Wildflower Watch

By David Kish, executive director, CB Wildflower festival

Nature’s wake-up call

Long before smartphones and AI assistants, travelers often relied on the hotel wake-up call to emerge from sleep. This was a human-initiated alert, sometimes accompanied by a gentle knock at the door. By the 1990s, the process was replaced by automated phone systems. 

Nature, too, has its own version of the wake-up call.

Each spring, the progression of wildflowers serves as an ecological alarm clock, with early bloomers such as pasque flowers, spring beauties and marsh marigolds heralding the season’s arrival. For me, the glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum) stands out as a luminous messenger with lemon-yellow petals unfurling like sunbursts across the forest floor. Often emerging in vibrant masses, glacier lilies deliver a striking announcement of spring’s rebirth, a reveille echoing across a sleepy valley.

A perennial herb, the glacier lily grows from an underground corm and typically sends forth two leaves prior to flowering. Pollination is facilitated primarily by bumblebees, while the plant itself provides critical nourishment for emerging bears and migrating hummingbirds. In this symbiotic dance, the glacier lily acts as both signal and sustenance—nature’s equivalent of a ringing phone urging us to respond.

In the mountain valleys where these lilies bloom, the melting of snow acts as a cue for growth that initiates the biological calendar. As our climate changes, the snowmelt occurs earlier each year and shifts the timing of bloom, pollination, and migration in unpredictable ways. What happens when the callers and receivers fall out of sync? Will species that rely on this timing find themselves disconnected, or even silenced?

Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) are working urgently to understand these temporal shifts. Their studies represent not only scientific inquiry but also a clarion call to society. Like the old hotel wake-up call, startling, insistent and easy to dismiss, their findings demand our attention. To ignore the first call, or the second, is to risk oversleeping through a critical moment in our ecological future.

If nature is calling, perhaps it is time we picked up the phone.