Indian Paintbrush - Hummingbirds' haven

Years ago, I was hiking over a high mountain pass enjoying the insane, kamikaze flights of at least fifty hummingbirds intent on gathering nectar from a field of brilliant red paintbrushes. I was euphoric, completely surrounded by their buzzing antics, when a wild-eyed, bearded, gnome-like man burst out of the nearby forest bellowing expletives at me. I stopped on the trail, more confused by the man running towards me than worried. I felt like I had hiked into a fairy tale.

Ends up he was a college student studying hummingbirds and their relationship to Indian Paintbrushes. He had been worried I would hike into his study plots! It was then that I learned some scientists believed paintbrushes and hummingbirds evolved together.

Paintbrushes come in red, orange, yellow, purple, pink and green. Their color comes from paintbrush's three-lobed, leafy bracts (modified leaves), rather than their actual flowers, which are tucked up inside the colorful bracts. Paintbrush's brilliance and loosely clustered bracts attract hummingbirds. Their tube-like flowers are rich with nectar and tough enough to withstand poking from hummers' beaks, thus the gnome-man's research.

Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja genus) grow throughout the West in a wide variety of habitats. There are about 22 species in Montana. They hybridize readily, so species are ever changing. Paintbrushes can photosynthesize but they must cohabitate with other species. They have special root hairs called haustoria, which absorb water and nutrients from neighboring plants. Because of this, they are able to stay vibrant throughout the growing season.

When living near lupine, paintbrushes absorb some of lupine's bitter alkaloids, which keep herbivores from eating them. They absorb selenium in selenium-rich soils. This ability has led researchers to use paintbrushes for "bioremediation," which is the process of removing pollutants from soil with living organisms.

The selenium often found in paintbrush led some Indian tribes to use it as a hair rinse to make their hair shiny. Paintbrush has also been used for treatment of rheumatism and they were literally used as paintbrushes by some tribes, hence their name.

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