Learning From Mistakes

As embarrassing as this is, it was a very valuable lesson for me so I thought I’d share a careless mistake I made during my research. Before this week long trip, I’d prepared a Plant Identification Chart with photos from Calflora.org and CalPhotos.Berkeley.edu and descriptions of those plants. The one problem I overlooked with this is that the internet is no substitute to actually going outside and looking at these plants. So I started my search for invasive plants and on the first day I found what I thought was dried up invasive Sweet Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare). It was tough to tell what color the flower was because not many of the plants are in bloom around this time, so it looked brown and dried up. For the next few days I was charting hundreds of populations of the plant thinking there was a terrible infestation and not finding much else that was on my list or anything that even looked like what I was looking for. Several days in, another capstone student, Aimee Newell, had finished up early for the day so she came to check out what I was working on, being that she’s also looking at vegetation on the island. I then showed her the “fennel” that I was about to record and she informed me that what I had been so sure was fennel was actually a plant called Yarrow or Achillea Millefolium (and it was a native!). I’d done what I warned the kids at the middle school not to do and identified a similar looking native! With help from her and Cause, we were able to find an actual specimen of Sweet Fennel behind the bunkhouse with it’s biggest identifier being that it’s leaves smell like black licorice, something I didn’t learn from online sites. Lesson learned: ask questions early and ask them often! I will be contacting the NPS botanist for SAMO and confirming the plants I identified now that I’m back on the mainland.

In the photos above: left image of the plant in the field is Yarrow, right image of the plant against a white wall is Sweet Fennel.