Rare orchid find sets off frenzy

Joe Fehrer, manager of Nassawango Nature Preserve on Maryland's Eastern Shore, has set the rules: No photos of the horizon or any landscape feature that might identify this place. No naming the back road that leads to it.

The obsessive cone of silence around this precise location has nothing to do with nuclear codes or terrorist cells. The mission here is to protect a flower. An orchid.

Fehrer's job is to stay one step ahead of the orchid thief.

The flower Fehrer is defending is Platanthera x canbyi, or Canby's bog orchid, a rare hybrid born of two rare parent orchids. The flower hasn't been seen in Maryland in almost 20 years.

Fehrer would much rather the rest of the world take it on faith the fragile and rare orchid has reappeared on the Eastern Shore. He is taking a reporter to see the orchid only reluctantly, he said, running the risk the crazy "orchid heads" will sneak out here, trample the delicate habitat or dig it up and steal it away.

Just past a clump of huckleberry bushes, Ron Wilson, a former high-school science-teacher-turned-professional-botanist, held his bright yellow GPS close to his face, the better to read the plot points he recorded a few weeks ago when he discovered the hybrid.

"We're lost?" Fehrer asked.

"It's just I've got so many different overlapping plants," Wilson said.

Despite cajoling by the preserve's owner, The Nature Conservancy, Fehrer remained so conflicted about publicly announcing Wilson's find that the orchid went in and out of flower while he tried to make up his mind.

By the time The Nature Conservancy sent a news release this month, the hybrid orchid's showy yellow flowers had withered and gone to seed. That made Fehrer happy, but now makes it close to impossible to find the orchid in the 25-acre swath of boggy greenery.

Almost immediately after news of the find broke, Fehrer's phone started ringing. The orchid heads were on the hunt. They just wanted to see it, maybe take a picture, they pleaded. Fehrer said he was busy, couldn't help them. He hung up.

What Fehrer does not know is the orchid heads have found the rare hybrid, blogging and obsessing about it for days on e-mail lists and in Internet chat rooms.

Back in the bog, the sky began to cloud over. Wilson squatted close to the ground. Suddenly, he stopped.

"Oh my God!" He leaned down and peeked at two thin green stalks with a single slender leaf, no more than about 8 inches high. A deer had most likely dined on the flower. "If I found this today, I wouldn't know it's the hybrid," Wilson said. "I'd probably have to do DNA analysis."