From the Idaho State Journal, by John O'Connell
Cleve Davis calls his hobby botanizing.
He heads to remote places to seek plants that no one has ever recorded seeing in Idaho. Davis, a botanist with the Bureau of Land Management's Pocatello field office, is credited with introducing four new rare plants to the state's list.
He's also proven seven plants thought to be rare are common or were misidentified, prompting their removal from the list at the annual Idaho Rare Plant Conference.
This week is National Wildflower Awareness Week, a time when Davis suggests buying a good wildflower book and learning to identify common flora. Davis believes having basic plant-identification skills increases appreciation of nature and makes being outdoors more fun. But to him, the most alluring aspect of the activity is that it's possible to accomplish something no one's ever done before.
He typically finds new plants where something in the environment appears to be a bit out of place - for example, where there's a patch of red soil or in a small area where the geology changes.
The 29-year-old has spotted new rare plants while back-country skiing on Blizzard Mountain near Arco, rock climbing at the City of Rocks by the Idaho and Utah border, and kayaking the Middle Fork of the Salmon River.
He was attempting to map populations of another rare plant, starveling milkvetch, on the Bear Lake Plateau when he made one of his best finds. It was June 6, 2001, and his eye was drawn to a wind-swept hillside covered in white shale. The barren area stuck out in an environment where the rest of the landscape was covered by sage.
Growing there was an ample population of a plant he'd never seen before.
"It was a different looking plant. It was tall and robust and had pretty big white flowers with yellow eyes," Davis said.
He took a sample and sought the help of an Idaho State University emeritus botany professor to identify what turned out to be silky cryptantha, a plant previously undiscovered in Idaho. He then sent the sample to a specialist in the genus cryptantha for confirmation.
The plant still hasn't been located anywhere else in Idaho. In fact, when Davis later returned to Bear Lake Plateau, he couldn't relocate the plant.
According to the Idaho Native Plant Society, the state has 306 species of rare plants and 122 that may be rare but data is lacking to make a determination. The BLM and U.S. Forest Service protect plants designated as sensitive.
Four plants in the state - Ute ladies' tresses, water howellia, MacFarlane's four-o'clock and Spalding's silene - are listed under the Endangered Species Act and have federal protection.
Two sensitive plants have been found in the Mink Creek Area south of Pocatello.
They were both spotted in the 1930s by Ray J. Davis, author of "The Flora of Idaho," and haven't been seen since in Mink Creek.
For the past five years, Davis has searched Mink Creek for the two plants, foothill sedge and western sedge.
