In the garden of elfin
By the end of April, many home gardeners have started tomato, lettuce, and pepper plants in pots on windowsills in hopes of feeding themselves in late summer. Ela Carpenter will have started hundreds of wild indigo plants in hopes of feeding butterflies.
Not on her windowsill, in a greenhouse at Masonville Cove, a Baltimore-based Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership — sites where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the community, and partners have come together to promote conservation.
Masonville Cove was one of the first Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships established when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started the program in 2013, but the designation built on years of work by local partners to support restoration and engagement. Today Masonville Cove uses the Service’s Standards of Excellence for Urban Wildlife Refuge as a road map for strengthening conservation partnerships in the community, while creating high-quality habitat to benefit people and wildlife.
Carpenter, an urban wildlife biologist for the Service, is jumpstarting a project that advances this mission: transforming an unused greenhouse at the site into a nursery for wild indigo. The plants will be a future nursery for frosted elfin.
The small, brown butterfly only lays its eggs on wild indigo or wild lupine — the larvae must feed on one of these two plants to survive — and the pine barren habitats that support these plants are increasingly rare. The Service is in the midst of proactively assessing the frosted elfin’s status to make a determination about whether it needs federal protection in 2023.
In the meantime, staff and partners are taking action to support frosted elfin across its native range through research, management actions, and in this case, expanding the food supply.
“The idea is to grow these plants in the greenhouse until they are sturdy enough to withstand deer browsing — a year or two — and then relocate them to land where frosted elfin are known to occur,” Carpenter explained.
That land is on the Eastern shore of Maryland, at a site owned by The Nature Conservancy that has been managed with prescribed fire to create the open grassland habitat the species needs. Staff from TNC and the Service planted wild indigo and lupine at a site intending to feed frosted elfin, but ended up feeding deer. Could the greenhouse at Masonville Cove — donated secondhand, with a little wear and tear — provide a safe place for the young plants to grow up?
A few weeks ago, Carpenter visited the greenhouse with Clare Maffei to find out. Maffei is now a biologist with the Service’s Science Applications program, but was previously based at the Chesapeake Bay Field Office. She planned to start the propagation effort at the greenhouse last year, but was thwarted by covid-19. Instead, she attempted to grow wild indigo at home, where she was thwarted by birds.
“Apparently robins were plucking the plants out of the pots,” Carpenter said. “That was the main takeaway: they need to be contained away from curious critters that want to nibble on them.”
Although the greenhouse needs a few repairs — at some point, a car backed into it, shattering the door — Carpenter said the most important features appear to be functioning: the fans and vents that will keep the temperature stable inside.
And thanks to support from the Maryland Environmental Service (MES) and the Port of Baltimore, they were able to get the door fixed. “Now when the plants are growing inside, we won’t have deer just strolling in to get a snack,” she added.
This week, Carpenter will continue filling pots with soil, cold-treating the seeds, and helping to support future frosted elfin.
But she said you don’t need a greenhouse to help native pollinators. In her small garden at home, she thinks about feeding native bees and butterflies too.
“It’s important to diversify, to think of all the different types of pollinators that need food sources throughout the season.” There are perks: planting with pollinators in mind means you will have something blooming in your garden throughout the growing season.
If you need inspiration, come to Masonville Cove. More than just a workspace, the greenhouse will be an opportunity for visitors to witness conservation in action.
“It might not be what you normally think of as conservation, but we want people to see that there are many ways to help species that need our support,” Carpenter said.
The effort to conserve at-risk wildlife and recover listed species is led by the Service and state wildlife agencies in partnership with other government agencies, private landowners, conservation groups, tribes, businesses, utilities, and others. It has drawn support for its use of incentives and flexibilities within the Endangered Species Act to protect rare wildlife, reduce regulations, and keep working lands working.
