thick with grasses, wildflowers (hopefully, the Georgia aster) and other species native to the habitat.
“I expect a lot of purple here in the fall from blooming Georgia asters,” Hammond said.
At the so-called Coosa Valley prairies in Floyd County, Malcolm Hodges of the Nature Conservancy of Georgia showed me one of several patches of whorled sunflowers in “remnant prairies” — small open areas similar to tall grass prairies of the Great Plains.
The Coosa prairies, also maintained by controlled burns, are one of only four natural areas in the Southeast that harbor the plant. The owner, the Plum Creek corporation, protects some 900 acres of the prairies through a conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy.
In the sky: The moon will be last-quarter Wednesday, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Mercury is low in the west just after dark. Venus rises out of the east about two hours before dawn. Mars rises out of the east just before dusk. Jupiter is low in the southwest at dusk and sets in the west a few hours later. Saturn rises out of the east at sunset.
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