The Carnivorous Kingdom

(birds chirping) My name is Thursa Long, and I was born about a half a mile from where I'm sitting and I've been living there almost 92 years now.

I live 100 feet from where I was born.

So you can say I haven't been around much, been around enough that I've never found a place as pretty as this is right here.

(light music) Thursa grew up in the Splinter Hill pitcher plant bog, celebrated as one of the most biologically diverse spots on planet Earth.

These Alabama woods and meadows are home to an incredible array of plants and animals, including many that can be found nowhere else.

But the bog's most fascinating residents are the dozens of species of carnivorous plants, including the pitcher plants that give the bogs their name.

(women singing in foreign language) We didn't have screens for our windows and doors when I was a little girl, so the flies felt quite welcome to come in.

But these pitcher plants, they were important.

They were fly catchers.

That was the name we knew about.

Mama would say, "Go get some fly catchers."

Down the hill we went.

Let me see, there's been one right here.

Well, they won't mind if I use it, will they?

We went down below us and we gathered about eight or 10 of these and Mama put them in a jar of water, poured little honey.

There's a bug after it now.

Poured a little honey dribble down in there, here came to flies and they get to go.

And it was so good they went all the way to the bottom and drowned.

Thursa's mother would've caught just as many flies without adding any honey because the pitchers make their own.

The lip of the pitchers exude a sweet nectar that insects find irresistible.

This eastern swallowtail can't get enough, busily sucking up every drop.

The butterfly is too big to end up as dinner, but smaller bugs lured by the nectar quickly discover that the lip is coated in a slippery wax that sends them sliding down inside the pitcher.

The pitcher plants get their name from their leaves, which form these tall vases that actually hold water.

The trapped bugs fall into the water, which acts as a sort of stomach, digesting insects and providing nutrients to the plant.

The hood over the mouth of the pitcher helps keep rainwater out, concentrating the plant's digestive juices.

Getty Hammer studies Alabama's pitcher plants.

This is Sarracenia leucophylla.

They are all full of a digestive fluid.

Some of those digestive enzymes are actually similar to the ones that we produce in our salivary glands, but they use them essentially to break down chitin, to help them digest insects.

Sarracenia also have within their traps downward pointing hairs, so that also helps kind of trap insects and make sure that they can't escape.

They kind of have this white pigmentation that aids in confusing insects.

It kind of looks like a window out, which will help further trap the insects.

But the white top pitcher plants are just one kind of pitcher.

Nine of the 11 species known in America are native to Alabama, and many of them live nowhere but Alabama.

This is the cane break pitcher plant, one of the rarest plants in the world.

It is known only from five locations in two Alabama counties.

The spots where it exists are very, very small.

You're looking here at the entire population at one of the five locations, which was purchased by the Nature Conservancy to ensure the survival of the species.

This is the parrot beak pitcher, whose pitchers lie on the ground and trap air in inside like little pillows.

When the bog floods, the parrot beaks pitchers float just at the water's surface and capture minnows and water bugs that swim inside.

This is the frog britches pitcher.

Short, squat, little pitchers about three inches tall with large openings.

They depend primarily on creatures falling into them when they try to drink the water inside.

The eggs this mosquito lays in the pitcher won't survive in the plant's digestive juices, but the mosquito doesn't know that, ensuring another source of protein for the plant.

This frog britches pitcher has been taken over by a funnel web spider.

The spider built its web over the pitcher plant in order to use the plant's nectar to attract insects into its web, stealing meals from the pitcher plant.

This fly was attracted to the plant's nectar, but landed and got caught in the sticky web and then devoured by the spider.

Here's another spider using the same tactic on top of another clump of frogs britches.

An unlucky jump, and this cricket is helplessly trapped in the sticky web.

Watch it again in slow motion.

The spider carries its eggs on its back, so its home gets flooded she can carry her eggs to safety.

Which brings us to the big question, Why are these plants eating bugs?

Why do they need to eat bugs?

How do they evolve to eat bugs?

The main reason carnivorous plants are ingesting insects is because this area is very limited in nitrogen.

That's one of the most limiting nutrients in bogs, and so they are essentially getting their nitrogen needs almost all from insects.

And so carnivorous plants, depending on the species, are going to absorb about 20 to 70% of their nitrogen from the insects.

For plants, it's all about nitrogen.

That is the fertilizer that makes them grow.

That's what we spray on corn fields and cotton fields and everything else.

Nitrogen.

Bog habits are notoriously low in nitrogen, so eating bugs is how the carnivorous plants fill that gap and create the nutrients they need to survive.

We're in the field with Skyler Kerr, an entomologist, to see the creatures on the dinner menu in a pitcher plant bog.

Seems like the remains of the beetle, yeah.

I can see some of that exoskeleton still there.

I think it's a little bit harder to digest than the innards.

In this pitcher alone, we found bees, wasps, crickets, beetles, ants, love bugs, a snail and various kinds of larva.

So we've seen plenty of small insects being caught in these pitcher plants, but some of the larger pitcher plants can get decently large prey.

So this is a bee, I believe this one is a kind of bumblebee.

It's not a carpenter bee, but it's decently large.

So larger the plant, the larger the prey it can take more or less.

And this is the second bee, different species, but second bee we've seen today in one of these plants.

So right here is the pitcher plant that we seem to have the three adult moths gonna hang out on the top, just peering out, killing the day, hanging out.

Pitcher plant moths are one of the only animals able to defeat the plant's various trapping mechanisms.

Adults sleep in the pitchers in the daytime and actually raise their young inside the pitchers.

So we just saw the adult versions, but down in this one, I found probably a late stage larva.

We're gonna try to get a good look at that if we can.

We're gonna try to open this guy up and find this larvae that should be right there.

The inner wall of a pitcher is the only place the adult will lay its eggs.

The caterpillar grows from larva to adult entirely inside of a pitcher plant.

This is the caterpillar from the pitcher we cut open.

We put him on the side of the plant thinking he would climb to the top and down inside the mouth.

Instead, he immediately chewed a hole in the side of the pitcher and climbed inside.

Each caterpillar will destroy the pitcher it's born in.

As it nears adulthood, the caterpillar will climb down to the bottom of the pitcher and chew a hole, releasing the digestive juices from the plant, making a dangerous place more to its liking.

The brown patches on the sides of this pitcher are places where the caterpillar has eaten the walls of the pitcher so thin they're collapsing.

All of the bent and broken pitchers in this image are plants that the caterpillars chewed on until they collapsed.

So we found this scarab beetle inside one of the pitcher plants.

He's not dead, struggling a little bit.

Well, partially digested.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, he might not have the best life.

But it has, there he goes, falls off.

Ground beetle.

These are what are commonly called patent leather beetles, or bess beetles.

They're in the family Passalidae.

They live under rotting logs, 'cause they're primarily decomposers.

They will help break down a lot of that rotting material.

Though generally they live alongside termites, these species of beetles are very fun because they can be semi-social is what we understand them as.

So we found these two together.

They can live in small pods with one another, but you're not gonna see them in like a huge hive similar to termites, bees or ants, 'cause that's called eusociality.

But semi sociality is something that these guys will partake in every now and then.

Look at these tiny red mites crawling around the beetle's head.

See the mite crawling across its abdomen?

They are living on the beetle.

They could be sucking blood, they could also just be cleaning mites.

There are some larger insects that will have mites that just kind of clean them.

There it is.

Well, this is a grasshopper in the family Acrididae.

Acrididae has a lot of kinds of grasshoppers.

They're known as the shorthorn grasshoppers.

And it includes many of the locusts that people know about.

Many grasshoppers are in the same family, including this guy.

We have another one right here.

Abdomen.

Seems like it's probably a Libellulidae, which is a very common family of dragonfly.

Dragonflies are the dominant aerial predator.

It's a fun fact to always throw out that dragonflies have a roughly 95% success rate in catching prey.

So they are one of, if not the best, predators percentage wise in catching the food that they want.

So the fact that they are not really wanting to even compete or having a hard time competing with this large swath of carnivorous plants is impressive alone on the botanical side.

Dotted throughout the south's pitcher plant bogs are sand hills that host one of the richest assortments of grasses found anywhere in the United States, richer even than the great prairies of the Midwest in terms of the number of grass species.

Skyler is using a technique called sweep net to survey the tiny world living among the blades of grass.

-(grass rustling) -(bugs trilling) And there's a little Acridid.

So it's a lot of aphids and ants.

Bunch of spiders.

So we have a wide variety of insect life in here.

We have some flies, we have some ants, we have some Hymenopterans, which in this case they are plant hoppers.

We have nymphal versions of a lot of Hymenopterans.

We have a small spider in here.

I think we have a small jumping spider.

This is just a fraction of the things you can find.

This is maybe what, 10 minutes of sweep netting.

So, katydids are in the family Tettigoniidae, and they have generally much longer antenna than you would find on, like we saw earlier, the Acridids, the shorthorn grass hoppers.

Acridids, when they're older, they're gonna be in the trees and they kind of make that short call.

It's like (trills tongue).

It's gonna be different from cicadas, which have the much longer call, but they're also called bush crickets commonly.

This is a nymphal Reduviidae, also known as the assassin bug.

This again, is a Hymenopteroid.

It's a Hymenopteran, has that long piercing sucking mouth part.

And they use theirs to stab into other insects and eat them.

(playful quirky music) Obviously the pitcher plants are going to be carnivorous.

They're gonna want to eat a lot of things like flies, beetles, ants, stuff like that.

It's kind of a death ground.

There are dozens of species of plants in these bogs that eat bugs, including nine out of the 10 pitcher plants known in North America.

But there are many other types of carnivorous plants, in entirely different biological genera, each catching bugs with wildly different trapping mechanisms.

Exploring them takes a deep dive into a fascinating jungle where the plants are the lions and tigers, rendering their home meadows into killing fields.

Pitcher plant bogs undergo a series of startling transformations as the seasons change, so we are going to start here in the wintertime.

The bog is frozen.

Cold, lifeless, mostly brown.

And when the frost is on the ground, a little white.

As the ice begins to melt and the animals start to stir with the coming spring, the bog is transformed by fire.

The first thing a pitcher plant bog wants in the spring is to be lit on fire.

For eons, that was done by lightning, sparking annual wildfires that swept across the open grass savannas.

But today, we have to give our remaining bogs a helping hand, pouring the fire right on them from diesel drip cans.

Fire is nature's gardener, controlling what can grow in the bog.

Without burning, bogs disappear under thickets of gallberry.

A carnivorous plant simply can't compete against the fast growing shrubs that want to colonize their wet homes and suck up all the water.

Without regular fires, carnivorous plants disappear.

So the burn was successful today.

We had a good northeasterly wind and we did a backfire.

So we went against the wind to slow the fire down slightly so that there was a longer residence time so that it burns off more of the hardwood.

So the fire moved nicely across the land.

We've cleared out a lot of the hardwood and the invasive brush that was here and it's exposed the sunlight to the area to allow the pitcher plants to get the sunlight.

After the burn, a nice layer of ash is left all across the bog, which acts as a fertilizer.

The ash contains all the nitrogen the carnivorous plants collected from bugs the previous year.

The burn frees that nitrogen, fueling the growth of hundreds of plant species in the bog.

The fast moving fires burn the plants closest to the ground, but these longleaf pines, which evolved with fire, are undamaged.

Likewise with the animals that live in the bog.

Minutes after the fire, snakes and other animals emerge from the moist ground and begin prospecting around.

This is the morning after the fire.

Thousands of webs made by bowl and doily spiders dot the landscape.

They were all made overnight by spiders that were able to drop down into the wet ground as fire approached and hide from the flames.

Bugs and seeds are easy pickings for the birds with all the underbrush burned away.

(birds chirping) This bog was burned on March 7th.

This is one month later, April 7th, same place.

Life just bursts forth out of the ground.

One of the key elements in that explosion of life is water.

-Rain.

-(rain pattering) These Gulf Coast bogs occur in the rainiest area of the nation, averaging 70 inches of rain a year.

Near daily showers in the spring create what's called sheetflow in the bogs, with a layer of water flowing across the ground, sometimes for days at a time.

(light music) (water splashing) (light music continues) (crickets chirping) Alabama is home to 54 orchid species, and many of them live in the bogs.

This is the rose pogonia, or snakemouth orchid.

The grass pink orchid.

The rosebud orchid.

The green fly orchid, an arboreal species that lives in the trees along the edges of the bog.

-(light music) -(bugs buzzing) -(birds chirping) -(light music continues) (bugs buzzing) The milkweed blooms in the summer.

Perfect timing for the monarch population that migrates through the south, which lays eggs by the millions on the underside of milkweed leaves in the bogs.

Monarchs have almost disappeared because of the lack of milkweed these days due to factory farming and development.

But in the bogs, we have a good population and you see monarch caterpillars on every milkweed bush.

They eat night and day, and shed their skin and grow larger multiple times.

This caterpillar has just shed, and is now eating its own nutrient rich skin.

You can tell how much larger she's gotten by looking at the piece of face covering still clinging to her head.

Here's an aphid living on the milkweed bush.

And here's one of the aphid's main predators, the junk bug, also known as an assassin bug.

And here comes a zebra spider, which preys on both aphids and junk bugs.

The junk bug is a master of disguise.

It covers its soft and delicate body with the carcasses of its victims.

All the things in its hands and all the things stuck on its back are tiny bodies.

Here it's handling a tiny preying mantis, rearranging his gruesome load of corpses.

But he's lingered too long.

Look who's appearing on the other side of the leaf.

The zebra spider.

A quick strike and it's over.

The junk bug gives a death shiver and the spider takes its prey.

(light music) The aphid has escaped danger.

At least for now.

(light dramatic music) (light music) So this is another carnivorous plant out here at Splinter Hill bogs.

This is called a thread dew.

So the thread dew, again, has these longer stalks.

It's unlike the pitcher plants we saw that have a reservoir at the bottom.

These instead have a bunch of micro little tubules that come off and have very, very sticky substances on the end of them, almost glue-like.

This, of course, lets insects get attached really easily where then it can digest them.

This one is absolutely loaded with lots of kinds of midges, which is the catchall term for small fly, biting or non biting.

We also have a moth here, it seems to be a small, probably Noctuid moth if I had to make a best guess.

And you're, of course, gonna have a lot of flying insects get stuck on these somewhat similar, but not exactly like a spider web.

(bugs trilling) And they're beautiful, so (laughs).

(birds chirping) Drosera, or the sundews are probably my favorite carnivorous plants.

They're just very aesthetically pleasing.

They're really beautiful plants.

And we have several species of sundew, which is awesome, I get to see a lot, so (chuckles).

They have drops of the dew or digestive fluid on the top of glands on their leaves.

So they essentially are very sticky waiting for an insect to either crawl across or land on them.

The dew really aids in kind of attracting insects because it looks like nectar.

So the coloration, as well as that shiny dew, attracts insects in to land on them.

And then once they're triggered the will start to curl in on their prey and then start to digest them.

(birds chirping) -(thunder rumbling) -(rain pattering) -(bugs chirping) -(ticking) -(bugs trilling) -(birds chirping) Alabama is home to 97 species of crayfish, more than any other state.

One of the rarest is the burrowing bog crayfish.

These mud mounds are the chimneys that crayfish build each day as they excavate a network of underground water-filled caves.

Brian Jones agreed to try and catch one of the rarest crayfish species in the nation.

Goes this way, then it goes that way.

And it opens up a little...

It's over here.

Oh really?

Yeah.

-Wow.

-It's snaking.

There he is.

The burrowing bog crayfish are a dark greenish blue, very unusual in the crayfish world.

They hide in their burrows all day long, then emerge at night to walk around the bog catching insects, worms and even frogs.

Yeah, perfect.

The dark coloring helps them hide in the corpuscular hours.

They have enormous claws compared to species that live in creeks and rivers and tiny, almost useless tails.

That's because the bog crayfish never need to swim to escape predators.

Brian caught a creek dwelling species, the sly crayfish, for comparison.

Note it's giant tail for swimming away from predators and the brown coloring for hiding in the leaves on the bottom of the stream.

And then the tiny claws.

These crayfish are clearly made to escape rather than fight.

You can see just the shape right there with his claws right there.

Crawls down in and then pushes the mud out.

Seems like the perfect shape and size for that hole.

(bugs trilling) Remember the bog that burned on March 7th?

This is the same place four months later on August 7th.

It's raining.

It has rained almost every day since March.

These bogs receive more than 70 inches of rain a year, which leads to a dizzying array of flowers for insects to feast on.

Including strange moths like this, a hummingbird hawk moth, an unusual insect that flies like a bird.

Its wings beat 70 times a second, enabling it to hover in place and fly at speeds of up to 12 miles an hour.

(rain pattering) The other extraordinary thing in this bog are these white fringed orchids.

This is the last place they are known to exist in Alabama.

There were once a number of populations spread around the state, but all have disappeared.

The last known spot, in another bog about 25 miles away, was paved over to make a parking lot for a Popeye's fried chicken.

Steve Heath was the chief marine biologist for the state of Alabama.

Retired, he spends his time trying to protect wetlands and pitcher plant bogs.

This is one of very few, it's the very best bog for white orchids anywhere in the state.

Yeah.

And because nobody knows where it is.

They've actually caught university botanists poaching, digging 'em up and trying to take 'em back to the greenhouse.

And they say the way they grow- It doesn't work.

No because they have to have a special algae or something in the soil with them.

I've heard that.

And then they also, the way their root system is, if you try to transplant 'em, they're not gonna make it.

So it makes it doubly horrible.

And somebody's is poaching.

Yeah.

The bog where the orchids are located is just a few hundred feet from a heavily developed section of Fish River.

Decades ago, the river banks were lined with pitcher plants instead of houses.

The bog was discovered by accident 25 years ago, when a property owner illegally cleared wetlands with a bulldozer to build a house and a yard.

Steve Heath called the Corps of Engineers and U.S.

Fish and Wildlife because he believed the area deserved protection as a wetland under federal law.

While federal officials were investigating, a bunch of pitcher plants popped up, and then a bunch of white fringed orchids.

The first year there were 20 orchids.

The next year, 100.

This year, 25 years later, there were 1,680.

The property was donated to the South Alabama Land Trust, which manages the property and counts the orchids every year.

Well, as you said, it was really virtually nothing here.

And when we obtained the property, we started, we implemented a habitat management plan and we started with rigorous burns.

And in burning it, it really allows the natural species to flourish.

Have you ever seen the white fringed orchid anywhere else?

I have not seen the white fringed orchid anywhere else.

This is a very unique place, small but mighty.

Once we lose it, they're forever gone.

And as quickly as this area is growing, if we don't step up and do our part to conserve it now, we'll lose it forever.

Coming from England, and I used to crave adventure in England and I used to feel a little claustrophobic because there's not wilderness.

You can't just escape into days on end of trekking through wilderness, it's not really left anymore.

But here it's still here and we still have all these amazing animals and ecosystems.

It's just that the whole thing is incredible and people just don't seem to realize that it's not never ending.

Like if you keep developing, you keep clear cutting like it's gonna be gone at some point.

I mean, and then you know.

I mean, we complain about the Amazon being deforested, but doing the same exact same thing right here.

Yeah, really fast, yeah.

Yeah.

On the other end of the scale, like that used to all be forested and it's not anymore, it's now all agricultural land, and so it's been clear cut at some point.

This sod farm used to be all pitcher plant bogs.

Now, instead of carnivorous plants, they grow grass to roll up, take to a subdivision and roll out.

Same with this cow field.

This was all pitcher plant bogs, and these cotton fields, millions and millions of acres across the south that used to be pitcher plant bogs turned into one gigantic white monoculture.

This is the location of our new pitcher plant bog.

It'd be a great resource for people to come to and be able to find out the diversity of plants in the Southeast, 'cause they're fast being depleted in the wild.

So this is kind of gonna be a last place to come see things.

And hopefully that'll inspire people to preserve things that are out in the wild and kind of be aware of what what's out there.

'Cause there's so much out there that most people just never think about.

Seth and Ben have been growing carnivorous plants for their bog from seed to avoid taking any of the precious plants from their natural habitats.

Some Scarlet belle, which are psittacina and I want to say, leucophylla craus.

We have our sundews.

We got our tracyi.

Love the water of the tracyi.

Some of those smaller sundews, but most of what's covering these tables is these trays of these baby pitchers.

And we've just got about two and a half thousand of these little, maybe leucophylla hybrid looking baby plants home brewing right now.

It's really kind of cool to look really closely and you'll start to see the differences already even though they're so tiny.

I did these seeds in the fall and they sprouted kind of early spring.

So these are probably about six months old at this size.

We have a few of them that have started to catch things.

So you can kind of see it depending on how the light is.

Yeah, this one here.

-It's got some.

-Yes, that one's got some.

There's a little bit of a shadow on the tube, but that one.

So even when they're little bitty, like small as some of these, you can kind of sometimes see like little bits of dark stuff inside the tubes.

They're catching something, maybe like spring tails or something, but even when they're first sprouted they're not making just purely photosynthetic leaves, they're making functional pitchers that can catch things.

Yeah, it's really neat.

Now I've heard that this Alabama suite of pitchers is the most species in a geographic area this size that you can find worldwide.

We're pretty much dead center in pitcher plant central.

I mean, you get some over to the west of us in places like Louisiana and Texas, and you get some to the east of us in like Florida and maybe Georgia in places.

But we're kind of in the middle of that central region of pitcher plants.

So we really get the overlap of all those species diversity.

So we're kind of the hot bed of a Sarracenia species in the Southeast.

There's a sudden rush of color in September and October.

Scientists call it the fall nectar flow, when hundreds of plants and trees flower at once to maximize their chances of attracting pollinators.

The nectar is really a bribe offered by the flowers to entice birds, flies, bees, and butterflies to help them successfully reproduce by spreading their pollen.

The brilliant colors displayed by the flowers are not meant for our eyes.

The flowers have a mission, which is to attract their pollinators.

That we find them lovely is just an added bonus.

(playful upbeat music) Death is common in the bog, from the carnivorous plants, but also the dozens of species of spiders.

Every now and then, a creature manages to escape from a spider's clutches, but few are so lucky.

The green lynx spider is one of the bog's most efficient killers.

It's an ambush hunter, relying on its green coloring to blend in with foliage and surprise its victims.

This baby lynx climbed down into a pitcher and captured a pitcher plant moth caterpillar for lunch.

(bugs trilling) The lynx's primary targets are crickets, bees, and hornets.

As November arrives, the female lynx spiders swell with eggs and their bodies begin to lose their vibrant color.

Once they lay a clutch of eggs, they quit eating altogether and focus all of their energies on guarding their egg sac.

They're even able to spit venom at attackers, a venom strong enough that it can temporarily blind a human.

After more than a month, the hatchlings emerge.

Mom will last a few more weeks, guarding her young until her last breath.

(bugs trilling) This golden orb weaver did the same thing, guarding its young until it died.

A fly took advantage of the rotting carcass to lay its eggs.

In quite a turnabout, the maggots are nourished by feeding on the body of one of their main predators.

This property has been in the Yonge family since before the Civil War.

Lynn Yonge's grandfather and great grandfather burned the property annually for more than 100 years to keep the land open so they could harvest pine sap to sell to turpentine companies.

The regular burning ensured the survival of multiple pitcher plant bogs scattered around the land.

My goal is to leave it alone.

I think the value of the property, I don't need to take the timber off of it in my lifetime and I want to try to prevent that from happening.

I asked to visit the site after Lynn told me there were multiple pitcher plant species that he'd never seen anywhere else.

See if I can find one of those.

I see one.

Right here.

-Yeah.

-One here.

There's several there, there's no green, and so there's no red on some of these.

This right here, all red, you know, and to me that's just a different critter.

So this one's kind of different too for me, but just the way the veining is on 'em like that.

Sorta a curly Q edge that's on there.

That's a little different too.

Looking for one of those ones with a red lip on it.

A quick tour suggested the property was home to six of the 10 species of pitcher plants known in North America.

So we brought in our gang of botanists.

I guess, after all the rain.

This bog was a complete surprise because until he burned down here we didn't even know it was here.

To me, this is possibly that weary eye that we're talking about.

A lot has got that very round hood to it.

Weary eye has more the wrinkles and the tan color.

Yeah, like this one in particular with the wrinklies.

Research on that or anything.

Is that just straight wormroot?

Bladderwort.

Bladderwort.

Yeah.

And so unlike a lot of the carnivorous plants which utilize their leaves above ground to trap insects, these actually have traps underground.

So they have little bladders, and essentially once that bladder is triggered, the trigger pressure of the vacuum of that bladder will suck in any insects and then they can digest them in that bladder.

Just put it in your mouth and kind of bite it, you know, and just kind of try to get the- -Let the- -Juices a little bit.

-You know?

-All right.

You chew on it and it tastes like tin foil.

-Oh!

-Oh, yum.

Good snack.

You want half of it?

-You wanna go first?

-Oh, you go first.

Okay.

Oh, you put the whole thing in your mouth, okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not having a good time.

(people laughing) But I do feel my damn tongue going numb.

(people laughing) -Gonna swallow it?

-It's okay to spit.

Oh, I will be spitting.

Now what's happening in your mouth?

So my whole tongue is numb.

In a pins and needle sort of sensation, like...

It's hot and it's cold.

It does taste like tin foil.

Bog plants had all sorts of medicinal uses.

This native hibiscus, known as comfortroot, eased digestive issues and is still widely used today.

Joe-Pye-weed was used for all kinds of things, including to treat syphilis, fever, and for healing burns.

Goldenrod was used to treat kidney stones.

And then milkweed root, which was used for indigestion, flatulence, rheumatoid arthritis, typhoid fever, and eczema.

Oh, the homemade recipes and remedies they did have.

We had one little old lady, she was really had some Indian heritage.

They had a cure for skin cancer.

And this is not make me believe, I saw it with own eyes.

She went into the woods and she gathered her herbs and whatever and then she mixed it.

And my grandfather had, well, it was a deep cancer.

The day came, Miss Finn is gonna take the cancer off.

I was standing right there, just as close as I could get.

She lifted that thing up and carefully got it away from him.

Put her plaster on it, healed up, never came back.

We've been living through a pandemic with COVID.

This is not the first time tribes have been through apocalyptic levels of pandemic.

Our people survived through horrific phases of smallpox that killed millions and millions of indigenous people.

Come to find out that several tribes had used pitcher plants to treat smallpox.

It's in historical accounts, it's out there, and then recent research shows that it worked.

Scientific methods showed that it does kill pox viruses.

So I think that's incredible, and I had no idea.

It probably played a role in the survival of my ancestors being here today.

But there are so many medicinal uses, all kinds of uses of plants all around us all the time.

We've got to protect it.

We've got to protect the creation that's around us because once it's gone, it's gone.

The Poarch Creek have been doing just that; purchasing tens of thousands of acres of pitcher plant habitat, including this area along Magnolia Creek.

The tribe's purchases represent one of the largest efforts to protect habitat in the state in decades.

Creek people were called Creek people because of where they settled along these creeks.

The original word for our people is Muskogee, but Europeans referred to us as the Creeks and it stuck, you know, either word works.

And so when the tribe purchased all of this property in this creek front area, it was kind of like a return to having tribal land that was really similar to what they would have originally lived on.

Not only did the tribe buy all of this creek front property, they also bought all the adjacent land and piney woods that go on beyond it.

And in all of that, there's all kind of potential for pitcher plant bogs to come up out of the ground.

So just beyond that tree line over there is the creek, and running down in this basin is the pitcher plant bog with all this longleaf pine.

So all this property we've purchased all along the creeks here are full of pitcher plant bog habitat.

So for Creek people in Alabama, pitcher plant bogs were a huge part of the mosaic of what we lived in pre-colonially, but it really is a big part of longleaf pine habitats as well, which you can see is planted all around here by the tribe.

It's one of the greatest things the Poarch Band of Creek Indians has done for our local areas; plant tons and tons of acres of longleaf pine again.

It does take a lot to keep pitcher plant bogs healthy.

What we need is more fire to keep all this woody growth down.

And our Creek people were very intimately aware of how to use fire to maintain the landscape.

A lot of things at the Poarch community were kind of lost over time as we became assimilated, like the language died out in the sixties, the seventies, that time period, a lot of songs, our stomp dancing tradition.

They didn't really do that anymore at a certain point.

But some things persisted.

And it's just like you would imagine.

The things that you really need to survive persisted.

Food ways, gardening knowledge and medicine knowledge of plants around you.

So that's why I think the plant knowledge is something that we have lots of stories and kind of tidbits here and there.

Granted a lot was lost, but plant knowledge is one of those things for food and medicine that's so basic to your survival.

And that was a big part of the Poarch Creek community for a long time, even after the songs and dances and languages faded away.

Creek people, just the average Creek person, I'm not talking about a medicine man, I'm not talking about a medicine woman, I'm talking about just the average teenager, a granny, whoever, they had a much more extensive knowledge of using the plants around us than we do today and I personally am very interested in restoring that.

Going back to that baseline of what's the everyday common use knowledge.

And there is so much, I think even modern herbalists are at the tip of the iceberg compared to what we used to know.

I don't know if we ever even recognized how much biodiversity is out here.

-Yeah.

-Because we were just so lucky to grow up in it.

-Yeah.

-You know, it was, oh yeah, the pitcher plant bogs.

Oh yeah, the longleaf pines.

Like totally that's an Alabama thing.

It was like very normal for dad to like come home with a bucket of pitcher plants for mom yeah.

When he was like trying to get on the good side, you know, like wasn't coming home with flowers from the grocery store it was like coming home with like a five gal bucket of pitcher plants, yeah.

-Yeah.

-(light music) Okay, I did not get very far toward home.

I was leaving the bog, I'm up here in the country, and all of a sudden orchids everywhere in this ditch on the side of the road.

So nature is out here wanting to come back, we just have to get outta the way and make a little room.

The seeds are here, we just have to let 'em grow.

(light music)