Jim Habeck, professor emeritus of botany at the University of Montana, had never heard of such a thing. The earliest buttercups had bloomed in western Montana, to his knowledge, was March.
“I'd never claim no one had ever seen one bloom that early,” Habeck says. “But if it's not collected and the date and location recorded, there's no way to know.”
“Last year was unusual,” Habeck says. “I'm not sure what word describes this.”
Tree was doing some bird-watching at the refuge on Jan. 11, and not finding many birds to watch.
For the heck of it, he decided to go see if he could find any buttercups.
“The earliest I'd ever seen one was Jan. 23,” Tree says. “That was last year, and that was a shock. This year I didn't just find one. I found several.”
It was 2:30 in the afternoon. By the time he got home and got in touch with his former instructor, it was 4:30.
“Almost dark,” Tree says.
Habeck told him to hustle back to the refuge and collect one of the plants, so Habeck could dry it and press it, and so Jan. 11 could be marked as the date.
At the University of Montana Herbarium, which contains more than 129,000 plant specimens, Habeck knew that of the 100 mounted specimens of this buttercup dating back a century, the earliest flowering dates were several weeks later.
“By all the records I was able to dig up,” he says, including those of Morton Elrod (UM's first botanist) at the turn of the century, no one had ever connected a blooming buttercup to a date any earlier than some day in March.”
Buttercups require freezing temperatures in order to go into dormancy. They bloom when temperatures warm up enough.
The significance, Habeck said, could be great. It could be a piece of evidence - in addition to things like shrinking glaciers and mountaintop snow lines that get higher with passing years - that global warming threatens to turn nature on its head.
“The worst-case scenario,” he says: “If ever western Montana was so warm that the buttercup couldn't experience the cold treatment it needs to break into dormancy, what would happen? Without that cold conditioning, plants can't complete their life cycle, they can't exchange pollen and they get wiped out.”
We experienced typical winter weather in December, with large amounts of snowfall and a cold snap that sent temperatures below zero - just what the buttercup needs to go into dormancy.
But since then it's been unseasonably warm - sometimes temperatures haven't even dropped below freezing at night - warm enough for buttercups to bloom in January.
Late Tuesday night, after doing more research, Habeck says he found a guidebook to western Montana flora by Klaus Lackschewitz. In it, the author said this species of buttercup “is the very first flower to open” and that it can happen “as early as the last days of January or as late as mid-March.”
It's why collection is so important.
“It's true for the first bluebird in or the last robin leaving,” Habeck says. “The only thing scientists can go by is documentation.”
“It's not uncommon for plant collectors like Klaus to bypass common, widespread plants like buttercups, thinking the herbarium already has plenty of them stored away,” he goes on. They “are not thinking that it's the time of blooming that might be very important and collections need to be made for the record.”
The Jan. 11 blooming buttercups still qualify as “unusual and rare,” Habeck says.
And when he's done drying and pressing the one Wayne Tree collected, it will be on record in the UM Herbarium. Habeck likes the idea that 10, 20, even 100 years from now, some scientist may find the information from 2006 useful.
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