Muskeg Love, or a Bog Blog

We've just returned from an amazing trip to southeast Alaska. Alaska is full of many wonderful, big things: ice-sculpted mountains, huge trees, humpback whales, orcas, black and brown bears, mountain goats, tidewater glaciers. Dawes Glacier has a wall of ice some 300 feet tall above the waterline, and it extends about a thousand feet down under the water! Big! But of course this blog is about (mostly) the small, weird things, and so I want to talk about my love of the muskeg, a habitat of many things that are small and strange.

Muskeg near Wrangell, Alaska

Muskeg is a First Peoples word in common usage in Canada and Alaska that means a grassy bog or swamp. We suspected that bogs were near when we were hiking around Ward Lake near Ketchikan. The river feeding into the lake was the color of strong tea. Some bog plants, such as sphagnum, leach tannins into the water, staining it. You may have heard of tannins in wine; it's the same group of compounds. Tannins not only add color, but are also preservatives. Western red cedar and coast redwoods contain tannins in their wood. These compounds help make their lumber rot resistant and contribute to the beautiful red-brown color. The preservative power of tannins also helps explain bog bodies found in Europe. The acidic tannins and low oxygen conditions in bogs preserve bones and sometimes even soft tissue and clothing. Often the remains are also stained a uniform brown or black color. Tollund man, discovered in a bog in Denmark, died somewhere around 400 BC. His body is withered, but his face looks relaxed in peaceful sleep.

Tollund man
By Sven Rosborn - Own work, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4330462

We know that Tollund man did not die peacefully, he was hanged. But we don't know why his body was placed in the bog. In college, I worked briefly as an intern for a National Forest in Montana. I visited some bogs that the Forest Biologist, Maria, was surveying for rare plants. I recall her musing that a bog would be the perfect place to dispose of a body. Some of the placid-looking pools could swallow a person without trouble. Luckily, Maria was a cheerful person with kind, brown eyes, and seemed unlikely to use her knowledge of bogs for evil. 

But, returning to Alaska, as we hiked along Ward Creek, we passed through a grassy, open area. The ground was squishy underfoot and dotted with open pools of uncertain depth. It just had the bog vibe: a little eerie, quiet, open but surrounded by forest, a bit too wet to be completely inviting, and yet somehow intriguing. We recognized flowering bog Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), and knew for certain that we had found our bog. We'd seen Labrador tea before growing in the peat bogs of Nova Scotia. The "tea" part of its name comes from the fact that some indigenous people steep the leaves to make a beverage or medicine.

Bog Labrador tea

Bogs harbor unusual plant species like Labrador tea that can grow in the acidic environment and nowhere else. Bacteria and fungi break down the organic matter in bogs very slowly, releasing acids. In Montana, one plant Maria had been seeking was the yellow lady slipper orchid. These are fairly large, showy orchids with dangling, twisted sepals. Orchids love acidic soil, and we found two orchids in our wanders through various Alaskan muskegs. The first, heart-leafed twayblade, was so tiny we almost missed it.

Heart-leafed twayblade

Tway is an old English word for "two," and it seems to refer to the lower, split petal-like part of the flower. The twayblade was growing in a muskeg on a very steep hillside (the trail was mostly staircase)  at Settlers Cove Recreation Site. I usually think of steep hillsides as being well drained, but this one was so thick with moss and mounds of tree roots that it held water like a sponge.

The other orchid was in a muskeg near Wrangell. I noticed it right away because it was larger than the twayblade, with bright white, birdlike flowers. It is called, unimaginatively but descriptively, the white bog orchid (Plantathera dialata).

White bog orchid

Another reason that muskegs harbor unique plants is that their soils are very poor in nutrients. Plants in the muskeg can get hungry, and they hunger for . . . living flesh! In the muskeg near Ward Creek we saw tiny round-leaved sundew plants (Drosera rotundifolia).

Round-leaved sundew

The sticky looking hairs on the leaves are indeed sticky, and grab on to unfortunate insects. The leaf wraps around a insect and slowly digests it. Really, though, carnivorous plants like the sundew are not using the insects for food exactly, but more as a multivitamin. If carnivorous plants are green then they have chlorophyll, and are able to photosynthesize and make their own food. Muskeg are so nutrient deficient, though, that some plants need to take insects like multivitamins in order to stay healthy.

At the muskeg near Wrangell, I also snapped a picture of this mystery lily.

Western false asphodel? Maybe.

I found out later that is a sticky false asphodel, possibly the carnivorous western false asphodel (Triantha occidentalis). Asphodel is the flower growing in the Elysian Fields, the Greek fields of the dead, which seems apt for a carnivorous plant. Western false asphodel entraps insects on its sticky flower stems, the only carnivorous plant know to use that strategy. I saw a number of innocent-looking lilies in the muskeg, but didn't know enough at the time to check the flower stems for trapped bugs.

The Alaskan muskeg is a great reminder to look closely at some of the small things, even in a land of enormous vistas and big, charismatic animals. Just make sure that when examining the muskeg, you watch your step and don't sink, only to be rediscovered, like Tollund man, thousands of years in the future.