Did you know that the Southwestern trout lily is the first spring wildflower in our woodlands and forests?

This native flower, resembling a miniature Easter lily, is 5 to 6 inches tall and grows singly and in clumps. The first blooms are in late January. They survive snow and ice like this year, and continue flowering into early March if the weather stays cool.

The plateau spider lily is among Central Texas' early-blooming flowers.
Fred Gehlbach

This wildflower is a rarity that “asks” all of us to admire, photograph and protect it in places like Cameron Park, where it was first discovered by a Baylor graduate student as a species new to science 35 years ago.

Only 15 populations were known, from Fort Hood north through Waco to Dallas, when I started to study our special trout lily’s habitat and survival. I was already familiar with white- and yellow-flowered relatives in the eastern U. S. including East Texas. Their group name, trout lily, comes from single or twin, mottled green and brown leaves colored and shaped like the sides of a small trout. As a biology student and weekend fly fisherman at Cornell University in New York, I caught brook trout from creeks bordered by trout lilies!

Southwestern trout lilies live in deciduous forests on lower slopes and in ravines with northern or eastern exposures that indicate its need for a cool environment.

By late March, its flowers are mostly gone. Leaves disappear in April. In the 1960s and ’70s, Cameron Park’s trout lilies were slowly vanishing because of warmer weather, human trampling and mountain biking. Later, disc golf was added through the middle of one colony of the park’s lilies. Other local populations were erased by grazing and suburban development.

Do we care about what it takes to save this plant or are we just uninformed?

Southwestern trout
Photo courtesy of Fred Gehlbach

Hill Country dayflower
Photo courtesy of Fred Gehlbach

My interest triggered a 1979-80 study that compared forest plots with lilies at five locales to nearby similar plots without lilies. A Baylor student and I assessed lilies in three parts of Cameron Park, plus an area on Herring Avenue and one at Fort Hood. Measurements were made in the February peak of flowering and repeated during the natural die-down in April.

We learned that lily habitat has more different and larger trees, smaller soil particles with more nutrients, and lower air and soil temperatures. At that time we didn’t know that temperature was a clue to something much larger.

Soon after, my family and I moved to a new suburban development, where we participated in landscape planning that included a forested nature preserve. There were no trout lilies, but two additional early spring wildflowers found only in Central Texas.

First to bloom is plateau spider lily with multiple blue flowers in early March. Later, blue flowers appear on Hill Country dayflower. While studying the seasonality of plants and animals for 47 years in Texas, Arizona, Mexico, and Belize, I learned that “we, the people” are the major cause of increasingly early events in nature. Not just locally, but worldwide.

In Waco and other cities, human technology produces heat. Cities are “furnaces,” warmer than the countryside, and my colleagues tell me most people now live in cities and towns, including about 80 percent of Texans.

My home forest has warmed up by an average of 2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, and its wildflowers, shrubs, and trees now bloom five to 19 days earlier than in the ’80s. This includes familiar natives like red (Shumard) oak and unfamiliar ones like Ohio (white) buckeye.

Native critters are also reproducing earlier, too, and others with wings or four legs have followed the added warmth north from original homes in Latin America.

We now use the term “climate change” to include increasing storm strength and irregularity related to increasing temperature. Are you aware that 2010 was our Earth’s hottest year in modern times?

Stay tuned, because global climate change is backed by independent studies of many kinds conducted by professional scientists worldwide.

I consider this constantly as I encounter originally tropical animals like armadillos that invaded Texas from Mexico over a century ago and find Waco’s more recent arrivals from the tropics. Hello birdwatchers! How about our white-winged Doves and black-bellied whistling ducks?