 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at LPTV.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this two-segment episode, join naturalist Angela Shogren of Bemidji as she stewards a scientific natural area near Itaskas State Park and photographs Minnesota's rarest orchid. Then brainered man Jesse MacArthur uses his DSLR to record indigenous culture and breathtaking nature in the Amazon rainforest. I'm Angela Shogren. I'm a Minnesota master naturalist and site steward for Iron String Bog and I'm a photographer in Bemidji. In the summers I work with Itasca State Park especially and sometimes the DNR take people out on tours of the scientific natural areas, especially Iron Spring Bogs. I show people how to find little bitty orchids and some of the interesting bog plants out there, make sure nobody gets lost in all of that green. And just let people know that bogs, they're not muddy swamps like people think they are. They're magical and I love when people get out there and see how interesting they are and that they're not what they imagined at all. I became a Minnesota master naturalist after our family moved closer to town and I just needed a way to still do that but live without so much acreage. And when I found out about the master naturalist program I realized oh that's something I could get into and especially when I found out about the scientific natural areas and how they needed site stewards. And I went out to visit Iron Springs and found out this was an area I could do the same thing with, just discover new things and feel like I was really doing a good thing that needed to be done. Every time a volunteer goes and works with these programs that's somewhere that your tax dollars don't have to pay anyone to go and do. And a mom, I have three kids, it's nice to get out and be somewhere wild that's as much adventure as I get and I love to take pictures so I can share that with other people. My bog is really easy for getting around in for older people or people who have a harder time moving and so I tend to take them out there but it makes me realize how many people can't get out into these places and that makes me want to take more pictures than them and be able to share it. It's hard to photograph in a bog sometimes because of the light and to get in there close enough I can't use a regular tripod because everything is covered in sphagnum moss and they're just barely anchored in there. So you don't want to put down a real tripod or anything because if you move one you might pull the whole top off and disturb everything. So a lot of times I use a bean bag and I'll set my camera on that and the Hecarro lens really helps. I don't always use one though. They do tend to grow where the light will hit them so that makes it easier for them to find as well because sometimes they'll look like they have a little spotlight right on them. But mostly it's finding them in the first place. If we'd done this in the spring there's all kinds of pink things, good and showy stuff. Right now there's orchids but there's not real big and colorful ones. The one that I think might be the best I'm really hoping is blooming and it's blooming over on the other side so I'm looking for that one. Iron Springs bog, the scientific natural area I take care of. It's hard to believe if you're in there they used to log it. I've looked and looked and I can't find any of the logging roads through there. Oh I'm going to get a picture of this. So a scientific natural area. These are the most protected places in the state. They're managed by the Department of Natural Resources. They choose them because they are a critical habitat. There's either an animal that it's one of the only places that lives or some kind of plant community. They're left as natural museums. They're managed but they aren't over managed. They don't make a lot of decisions. They're the places where we find out what happens if you just leave things alone for the most part. We have a supervisor that we send reports into. We say if there is invasive weeds or if we found something really unusual, illegal activity, people tend to dig things up sometimes because they're not over managed and they do contain rare species a lot of times like the orchids. So poaching or you can't use all terrain vehicles in them. We report if there seems to be damage in there from people or environmental damage from things that have happened. We just keep an eye on the place for the DNR and then also open it up to people because people should be able to enjoy these. These are our most wild places. So as I get to know it, it's fun for me to then take other people out there so that they can enjoy it safely but still see our state land so that everybody can actually get out there and enjoy them and know that they're there and know what's in them. Also when you step into the bog it's just all of that moss just sucks up all the sound and it just makes it feel magical. It makes it feel like you've just stepped into a different realm and everything is soft and padded and it's very soothing. Soothing and exciting at the same time. My favorite thing that's out there is the orchids. Minnesota has almost 50 orchids and people don't realize that. They think of them as a tropical, warm place but orchids grow everywhere. A lot of them grow in Minnesota. Our state flower is an orchid which not everybody knows but a lot of our rare ones are teeny tiny. They're exquisite but some of them even need a hand lens to really get in there and see the flowers. And those are my favorite. I love to do macro photography and get to share those with people and get them to see how amazing they are. What differentiates an orchid from the other flowers is all orchids have five petals. They have a lip. Sometimes their lip is modified into a pouch like the lady slippers and our different moccasin flowers. Sometimes it's upside down but they all have a lip which usually is like a landing strip for whatever pollinates them. A lot of them are pollinated by, not just by bees and the things you think of as pollinators but by tiny gnats, by flies, even by mosquitoes. The one good thing about having mosquitoes I guess, our lady slippers have two holes in them so that when a bee goes into them, it goes in through the top and it can't go back out through the top. So it has to go in there and get all covered and make its way out through a little tiny hole in the back so it can't get out of there without getting covered in pollen or bringing pollen over from the other ones. If you see big holes in lady slippers, that's because some of them do not have the patience for that and will just chew their way right out of it. Some of our orchids that are especially rare but still showy and their little beauties are the ram's head orchids. They've gotten very rare. Where they grow they'll have lots and lots of them but in very small areas. So the ram's head is a showy or one that's a dark purple, it looks like a teeny tiny little lady slipper and when people find those the DNR actually asks that they just let the DNR know and not necessarily share that publicly or share that with everyone because we need to know those sites where they grow. It's hard to know which orchids are the most rare or how rare they are because some of them are the size of toothpicks and they tend to grow in these real wet areas that people don't go to very often. So if people find those, we want to know where they are but we don't want people to show up and dig them up. So it's good to let the DNR know and take your pictures, tread very, very lightly because they're hard to see from the top. It's real easy to step on them and squish them but be discriminant and how publicly you share that. I mean everyone should get access but there are people who don't realize the pointlessness of transplanting. This is a rattlesnake plantain. It's Goodyear Rapins which I have not found in here before and the thing that's neat about this one is that its leaves down here are what make it more distinctive even than the flowers. It's got these variegated leaves that just sit flat on the ground like that and then the flowers wind up it. I love that. This one's even open and blooming. I'm going to put my macro tubes on for this one because it's so tiny. As my eyes get worse, actually that's part of why I started doing the macro photography was just so that I could see them way up close. I use a little mirrorless camera. I've had problems with my spine where my hands don't work real well so that's really light and I can lug it around for miles all day. It also just works well out there because it doesn't squish a lot if I set it down. It doesn't just sink way down deep into the moss because it's lighter. It has a screen, an LCD screen that I can look at. I can use that instead of a hand lens or a magnifying glass even just for looking at things. The Lady Slipper orchid is our biggest one but most orchids are very small, toothpick size, maybe six inches. Many of them are green or white or almost translucent. If you have a hand lens and get down there some like the Hooker's orchid looks like a little dragon. They're just exquisite but from the top they may just look like a blade of grass if you don't know what you're looking for especially in a bog where everything is green. Oh, here's what I was hoping to find. It's a plantamthera orbiculata. It's probably the prettiest one that's blooming right now and they look like little elephants. I tend to have an easier time seeing them. I think it's because I spend so much time out there. My eyes have gotten so adjusted. I also used to do a lot of watercolor painting so I just see the colors. I see all those different shades of green. Throughout the summer I get to look at almost distinctly different colors for me and it just goes, if anyone's ever been morale hunting, you know if you see one, all of a sudden you'll realize you're surrounded by them and that's what happens a lot of times for me with orchids. I like these ones. They make me feel like being a little kid when you have to kind of look up at everything. I've been helping with a project that the University of Minnesota is doing along with the landscape arboretum where they've been trying to really study our little orchids. A lot of our smallest, most rare ones, haven't been very studied. We don't know a lot about how they reproduce, how they're doing, how they're pollinated and so I go out there and help them find them because I spend so much time out there even just spending time in a bog or in one particular place you get to know that place, so it gets easier to see if things are unusual or see the unusual things in it. There's another kind of orchid right there. I'm keeping my eye out for the Milaxis Pallidosa which is the most rare orchid in Minnesota and it's one of the most rare orchids in the United States and it grows in here and it grows in this section of the bog but I've been looking for it. This is one of the blooms that I haven't found yet this year. I think this is Milaxis Pallidosa which is the most rare orchid in Minnesota, one of the most rare orchids in the United States and a lot of what people come to this bog for. Sometimes they wonder if it's the most rare, not because it doesn't grow as much but just because it's so hard to find but I haven't seen it yet this year so I'm so excited. When we were out there, I was blown away by your ability to spot that to the point where I was like, she set this up. I was like, there's no way that she just happened to find this. No, that was amazing, I swear to God. I think I'm out here so much that I'm surrounded by green all the time that my eyes don't have any choice but to just start seeing the greens as different colors. The different shades of green. So I have an advantage. After you're out here long enough it starts to turn back into 3D again. Oh, it's perfect, like it's perfectly in bloom. It's, oh, I love it. I've never found it when I had my macro tubes along. You know, when I find something really rare, it's really exciting. I really want to get a shot of it. I can't wait to report it to the DNR and let them know it's out there. I want to share it with other people because I know it's something that a lot of people will never get a chance to see on their own. But even the more common ones, they're just all really, really neat. They're just neat little beings. They're some of the oldest plants. They've evolved forever and they've evolved so specifically. There are ones that don't produce any chlorophyll at all. They're just red and white or almost see-through. They might entirely rely on fungi to get their food. And they have stripes and polka dots. There are some that look like they were designed by six-year-old little girls with purple and hot pink polka dots on them in Minnesota. And we don't think of having that kind of plant here. Some of them are frilly. They come in really neat shapes. It's hard to believe that a hooker's orchid wasn't designed to look like a little dragon. They're just exciting. The closer you look, the more cool little features you find in there. If you look up the stories behind them, or Darwin wrote about some of the same kinds of orchids that we have up here, and he was fascinated by them, by these teeny tiny little things. All of the orchids make me feel like I'm finding treasure. I think it's the closest thing you get as a grown-up to getting that little kid feeling of finding something new and something you haven't seen before, or you hardly ever get to see, or most people don't get to see. I think it's important that everyone have access to these areas, that they realize they belong to them. They're not just set aside for no one to use, that they be used, that they be used safely, and that nothing gets destroyed, but that people get out there and are able to bring their children and see how things look without being developed, without all of the impacts that we have everywhere else. My name is Jesse MacArthur, and I recently returned from working in Peru within the Amazon, working with the Indigenous that live there. I'm an anthropologist. I'm also a photographer, and a lot of the work that I was doing in the Amazon was documenting some of the different projects that are being done to help the communities that live within the forest. Ever since I've been a little kid, I've always wanted to go and work with the Indigenous in the Amazon, because I've always heard about a lot of the people getting taken advantage of down there and dealing with issues such as deforestation or animal trafficking or illegal logging and mining, and I really wanted to do whatever I could to help. My mom actually found an article about a national park that had just opened up in Peru. It had just become finalized, and it's a huge deal. It's called Parque Nacional Sierra de Divisor, and it's right on the border of Peru and Brazil, and it's absolutely huge. And so I read a little further. It got into speaking about the different organizations that have participated to work with this park. And one of them is called SADIA. The more and more I read about what they do in working with the Indigenous and helping the Indigenous, I decided that I have to be part of this. So I wrote a letter to the executive director. I introduced myself, told him about my background with working and going to school in South America, how I'm an anthropologist, screened some photography, and he asked me to come down. So I quit my jobs, and I took off. And the day after getting to Lima, where I flew in, they sent me out to the Amazon. And so I met up with my team when I was there. We spent several days in Pucalpa. It's a city in eastern Peru in the Amazon. It's a relatively large city, so we spent several days there, and then we took off by boat and went out to the forest, like several days by boat into the forest. It was really a very eye-opening experience being able to take off and go from Brainer, Minnesota all the way down to the Amazon. And I went out there, being the stereotypical man from the United States, I had my huge backpack. I packed for everything that I thought I would need while being out in the forest, while there were men who brought nothing more than just a small little backpack for the three weeks to a month that we were planning on being in the forest, and I went out there to adjust. The bugs destroyed me. So, Cethia, they worked with these communities, as well as the Provingan government, to help them get their land titled. And then from then on, they worked with these communities to help them develop sustainable ways of maintaining their land and living and utilizing the forest without destroying it. The first community that we went and worked in, it was about 15 hours and I didn't eat a lot while I was out there. Sometimes it would just be a piece of chicken the size of a 50 cent piece and half a bowl of broth and maybe a plantain banana. And so, I learned how to eat a lot differently. I had to learn how to think differently, as well. And that was something that I think was the most difficult adjustment for me is I came with mentality and going down to the rainforest that, alright, hey, I'm finally living my dream. I had to learn how to re-evaluate these situations and think of them a little differently. One time, in particular, we were working with the community teaching them how to do selective harvesting for utilizing the forest that they have. And that was really difficult for me at first because as I had said, I went down there and wanting to help preserve the rainforest and now we're educating a community with how to cut down trees. But the reason we were doing so is because with many of the communities in the rainforest, they do it all illegally and they'll wipe out an entire forest or a portion of the forest. And so, with Seidia, we went out to these communities and we were teaching them how to utilize the forest without destroying it, how to just chop down certain trees of a certain diameter or of a certain species and allowing other trees, larger trees, to reproduce, giving them sufficient time to reproduce so the forest would grow back and then not selecting any trees from that location for a set number of years. So there were several times where I actually had to film them chopping down trees with chainsaws and that hurt. It really bothered me. However, they were using these trees for building in their community. And that was something that I had to learn how to think of a little bit differently. I couldn't tell them you can't chop down the trees because you're destroying the forest. Somebody here in Minnesota is saying, hey, you can't chop down that tree for your firewood. It's no different. It's their home. I was around an hour from the Brazilian border in eastern Peru, like right in the center of Peru. And to get to where I was, it was anywhere from 15 to 20 hours by boat to get there and that's with a 60 horsepower motor. Most of the people out there travel with 6 horsepower motors and the rivers themselves are very dangerous. Every opportunity that I saw to be able to learn or to participate in different cultural practices in these communities, I went at it. There was one time in particular where I saw an elderly man who was on his knees with leaves that he was weaving to make a roof for a house. I thought it was really cool so I went up to him and I asked him if I could help. He said absolutely. So I got down and I watched him for a few minutes and then he handed me a leaf and said okay, go. I screwed up a few times but after 5-10 minutes I had it down and it got to the point where he'd hand me a leaf and I'd weave it. He'd hand me a leaf and I'd weave it and we just keep going. And he later on invited me to go have lunch with him and his family and then he asked me if I wanted to go fishing. And so I went down to the river and there's this long canoe that's around 20 feet one single tree. They'll dig it out and they're very, very light and they can go places that a lot of larger boats are unable to go. And so we got in this boat with me, this man and his two nephews and he fired it up and we went up river and the whole while I'm wondering where's your fishing line and I couldn't figure it out. All I had was a sack that was inside the boat and then he just turned the boat and went into the forest and the river was very high because we had received a lot of rain and the river will rise up to the point that it just disappears into the forest. There's no river bank and so a lot of the fish as well will take off and go into the depths of the forest. And so he set up a gill net in the trees and it was a really cool experience going through the trees in a canoe. It was very quiet. I could hear birds up above my head. There was rain that was falling down through the leaves. We would just pull ourselves through the water and then we'd set up a net from one tree and go maybe 80 feet and tie it up on the other side. Then we fished for a little while and then we left and then when we came back he'd just pull on the net and lift it up and there's fish that got caught in it. Another community was teaching them how to obtain fruit from the trees without destroying the trees because in previous years a whole tree take the fruit and go. One fruit specifically that we were helping them work with is called awache and awache grows in the tops of palm trees maybe 70, 80 feet up and the trunks are very slippery not easy to climb. They grow in very damp areas so that's why they chop it down. So we traveled out to this community and we taught them a way how to climb these trees using a harness and all of the proper equipment. And so we went out to these places and they climbed up these trees and they'd have a machete on maybe a 20 foot tether that would be dangling below them and they chopped these huge bushels of awache and awache is it's a fruit that tastes a little bit nutty they're dark red about the size of an egg and they grow in bushels of maybe 2 to 300 and they weigh a lot and so they would chop down these bushels of fruit and rocketing down through the canopy knocking over branches and leaves and things would be falling and they would hit the ground and just explode and scatter all over the place and then we'd pick them all up and bring them back to the boat. It was such a cool experience being able to see this and being able to work with these communities and showing them ways how to protect the forest, how to use it it's a big deal too because I know a lot of these communities have ways to make money and the first community that I traveled to after we got off our boat and put all of our things up I went out to play soccer with some of the people that lived there and I heard a bird that I'd heard before but never in the wild and I turned around and looked and there were two bright like vibrant green macaws that just flew on to the top branches of a palm tree and it amazed me being able to see this because I'd never seen it before but later I saw like seven or eight of them that flew right above my head and they were bright emerald green and they were all loud and really just talking a lot what I've really brought back with me from all my experiences that took place in the Amazon more than anything is the desire to help educate other people with what's going on because it's no secret that the Amazon is being destroyed however I saw it firsthand so now it's very important to me to to help educate others on what's going on or inspire others to learn about what's going on because it's it's not going to change unless people make an effort to do so I just really had to learn how to see things a little bit differently while I was out there and it was a really cool experience it was really cool thanks so much for watching join us again on Common Ground if you have an idea for a Common Ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014 to view any episode of Common Ground online visit us at lptv.org we order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008 if you enjoyed this episode of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground consider making a contribution at lptv.org