Welcome to Life List, a Burning Podcast.
SPEAKER_05Hello, hello, welcome, welcome everyone. This is Life List, a Birding Podcast. I am George Armistead here with my co-host, Molly Brown. Molly, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_04Hey, George. Doing fine, kind of in the summer doldrums. Um, but yeah, it's uh it's going really well. Um I feel like with our guests that we're about to introduce, that it sounds like I'm just saying this for his sake. But it's been really good for plants uh recently because we seeded a bunch of big sections of land last year. And in the past couple weeks, a few things have just started coming up that I wasn't really sure if they'd taken or not. So that's been how July has been for me. Just a lot of like Susan's and even some cone flower that I really wasn't noticing until it started blooming. Um there's a big patch of swamp milkweed, which we haven't had on the property before. Um, it's coming up really nicely. Um, so that's kind of been my my fascination lately.
SPEAKER_05Nice. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_04How about you?
SPEAKER_05Well, I'm scratching and itching. I was out in uh down on the eastern shore, Maryland, this weekend, and uh must uh wandered into some some chiggers. Um berry bugs as they're known, the these larval mites. And uh I suspect our listeners by and large are familiar with those, but they I react to those really pretty strongly. Um and so I'm an I'm an itchin' and scratching. Um but it it was worth it. Got my my first Luna Moth on our on our farm place there. A beautiful, beautiful big one. Uh yeah, I was pretty stoked about that. Uh that was probably the highlight of the past few days. But yeah, I think we should waste no time. We have a guest we're really excited to have with us uh that knows a thing or two about bugs and pollinator plants uh and pollinators, and that is Dr. Doug Talamy. Doug is an entomologist, conservationist, and professor at the University of Delaware, whose work has transformed our understanding of the relationship between native plants and wildlife. His research and books, including Bringing Nature Home and Nature's Best Hope, have inspired millions to see their own yards as part of the solution to the biodiversity crisis. Driven by the belief that everyone can play a role, Doug co-founded Homegrown National Park to encourage people to plant natives in the spaces they care for. His vision is simple. When we all take part, we create the connected habitats that life depends on. His books have definitely become a something of a Bible, I think, for Molly and myself and many, many, many, many others. Uh Doug, it is a real pleasure and an honor to have you with us today. How are you doing? Doug Tallamy.
SPEAKER_02Appreciate uh the invitation. I'm doing fine. I am not itching for once. I just I'm itch-free. I'm not sure why, but um Yeah. Great thing. Is that a good thing? Yeah, it's a good thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I imagine you find yourself in a position to be itching and scratching pretty regular. Uh what have you been doing to keep busy lately?
SPEAKER_02A lot of email, uh, a lot of podcasts, a lot of phone calls. Uh, you know, we had the big hot spell, so we weren't weren't out as much as as usual. But um I have had a stretch where I've been home almost two weeks, and that's been great. Um little chainsawing. I've planted so many things at home that I've lost my light in a lot of places. And uh plus we heat we heat with wood, so gotta get ready for next winter. We had the uh ash borer come through and kill most of our ashes, so I'm taking those down, and that's what we're gonna heat with. But yeah, easy to keep busy. Nice.
SPEAKER_04And you're in Pennsylvania, right?
SPEAKER_02Right, Oxford, Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_04Gotcha.
SPEAKER_05The great state of Pennsylvania. I never miss an opportunity to plug the home state here.
SPEAKER_04I can almost see it from over here in almost heaven. We um we just had a big maple tree come down. So we my my husband and I live on 42 acres of old strip mine. 25 acres or so of that is woods that was logged, I think, in the 70s or so. Um, so it's a lot, it's very rocky. They basically had cleared this field and like dumped all of the rock that they'd removed into the woods. So a lot of things don't take root particularly well or they're growing over top of the rocks. But I um, as much as I like having the maples around, just a big healthy tree coming down. I'm so excited because it created a huge gap of light right in the middle of the thickest part of the woods. So we're cutting that up tonight. And uh and I can't wait to see what happens um where that's gonna grow in. So I'm I'm actually excited, even though it's a nice tree that came down.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, good luck. Watch for those invasive. That's where they want to come in, right? Right? That light gap.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. We've done a little bit of management for that. We've had this property for six years, but I guess we should we should back up. I I know that a lot of listeners of this podcast have read your books and know about homegrown national park and native planting, but I think we should talk from the beginning a little bit. Um and may maybe we start with the homegrown national park concept. If that sounds good to you, Doug. Um do you want to talk about that a little bit?
SPEAKER_02Sure, yeah, we can approach that in a couple different ways. A lot of people want to know how I came up with the idea. And I came up with the idea when I this was way back in 2007, I think. I saw the statistic that we had um converted forty million acres of this country into lawn. It's now about forty-four million acres. Um so you know, forty million, how big is that? It's actually bigger than than all of New England combined, but I said, Well, what if we cut half of that lawn in half, or you know, just reduced it by half? That would give us twenty million acres to work with. And how big is that? And I started to add up all the national parks in the lower 48 and it didn't equal twenty million acres. So I said, gee, let's make a a new national park out of the restored areas right in our yard that that were once launched. We'll call it Homegrown National Park because we're doing it at home and and it'll be great. Um and I started talking about it in in my talks. When I wrote uh Nature's Best Hope, I dedicated a chapter to it. But that's all I did. I mean it wasn't wasn't really a thing. Um around 2020, 2020, I gave a talk in uh must have been before COVID, but I gave a talk in Connecticut and Michelle Alfendery had just retired from a uh branding career, whatever that is, in Manhattan. And uh her husband's a painter and sh they wanted uh he wanted a big barn to paint in and so they moved up to Connecticut, and she was she was a perfect example of what we call the non-choir, somebody who has no exposure to nature, doesn't appreciate it, doesn't know why we need it. Um well anyway, she was up there and I was giving a talk, and one of her neighbors uh insisted that she go to this talk because they own some property now and they didn't know how to how to deal with it. So they dragged her to the talk. She came up to me afterwards and she said, You're not reaching your uh your target audience. And I said, uh she said, You only talk to the choir. I said, Well, it's only the choir that invites me. And she said, Well, you want to reach the people who don't already know this. I said, I know, I know. She said, You've got to do social media, and you should have a small nonprofit to spearhead this message for the non-choir. And I said, I agree with you, but I don't do any of that. You know, I'm supposed to be a scientist, I'm supposed to be gathering data, doing research. And she said, Well, I do do that, and I think we should work together. Now, other people had approached me in the past, and I'd always said no, but this I must have been uh in a weak spot or something, but I said, okay. So we started uh Homegrown National Park as a small nonprofit. And when I say we, that's the point where Michelle really took over. I mean, she created a board and and really started to run the show. So we now have an executive director and and uh I guess three paid uh employees aboard. Um we're still small, but uh it is a real nonprofit. We've and and the mission is our vision is to have conservation landscaping become default. That's what everybody has. And then if you want to change it, okay. But if you move to a new property, it's already going to be landscaped. The developers are already going to uh um keep conservation in mind when they're developing corporate landscapes, everything. That's the vision. Now we're a long way from that, um, but uh that means we're going to have to reach private landowners everywhere. About 78% of the country is privately owned. Uh and and the reason we're focusing on private landowners is because um we've got parks and we've got preserves, but we're, you know, we're headed towards the sixth grade extinction. It's just not working. It's not enough. So we need to landscape the areas between those parks and preserves in a way that biodiversity, that plants and animals can can have viable habitat. And that will connect those parks and preserves so that they're no longer isolated, no longer small. And that's gonna make the big difference for for uh this biodiversity crisis. But that means everybody who owns private property has got to play this game. And most people don't don't have a clue that that is their responsibility. You know, we claim we own a piece of the earth. Well, if you own the earth, you own the responsibility of taking care of it. And if we don't take care of the earth, we're all doomed. So this is not optional. This is this is our basic responsibility. And that's the function of Homegrown National Park, is to get that message to everybody so that everybody, whether you own 500,000 acres in the West or a a balcony in Philadelphia, everybody needs to participate. Because not only are we gonna are we gonna actually transform land, we're gonna transform the culture so that conservation becomes important. You know, we've got we you look at an election coming up, you look at the top 10 things people are worried about. Conservation's not on the list. Every once in a while, climate change makes it to number 10, but um, as as if these things are not important. We want to get it right up there where where it belongs. And that means everybody's got to understand how important it is. And that's another major function of Homegrown National Park.
SPEAKER_05I wish people would start framing these as public health issues much, you know, more often politicians I think could get a lot more traction if they if they were to do that. Um but it I will say I find it I'm you know obviously a a I'm a big fan. I'm a fanboy. And uh and I I I love the the Homegrown National Park Instagram. I follow that avidly and and uh have gone through who the Instagram is following to find more good information as well. It does strike me that this is really picking up steam. Um like I just went to Atlanta in the spring, and I swear, obviously, you know, I maybe I was I was firmly amongst the choir there, but still um I was just shocked at how pervasive the the idea of native managing for native plants, native landscapes was there. And even within, you know, the city has all sorts of stuff going on. The I forget what it's called, but there's this old railroad tracks, I guess, that goes all around the city. And they they've yeah, and they've redone all that in native plants. And I mean that equates to quite a bit of land. And everybody else there was talking about, you know, their native plant garden and what how they were working on it. And um and you know, I I hear that a lot around here, um, but I think it has a lot to do with the community in which I live. But I just people that are friends of mine that are not birders, that are not really that are not really, I would say, nature people are interested in this idea. I mean, I think the everyone loves the idea of not having to mow grass as much. Um that's that's also a good uh pitch point, I think. Um but I'd be curious to know from you how what what you've seen in the growth of this movement and um you know where you know where you've seen it go and where you think it could go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I have been talking about it for more than 20 years now. And um when I wrote Bringing Nature Home, I didn't think anybody'd read it, and that'd be the end of that. Uh but I was wrong about that. And I think Well, the timing's correct. People are upset at the statistics we continually hear. You know, we've lost a third of our birds, and we've got global insect decline, and two-thirds of Earth's wildlife's already gone. All these terrible things we hear about all the time are upsetting. But people think, well, gee, what can I do? What can one person do to turn this around? And that's our message. One person can do a lot. Don't worry about the whole planet. Just worry about the piece of the planet you can influence. And that empowers you. Then all of a sudden, you're part of the solution. Everybody can improve their landscape. I can improve my landscape. Um, this is a process. We can do it every single day. And then then uh we feel empowered. And that's that's such a positive feeling. Not only that, you you can see that it works. You can see the the nature come back to your little little space. Is that going to save the the entire planet? No, but it's gonna be part of it. It's gonna be part of it. If we get everybody doing it, uh it's gonna be a big part of it. So so I think that's it. The feeling of empowerment has has really made it grow and grow. The the demand for native plants outstrips the supply now and has for a couple of years. That's a business opportunity. I read uh the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that um the real estate industry is starting to catch on. That that well-landscaped conservation landscapes are actually selling for higher than asking prices.
SPEAKER_05I saw that article. I was gonna ask I was gonna ask you about that. I was like, I love that idea, you know.
SPEAKER_02Like the only difference in the world.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02It wasn't long ago. They said rip it all out and put in lawn, or you won't sell your house. Well, not anymore. Not anymore. There's a growing market there. So that's all really encouraging.
SPEAKER_05I think that was a New York Times article where they sh they even showed a couple um properties where par yeah, like part of the like the the asking price ended up being well below what they got because people were like, well, wait a minute, this garden is like, you know, a little haven. It's a, you know, it's it's a yeah, it's a it's a refuge, not just for, you know, birds and and and butterflies and and fun wildlife, but for us. And uh yeah.
SPEAKER_02This is this is uh what more and more people are worried about. They put a lot of effort into converting their yard, they're very happy with it, but then they age out and they've got to go to a retirement community or something, and they worry, well, what's gonna happen to my landscape? So now more and more there's a market for you know, like-minded people to buy your landscape, and that's really encouraging.
SPEAKER_04So Yep. And well, speaking as a millennial, it's certainly generational change as well, because what I'm doing, both with birds and native plants, is suddenly cool. And it wasn't cool when I started 10 years ago, alone beyond that. Uh, my my hometown news outlet this morning I saw on Facebook had an article about how greenhouses can't keep native plants in stock. And it the the byline said five years ago they couldn't give these plants away and now they can't keep them on the shelves. And it it feels so good. I mean, just being someone who's taking part in that, you know, who's just conscious and making choices that move toward increasing biodiversity with native landscaping, to to see others want to be a part of it too. And I think that's a really cool thing about homegrown national park and the way that you framed your books to make every individual feel a part of it. I mean, it's it's a way of creating community, right? It's almost like you're in the club if if you have milkweed in your yard and you see a monarch caterpillar on it. Um, or if you notice a lunomoth, or you know, just any of those things too. I uh I I hear a lot of folks like that uh that I went to school with who don't have any sort of outdoor conservation mindset who are suddenly getting native plants. And it's it's really fun. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I think I do see it a little differently too. And I actually um a couple years ago was going to write an article and actually drafted an article for a uh regional magazine about native plants and wildlife corridors. And I we we kind of butt heads on it um and how we went about it. And I was referencing your books for them. But um it is a different mindset here sometimes because I mean, West Virginia is the third most forested state in the US, 82%. You look around and you see trees and you see overgrown fields and things that, you know, make you feel like you're surrounded by nature. And I certainly recognize plants a lot more than I did, you know, when I was, I don't know, even in high school and college. It's something that I've put a lot of effort into. So I know I see a field differently than I used to. Um, but I do find that to be sort of a local challenge as people feel like we have enough nature because there are hay fields or or, you know, uh autumn olive covered pasture or things like that too. So um I I don't know what the question is in that, but it's something that I that I recognize a lot in rural areas where that change is starting to happen as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It is a harder sell uh when you're in West Virginia or or Washington State or you know, some of these places where that's simply it's it's not as bad as Southeast Pennsylvania or you know the the uh uh Carter from New York all the way down to Richmond. You know, it's just just totally, totally ripped. And of course that's where most of the people are too. So but that you mentioned your your hayfield loaded with autumn olive. Autumn olive's not gonna do what you need it to do. So the being green is one thing, but being green with the the plants that are really the powerhouses is another thing, and that's that's where the management has to come in. So even in West Virginia, you have your work cut out for you.
SPEAKER_04I'd say so. And I guess you know, this is a goal of biodiversity. That that's like the lens that we're looking at for for this, right? Because there are advantages that I think have to be acknowledged for something that's green versus pavement. There's you know the the cooling effects and the carbon sequestration and those kinds of things. So it's it's so complex. And I see so many different entities that have a desire for plant life. Um but we're looking at it through all these different lenses. And it's as you said, I I think one of the things that's really rewarding from the biodiversity standpoint is that you can see results almost instantly. If you plant something, there's a chance that a pollinator that is attracted to it is going to nearly immediately appear. And I I love the feeling of reward that you can get just in your backyard for that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I've had my my knuckles wrapped a couple of times by particularly urban foresters. There's a in one of my talks I I liken a uh ginkgo tree to us to a statue. I say, oh, you know, it's pretty as saying there, but it's not contributing. And they say, Well, wait a minute. Yes, it is contributing. It's sequestering carbon and it's managing The watershed and it's lowering the heat island effect in the cities. And that is all true. My perspective has always been the food web. You know, plants, one of the major things they do is capture the energy from the sun and turn it into food. And if you don't get that food to animals, you don't have any animals. If you don't have animals, you don't have a functional ecosystem. It is not the only thing they do by far, but it's a really important thing. So when I say ginkgos are statues, I'm talking about the food web. Nothing eats a ginkgo. So it's not adding any energy to the local food web. But yeah, that that is an issue. I tend to overstate it sometimes in my enthusiasm. But yeah, plants are good. They're much better than paper.
SPEAKER_04Well, I used to work for the American Forest Foundation, so you can imagine the voices that I had in my head. But but I think that's what's important is to have a champion for biodiversity that is speaking to the masses and talking about that too. Because as you said, that is the ultimate goal, right?
SPEAKER_02Well, we've had this idea for a hundred years that that plants are just decorations. And we've become so separated from nature, we've actually forgotten. No, they're actually making the food that supports all the life on earth. And it's not their fault. They were never taught that. So that's why I keep we keep hammering away at that. Um being green is not good enough. You have to be green and contribute, and you have to contribute that that uh the food, the simple sugars and carbohydrates that all animals need. And then then you have a functional ecosystem.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I um you kind of mentioned the the ginkgo tree, uh, which is something we've got quite a lot of here in Philadelphia. But um I think we had the oldest, we we had one of the oldest in the in the country, certainly in Philly, that I believe got struck down by lightning fairly recently. But um and I this is something I struggle with on my walks because uh my the bird walks that I lead, you know, we'll see a lot of sapsucker holes and and birds that do use ginkgos. But um and I guess it just it makes me wonder about street trees in general. And one of my friends, I told him we were going to be talking to BDA and and he said, he's like, ask him about ecological traps and and street trees and you know how certain bugs, right? Like they might start off pretty well if the right species of tree there is there, but if there's no leaf litter for them, they're you know, it's sort of a dead end. And I guess I also have a good friend who is a tree tenter downtown, and he's trying very hard to get the city to replace many of its non-native trees with with native trees as, you know, as the turnover happens slowly over time. What advice would you have for him doing that kind of work? And you know what I I guess what would be I I'm not sure what an example of an ecological trap is.
SPEAKER_02Um, you just named some. Um it's true. Let's say I plant an oak uh on a street, and um it actually does attract the insects that use that oak, some of them anyway. We we did a we did a study, and uh the larger moths um tend not to be using it because in the heart of the city they get picked off by lights and other things before they even get there. But some of the smaller moths can colonize uh the oak and and have generation after generation on a single tree. Uh but what do they need to complete that generation is an excellent question. Uh and what's happening under that tree is really important. Most of the species that use trees, most of the caterpillars, let's say, uh, don't complete their development on the tree. They drop from the tree and then they have to pupate underground. They either they either tunnel into the ground under the tree or they spin a cocoon in the leaf litter that's under the tree. If it's cement, if it's lawn, um, there is no leaf litter under the tree. And that's an ecological trap. You've pulled in the adult, they lay the eggs, the larvae develop, and then it it doesn't make it to adulthood again. Uh and and it's it's a concern that we don't want to plant really attractive things in our cities and draw things in and then kill them. So what we have to do is we have, you know, that that's one alternative. The other one is to complete the the transformation so that they have everything they they need. It doesn't have to be cement under all of our trees. Um we can put beds under our trees. We don't have to have lawn under every tree in our our yards. We can have well-planted beds so that these uh caterpillars, and that's the main food for the birds when they're reproducing, can actually complete the development and do it again. So we do need, there's no doubt that in some cases we've created ecological traps. We have to keep going and and uh keep learning what these animals need to complete the development. We're doing it, we're doing it, uh, and the transformation is continuing. It's a process, it's not going to happen overnight. But the concept of ecological traps is very important and and uh we do need to think about it. There's a really good example in uh Argua, Switzerland, which is an urban area. There was a herpetologist who noticed that there were 10 species of uh frogs and salamanders that were decreasing rapidly in this city. So he dug little ponds all over the city. Somehow he got permission to do that, and he started to monitor their populations, and all of them but one increased rapidly. The one that didn't increase was it it actually required larger ponds than he he dug. Uh so that was despite the lights, it was despite the traffic and the roads and everything else, they still increased. So that's an example of of what could be an ecological trap actually turning into producing more than it killed. And that's what we're that's what we're talking about. You know, if we if we landscape our our the verges on our roads, uh all the mode areas now, if we if we put in the milkweeds and the all the flowering plants, are we inviting monarchs and everything into that area so that they can get hit by cars? We did a study with that, and actually, if if you do that in the medians in the middle, there's no way they can get to that without crossing traffic. Uh, and that can be an issue. But uh on the side of the road, apparently it works pretty well, particularly in in farm areas where you don't have a lot of heavy traffic. Uh that's one of the major reasons that monarch populations have crashed in the last 20 years is with the advent of Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, growers just started to uh spray right up to the road, and they replaced all the weeds, which was milkweed and esters and goldenrod, all the things our native bees and our monarchs need. They replace them with lawn, which of course doesn't satisfy anything. So converting that back to the native plant communities that support our native bees and our and our monarchs and everything else is an important part of that conservation. But gotta make sure it's that's we're not gonna kill them with our traffic. So should we do that uh next to a major highway that's where all the cars are going 70 miles an hour? Yeah. We need a little bit more research to think about it.
SPEAKER_04But oh roadways and road ecology is uh a topic I've wanted to talk about on the podcast, but I find it so depressing that I haven't committed to suggesting we do a full episode on talking about ecological traps. I I know I already talked about hay fields, but I always think about bobble links being a pretty classic example of that. Where you entice them in and then you mow their nests. Um and George, I was kind of laughing as you were saying that you had questions from friends. Everybody that I've mentioned that we were going to do this interview to has followed up with some question that they wanted me to ask, which is very fun. Um and I I understand why you've written many books because there are a lot of directions that we can go. Um I do we want to talk about keystone species a little bit. Um I it it's something that I actually read in a book recently about the overuse of the term keystone species and how it's just so popular and used so much now. And I know it wasn't a term that you coined, but I I think that um the concept of something being an ecological anchor in your space um is is really well known because of your books too. But um I, you know, we also talked about how we kind of want this podcast to, you know, be like tips for um for listeners too. So do you want to talk about how a backyard gardener can use a keystone species?
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, let's briefly review what a keystone species is. That you're right, it's not my term. It's Robert Payne came up with this back in the late 60s or early 60s, working with tidal pools in in the state of Washington. Um, and he noticed that that uh if you took out starfish, which are predators, then the sea urchins and other things exploded and diversity actually went down. So he said, well, the starfish are keystone species in that their presence, um other many other species depend on their presence. Beavers are keystone species, elephants are keystone species. They're they're ecosystem engineers that create opportunities for many, many other other species. Uh well we we've been uh looking at at how caterpillars use plants and which plants they're using. And we amassed these these giant data sets looking at at host use in caterpillars across the country. And we now have data set for every every county in the country. There's you know 12,000 plus species of of maws and butterflies in this country. So it's a big, big data set. Which plants are they using? To make a long story short, about 14% of our native plants are supporting about 90% of the maws and butterflies in in the country. Now, if you have a bird that requires 5,000 caterpillars to complete one nest, you got to make those caterpillars. Which plant is gonna make the most caterpillars? And it depends on where you are, but uh it's gonna be the Keystone plants that are doing that. Um I can I can design a 100% native landscape that produces almost nothing. So it's really not native versus non-native. It's it's functionality, which is contributing the most energy to local food webs. Uh and in 84% of the counties in which they occur, it is one of our oaks. They're the top keystone species. As you move further north and you get past where oaks are distributed, then it becomes willows. Cottonwoods are really uh important in the drier areas, the riparian areas of the West. So it depends on where you are. But if you don't have those powerhouses, uh, then the food web is is really depauperate and the birds can't reproduce anymore. So we talk about food web collapse. Sure, there's some things living there, but not nearly what could be if you use the plants to support the most food, particularly for birds. This is really so much about birds, because 96% of our terrestrial birds rear their young on insects. We do have finches and doves and crossbills, and they're they're rearing their young on seeds. They can make a little milk out of the seeds. And that's why that's what you see in in our cities. You see house uh house sparrow, which is really a finch. You see uh house finch, you see doves.
SPEAKER_05Goldfinches, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Goldfinches, they're all seed eaters. Um but the insect eaters uh tend to drop out because we don't make enough insects in our urban areas. And we're starting to there's so many places we're not making enough insects anywhere. Um and my friend uh Dave Wagner is spending a lot of time working on the causes of insect decline. And again, it depends on where you are, but climate change is a huge one, particularly the whole southwest. This year, so we're in we're in the Philadelphia area. In May we had two days, it got up to 90 degrees, and then the next night it got down to 25, and it had pushed out the you know, the oaks had flushed, almost all the trees had flushed, killed all the leaves. Killed the leaves and killed the reproductive, killed the catkins, killed my pawpaws, killed uh not the plant, but the reproductive parts. So everything flushed out again. But all of those caterpillars that uh would use that early foliage for the migrating birds, they were all killed. So it was a it's a tough spring. And I'm looking at what has made it through there. We've we've had birds and they've all reproduced in our property. I haven't seen anything with more than one one offspring, one clutch, one baby. That's our our chickadees, and just not very much to eat. That's one climate change event, and we're getting that irregularity all the time now.
SPEAKER_05Very, very hard on on the And that was after a winter where we had like three weeks of ice covering the ground. Uh yeah. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I um you mentioned a couple keystone uh trees, the and and you wrote and folks may or may not uh be familiar with your book, The Magic of Oaks, which details a lot of a lot of this and uh is again something that if you're especially if you're a birder, but anybody should should really take a look at, because yeah, oaks are really the best bird feeders uh around. Um we have a an 80-year-old willow oak that my grandmother planted in the back of our yard in uh Maryland, and I say I always say that's the best bird feeder on the property. Um but I'm curious, um are there some pollinator plants that you would characterize as keystones?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. And so that's this is where you say you were overusing the term. Whether or not a species functions as a keystone depends on what else is in that community. So they always think of it as a Jenga model. You know, if you pull out one bar, it makes other bars uh more important than they used to be. Uh and that's why, you know, there's some people, yeah, you can overuse the term. Everything can be a keystone under particular circumstances. Um but you can talk about keystones for woody plants, keystones for herbaceous plants, keystones for pollinators. Uh the concept holds though. There's still some plants that are doing a whole lot more than others. If you're talking about keystones for perennial plants or annuals that are that are producing uh so many of the flowers for many of our bees. Goldenrod, number one in a lot of places of the country. Perennial sunflowers, number one, number two, uh fall asters, very important. Uh and and what we're so I'm getting to rank those because I know about uh specialist bees, the bees that require the pollen of particular plants. It's not that we don't have generalist bees going to a lot of plants, including a lot of non-native plants, but the specialist bees need pollen from particular plants. Our specialist bees in North America, it's always going to be native plants. That's what they specialized on. Uh so if you want to make a pollinator garden that's going to help the most pollinators, you want to plant the plants that are best for specialist pollinators. Uh, because the generalists can use those plants as well. And so that's that's why Goldenrod in this Philadelphia area, it supports something like 12 species of specialist pollinators. Um if you move to the to Ohio or Indiana, it becomes perennial sunflowers where they support maybe 14. But if you if you have goldenrod, sunflowers, and uhstors, you're supporting over 40 species of native bees that won't be there if you don't have those those plants. So those would be the keystones in a lot of places of the the country. I think there's 60 species of bees in California that require uh the pollen of sunflowers, perennial sunflowers. Um so you're right. The keystone concept can be overused. It doesn't make it invalid. Um they're really important plants. Right.
SPEAKER_04Makes sense. As as you were talking about that, I was thinking about I mean, I think you can buy a native plants from Lowe's now. I mean, they're they're they're advertised everywhere. Um I would be curious to hear your thoughts on different cultivars of native plants and where folks source native plants from if they're purchasing individual plants. Um how have you seen that changing and what advice do you have for folks who are shopping for them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's two issues. Uh you you do want to you want to plant the plants that are best adapted to your ecoregion. So getting plants that were where the seed came from, the latitude, the altitude, where you live, uh is is important. Those plants are guaranteed to do really well. Uh if you wander outside that area and you plant a plant, um, is it is it bad? Well, the plant may not do as well. Um, it's not not bad, it'll die, and you get something else that that's gonna work. But uh that's called provenance. You want to stick to the provenance of your area as as best you can. And more and more nurseries are growing things with provenance in mind rather than growing uh a California plant and and selling it here. You know, Blue Spruce is uh is a specialist in the Colorado Rockies. It grows fine in Delaware, but is it contributing in Delaware? Not very much, because it's totally outside of the uh plant community and insect community that it co-evolved with. So that's why using it's not just plants from North America, it's plants native to your particular ecoregion that's really important. Cultivars are just a genetic variant of a particular species. Uh people call a cultivar of a native plant a native bar. That's a made-up word. You know, it's call it cultivar native, or it doesn't matter. And the question is, is that as good as the straight species? Well, it depends on what the cultivar is. It depends on what that genetic variant is. We did a study at Mount Cuba Center, a common garden experiment for three years looking at a straight species and then its cultivars planted in a circle around it. So you could compare insect use to see which cultivars performed as well as the straight species. These were all woody plants, so we were not looking at the you know the thousands of uh cultivars of uh flowering plants. Well, they're all flowering plants, but they were we were looking at woody traits. And the only thing that that consistently decreased insect use was turning a green leaf into something as red or purple. That loads the leaf with anthocyanins, which are feeding deterrents. So I can I can say if you're concerned about your contribution to your local food web, avoid red leaf cultivars. They're very popular. Everybody likes red leaf, red bud, and and uh the other thing to avoid, obviously, for pollinators would be double flowers. So, like double flower blood root. It's a beautiful plant, very thick. All the all the hydrangeas, the cultivars are double flowers, but that has taken the reproductive parts of the plant and turned them into petals. So that's why they're so pretty, but now they're not functioning uh in terms of producing pollen or nectar for for uh pollinators. That becomes an ecological trap. The bees will still go there hoping there's something there. They've spent energy going there, but there's nothing there. So then they have to move on. So again, it depends if if you're really just planning for decorations, they're beautiful plants. But if you're planning for function and you want to get, let's say, a native hydrangea, get hydrangea arborescence straight species, not hydrangea arborescence annabel, because annabelle is uh it's a double flower. And it's it's taken away the pollinator contributions of that particular plant. Um, the other problem with with cultivars is that uh they're cloned in order to perpetuate the trait that that that cultivar was developed around. They clone them, which means there's zero genetic variability. Uh and and genetic variability is really important. This freeze we had this spring showed it. I've got uh my driveway is lined with white oaks that I planted. And all of them except two got burnt. All the all the foliage had had uh uh was killed by that frost. But two of them uh hadn't flushed out yet. They're they're behind. They're behind every year. It's just uh a genotype that that is a little bit late, and they were fine. So that's genetic variability. If we were to get that type of frost every single spring, they'd be the only two that made it over time. That's the benefit of genetic variability. And with climate change, we need as much genetic variability as we can get. So we know the straight species works. Um, it doesn't mean that the cultivars don't work uh some of the time. It's just we don't know. The best information out there in terms of flowering plants is being produced by Mount Cuba Center that uh has been doing trial gardens with a lot of cultivars um over the years, several years now, and they have all that information up on their website. So you can you can go to their website. website and look at at uh your favorite plant and see how the cultivars have have performed compared to the straight species.
SPEAKER_04That's a great resource. We'll uh we'll share that in the show notes too. And I want to make sure that we at least mention how much fun it is to look at the Homegrown National Park website. And there's all sorts of resources. I look at it all the time for information on plants that are native to our area and even learning about other areas too. So if folks haven't looked at that before, it's a fun place to uh play around online and learn about it. And I I do want to mention too, I really appreciate that you mentioned that it is okay to have a plant in your yard that is not native. And that it doesn't, that this isn't a full switch that it it it isn't that it works or it doesn't, right? It's that every little piece helps. And I guess that's the whole concept that you're pushing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah let me talk briefly about uh an experiment Desiree Narenga, one of my PhD students did several years ago now. But she was looking at chickadee reproduction in the suburbs of Washington DC and to make a long story short she found that if 70% of the plant biomass in your yard, so not the number of plants but the amount of green material in your yard is native, chickadees can reproduce sustainably. So you can have generation after generation. This was a five year study which leaves 30% doesn't have to be native. It's not contributing very much. Now would chickadees do even better if it was 100%? Almost certainly yes. But if you if you love crepe myrtles and you gotta have your crepe myrtle you can have your crepe myrtle it's not invasive. And this goes for the ginkgo and so many other plants that are not invasive. We can't tolerate invasive plants. So the burning bush, nah, gotta go because it's producing tens of thousands of seed for each bush and they don't stay where the bush is uh and then it becomes a major major problem in our our natural areas. But 30% that's that's a lot of compromise in in my view.
SPEAKER_05Yeah I and I think in one of your I wanted to ask you sort of about the this concept and I'm not sure I have it quite right but I I seem to remember that I read someplace that you were talking about mulberries and um you know most of the mulberries we have around here are not the native variety not the native species and um and I think you had said something like you know if there's a really big mulberry, right, if you got a big old mulberry and it's producing a lot of fruit if you take that mulberry out you you better be prepared to replace it with something else. Otherwise even though it's a non-native tree you are you are removing a big chunk of food that was there before. And then I think you got some pushback on that so people like well you know you shouldn't have the mulberry anyway you should really have native tree there. Curious for your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I mean it's a very good example of of compromise. You said most of them are the non-native mulberry. Actually all of them are the non-native mulberry in this area of the country according to Rob Nazi who's rewriting uh Gleason and Cronquist um very good botanist he said through hybridization the white mulberry has hybridized with the red mulberry and introgression has created the the offspring are all white mulberry. And this has been going on since uh the 1700s the colonists were encouraged to bring white mulberry over to start a silk moth industry and that failed but they actually got a tax break for planting white mulberry. And I always wondered why I could never figure out trying to tell the difference between white and red mulberry and you look at the fuzz on the veins and it was very confusing. That's because everything I was looking at was white mulberry. Rob Nazi says you have to go to Texas to find real red mulberry these days. And it's probably going to be a case where white mulberry eliminates that species. What does that mean? Well you're right well white mulberry makes a lot of fruit red mulberry makes a lot of fruit um neither plant makes a lot of caterpillars so whether it's native or not it's contributing fruit to the food web neither one makes hardly any caterpillars at all. So if you replace white red with white what has changed not much so we're looking at the functionality of your landscape uh and I'm sensitive to this because when we bought this property it had been mowed for hay but there were you know just a few big trees on it and one of them was a big white mulberry. And I got my chainsaw out and I chopped it down the very first week. I shouldn't have done that. I mean that was a that was a big fruit producer and then I had nothing. So now now some have come back in and I've left them but um so again you know if you want to be a native plant purist great do it I want to be a functionality purist and I hurt the function of of our yard when I did that.
SPEAKER_04Interesting yeah we uh we we thought similarly here at our place um we took out well autumn olive and we cleared it out and we don't really have the brush to support the birds that it was supporting for nesting and other things now too and I wish that we would have done it in phases a little bit more than we had.
SPEAKER_02That's a tough one because not only do they need a place to nest, they need the food to support the the young and autumn olive doesn't produce that there's the you can get your viburnums in or other things. But you're right doing it doing it um the make the transition slow enough so that it's not just this huge uh like a volcano exploding and wiping out everything and if you're prepared to put it back quickly that's great. But then you've got deer issues everything you put back is going to be vulnerable to the deer and you've got to protect them and it it be that's a project I've wanted to well you know we want to do everything.
SPEAKER_04And and everything comes at a cost too I mean we we've had species of birds which I I mean we're we're very pollinator focused but I think birds are kind of the main barometer that I personally use on my property to you know kind of see how things are changing. And when we're increasing habitat for one species it might be coming at a cost to another species especially when we're looking at field conversion. But gosh I lost my train of thought.
SPEAKER_02Oh I was thinking about while you're thinking I'll that's at our house because you know it was hundred percent field. And we had blue gross beaks uh it was great during the scrub habitat uh period and indigo bunnings uh and and we've lost them because now it's basically a forest but we've gained wood thrush and and uh Kentucky warblers and other things oven birds that in an area that used to be uh a field uh and it happened I mean we've been here 26 years now but we've had wood thrush for the last seven or eight eight years they don't need hundred year old forests they do need leaf litter like other thrushes and once you produce that then you can get these things so you're right well this is this is why people say ecosystems are constantly changing they are and change is is normal um changing to to less function uh that's where I push back um but it's not the change that's important uh I want to keep function high uh even though it will change over time for sure.
SPEAKER_04Yeah I and I remembered what I was going to say what I really want to experiment with is doing just small patches of deer fencing kind of things I've thought about that too yeah it's I mean I'd love to do big patches but something realistic that you know I can get up on a budget.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I I encourage that because then you'll get to see exactly what the impact of the deer are you know they're not supposed to eat spice bush. Well I've done that I've got little patches of deer than I see I see the extent to which they are eating the spice bush. The spice bush outside the deer exclosures they're there but they're tiny and and and dwarfed and stubby and so we got a lot of deer. They're they're hungry.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I think deer are yet another podcast episode. Yeah um we've uh I I know that we're talking about bigger pieces of land where you can do something like that. And George it's really cool to think about doing it in your space too because you've got a small backyard. I I'd be curious to hear some more tips. Maybe George this can be one that you can take because you probably have more of a typical backyard for you know our listeners.
SPEAKER_05Yeah I was gonna ask that too like you know I I had kind of two it was kind of a two prong question. When is like if you're let's say you want to start what's you know what what would be a couple tips on how to get going. The other is if you're like me and you're say three, four years in and like is there something you should be thinking about that you, you know, that might not be obvious about maintenance or introducing other species or what would your advice be for people at the start and maybe people that have been doing it for just a little while?
SPEAKER_02Well some of the most important things you can do have nothing to do with plants. And what you want to do is increase the the insect diversity and abundance on your property because that's what the birds need. It turns out that the light pollution is one of the major causes of insect declines that we have and and especially the declines in moths which produce the caterpillars which feed our our birds. So change the outdoor lighting first of all consider turning it off you are allowed to turn your lights off but if you if you don't want to do that there's um a couple products one called bug light uh sold at hardware stores that produces amber light an even better one is uh it's a NORB light N-O-R-B that produces no blue wavelength at all it's only amber um and during the day it's it's not yellow it's white so it doesn't stand out people don't like that but when you turn it on at night it doesn't attract nocturnal insects and uh if everybody did that across the country it's a really simple change but it would have a huge huge impact on on um insect decline we tend to think that uh the solutions are really really complex this one's a simple one it's just so simple change your your lights another one would be think about your entire landscape are you hiring a mosquito fogger or a backpack sprayer to control mosquitoes because if you are you are killing everything and wasting money right well you're you're also not controlling mosquitoes that's right but uh in terms of of devastating the food web we just finished an experiment looking at uh the backpack sprayers where they put down the barrier spray on your property and and it's supposed to keep the mosquitoes away it does knock down mosquitoes for uh a week or two but it any insect that walks across or spider any arthropod that walks across a surface that was sprayed uh for at least 30 days that's when we ended our experiment but some some of these guys are saying oh it's 70 days anyway they die um that's it they die in in a in an hour or so uh and that it doesn't matter whether they're early uh stage of development uh whether it's an adult whether it's a small insect whether it's a big insect all the pollinators all the the parasitoids the predators um the monarchs the moths it doesn't matter what it is they all die so you're creating a 100% dead landscape by hiring these these guys now some of them do say yeah it kills it kills everything but you know bugs are bad so we want to kill them others are are it's blatant uh false advertising they say it only kills mosquitoes no kills everything so again what it's killing is your bird your boot fruit so you know you wouldn't want to put a bird seed uh feeder out there well with no seed in it or with poison seed in it and that's what you're doing when you hire one of these other guys it's not something a birder would typically think about well I don't like mosquitoes so I'm gonna I'm gonna hire the mosquito guy. So those are two things that have nothing to do with plants that you can do to make a big difference right away. Another thing uh I would I would say is think about how you're landscaping under the trees that are on your property because that's a a vital part of of the moths completing their development. You want uh the as big a bed under the tree as as you can tolerate that's what reduces the area that's in lawn. And that's where your leaf litter goes. All the leaf litter on your property should stay on your property. It's returning the nutrients your trees needed uh or use that year. You got to get them back into the soil.
SPEAKER_05Plus you don't have to rake that way that's the you know that's well you got to rake them into your bed.
SPEAKER_02I mean if you keep some lawn you got to get the leaves off your and that you know that is the the constant goal is reducing the area that's in lawn. Lawn should be where you walk a two acres of of lawn is you know that's a mowing opportunity and and it destroys the watershed. So you know I talk about the four things that every landscape has to four ecological responsibilities. And one is support that that food web, support the pollinators, manage the watershed and sequester carbon. And lawn does none of those. So that's why we we want to reduce the area that's in lawn.
SPEAKER_05I think there was a good graphic that I think it I can't remember if it was posted by Homegrown National Park but I it showed it compared like the depths of roots of various different plants and it started with Kentucky bluegrass which was like an inch or two and then it showed you know like lead plant went down like 15 feet or something and you know big blue stem went down like six or eight feet and you just it I hadn't really thought of it that way before. And uh but it got me thinking about and I think I've told this story before but where I'm recording right now is my desk in my basement in the office and when I first moved in here if we got a a good soak for several days there'd be a seep where rain would come in. And that never happens anymore. Because right outside here is our first bed that we we planted with all the stuff you're mentioning. And uh and I think those root systems are just so deep and so pervasive out here that that water never has a chance to get inside the house anymore.
SPEAKER_02That's why prairies an acre of prairie sequesters almost as much carbon as an acre of forest because of those deep roots that are pumping carbon into the soil all the time. And that's why you know they've got those deep roots to handle the dry summers that are characterized particularly our our more western areas. And that's also why lawn is the most irrigated crop in the country and we don't have the water for that. We just don't yeah yeah um well we're almost out of time here but Doug I did want to ask if you've got anything coming up or if there's anything else you'd like to share with the folks that are listening that you'd like them to know about well I do have a new book coming out in in March that's not right away around the corner but it takes forever to get these books it'll be a fun book about about uh how moths are protecting themselves all the cripsis and and uh all the tricks they have to avoid being eaten um fun for me anyway I don't know if anybody's gonna read it but um I would these these talks with um focusing on personal responsibility um we have this idea that that we d nature's nice but it's not necessary and that's totally wrong it's it's a hundred percent necessary we're part of nature we're not gonna live here without it yet every day we're diminishing it we've got to turn the round turn that around and we've got to turn that around quickly um but again your responsibility is just to turn around the piece of the earth that you can manipulate if you own property that's what you should focus on. If you don't help somebody who does but everybody has a responsibility to good earth stewardship not just a few conservation biologists or ecologists. And it's so that's a lot of people that's 8.3 billion people with that responsibility we really can turn this around if we all exercised it. So that's it personal responsibility.
SPEAKER_05And people underestimate I think or don't realize how much fun it is getting dirty getting getting your hands in the soil and then watching stuff grow over time is extremely rewarding.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Let me just add because it turns out most people don't garden. I don't talk about gardeners anymore. I talk about the entire landscape and what we do is we hire a lawn care industry. And so what I want to do is retrain the lawn care industry so they can become ecological landscapers. You still don't have to do it yourself if you're busy with the kids and everything else you just hire somebody but the guy you hire is going to do it responsibly. That's the the future that I'm looking for.
SPEAKER_05Yeah yeah and there's more and more of those folks out there that are doing that work. It's really fun to follow the work. Thank you so much for doing this Doug we really appreciate you taking the time we've been wanting to have this conversation for a long time I think Molly mentioned it the idea a couple months ago again I was like yeah we gotta try to do that. And uh so it's a real end yeah my pleasure my pleasure real honor to have you here so yeah thanks to Doug and thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back again soon with another episode of Life List a birding podcast. Take care everybody