Calypso bulbosa x kostiukiae

There are two North American varieties of the Fairy Slipper, The Eastern Fairy Slipper, Calypso bulbosa var. americana, found from the Cascades eastward to the east coast of the USA and Canada, and the Western Fairy Slipper, Calypso bulbosa var. occidentalis, found only west of the Rockies and in the Cascades. The former has a yellow beard and an unspotted lip, the latter a white beard and a spotted lip. The ranges of these two varieties overlap in a narrow area west of the Rockies. Occasionally they hybridize and produce Kostiuk's Hybrid Fairy Slipper with a yellow beard and a spotted lip. We had looked for this hybrid three years running without success, but finally found it this spring, two plants, this and another which was starting to go by. We had two GPS locations and found it at one of those locations and then another flower simply by examining hundreds of blooming plants along the trail we were following. The link to a blog post below has other photos of this hybrid as well as photos of both parents for comparison.

On another note, this photo was taken with my new camera, the Canon 7D Mark II, and was in fact among the first photos taken with the camera. The 7D Mark II has features that my old 7D did not have and that camera had been through six years of hard use on trails while hiking and backpacking and had nearly reached the limit of its life. It is now an emergency backup. Though this photo was not taken with that lens, I also purchased (as a package) a new lens, a Canon 18-135mm, IS STM f3.5-5.6 lens to replace what was the junkiest lens Canon ever produced, the 17-85mm IS USM lens, a lens that was in constant need of repair and which Canon has never acknowledged as being poorly engineered, though it has one of the worst records of any Canon lens ever produced.