Denise Ellsworth: So at this point I'm. I'm really just so excited to have to tell me with us again. I think we've had Doug um, maybe a half a dozen times for our different Webinar series, and all of those are posted on our Um. V lab website, and also our Youtube Channel, but one of our most popular presenters. Um, really kind of the um, I guess you could say maybe one of the Pied Pipers in the movement of getting all of us to enhance and add to our habitat in our backyards and community garden spaces, or
Denise Ellsworth: uh parks and other public spaces, to enhance that habitat for wildlife, and Doug is a professor at University of Delaware; also an acclaimed author. Um Some of his titles there on screen, including Nature's best hope um the nature of oaks, and bringing nature home
Denise Ellsworth: for those of us who have that kind of gardening or horticulture background the living landscape with Rick dark. Um a title that many of us keep handing great charts. Um Suggestions for plants to use in different um different needs in the landscape. So I an acclaimed author, a wonderful presenter, and really someone to get us um really excited and motivated about um incorporating native plants and other elements to bring pollinators to our garden.
Doug Tallamy: So Doug thanks again for being with us and um turning the slide set over to you.
Doug Tallamy: Um. Okay, Well, thanks thanks for coming everybody. Um, I have to admit right off. I had to visit from my grandchildren the other day. Both of them were sick, and now I have a call, So this may be the first time I've ever blown my nose in front of two thousand seven hundred people.
Doug Tallamy: It's going to happen that
Doug Tallamy: so I apologize for that. Um! I call this our pollinators best hope.
Doug Tallamy: Um, and I will give you a spoiler right now. You are our pollinators best hope. If we don't modify the way we're landscaping. We're going to lose a lot of pollinators, which is not an option
Doug Tallamy: uh now, back in two thousand and sixteen Eo Wilson wrote half Earth. Our planets fight for life. Uh, and he had very, very um. It was kind of a start statement, he said.
Doug Tallamy: We're going to lose life everywhere on planet Earth. It's all gonna crash unless we save nature unless we say functional ecosystems unless we save those habitats we're talking about on at least half of the earth, and he spent most of the book talking about the science that supports that statement.
Doug Tallamy: And then he ended the book. He didn't spend a lot of time telling us how we were going to do that, of course, to a a conservation biologist putting half the earth aside to be just a wonderful thing. We could save all of all those creatures that we love and all the plants. But half of planet Earth is already in some form of agriculture,
Doug Tallamy: and we've got just about eight billion people in the other half of all of our houses and roadways and deepthritis, and we don't have a third half to put aside for uh nature. So how can we do this?
Doug Tallamy: It's basically what I want to talk about today. I do think we can, we can realize Eo stream. We can create those habitats on half of the earth, but we we we need a new approach to conservation in order to do that
Doug Tallamy: before I talk about that, let me let me remind you what happened in two thousand and
Doug Tallamy: nineteen. I guess it was. We had a very big um oak mast.
Doug Tallamy: Maybe the red up group got together and decided to make their acorns at the same time, and this is what it looked like in a lot of places.
Doug Tallamy: Well, I'm. Easily entertained. So I took one of those acorns, and I just stared at it, and I was rewarded because an insect started to its way out of the acorn for it to a little hole for its head. Then it forced its head through. There it was a tight squeeze, finally worked its entire body through that tiny hole,
Doug Tallamy: and then it plopped down. That's a dangerous time for this this larva, because it's good to eat. A lot of things are after it, so it gets to safety by wiggling and squirming beneath the soil. Surface takes about thirty seconds, and once it's underground, it stretches in all directions and forms a chamber,
Doug Tallamy: and within that chamber uh it converts itself to a pupa, and then surprisingly stays as a pupa underground in that chamber for two years
Doug Tallamy: after two years comes out as an acorn wheel. That's what an acorn wheel Looks like.
Doug Tallamy: A lot of people think we both have big noses because it looks like they do, but that's actually an extension of the head capsule, and the mouth parts are way down here at the end of that extension, and they take those mouth parts to a hole into the center of the end. Corn. Turn around, lay an egg in it, and that is how the larva gets into the egg corner.
Doug Tallamy: Why do they spend two years underground? Why don't they come out there? In next year we'll take bread. Okay, corn's eighteen months to complete their development. So if they came out the next year there wouldn't be enough acorns for them.
Doug Tallamy: Of course, after they leave the acorn uh, it leaves the whole kind of like a true vacuum, and you know that nature up or is a vacuum, and in this case she's filled it with three species of chemnith, oracs, ants, tiny little ants, where the entire colony lives in the holes made by egg corn wheels
Doug Tallamy: after they have left the egg corn, and if scouts find a new hole in a new acorn, they get all excited because they're old. Acorn is falling apart,
Doug Tallamy: so they tell everybody it's time to move. They grab the larvae, they grab the eggs. The entire colony is transferred into the new egg corn that takes about thirty minutes, and then they post a guard here to make sure that nobody else comes in,
Doug Tallamy: and that's where they'll live for the next two years until this egg corn disintegrates.
Doug Tallamy: So what's my point with this little story? That is just one of literally millions of very specialized interactions that comprise the bulk of nature. There are largely interactions between animals and plants. Now this is another one. The relationship between jay's and acorns. Jason, the primary dispersers of of okay corn.
Doug Tallamy: They'll take an acorn and they'll fly up to a mile from the parent tree, and they they find a disturbed area and tap the the acorn beneath the surface,
Doug Tallamy: and then they're going to go back in the winter time and have something to eat
Doug Tallamy: well, for every four acorns of J. Varies in the fall. They only remember where one is. So, for every four acorns they bury, They've actually planted three oak trees,
Doug Tallamy: specialized interaction between palliated woodpeckers and carpenter ants. That's what they wear their young on carpenter ants.
Doug Tallamy: So you won't have pilliated woodpeckers unless you have a lot of carpenter ants and you won't have a lot of carpenter ants unless you have the big trees that make those carpenter ants.
Doug Tallamy: In California There are sixty species of native bees that depend on the pollen from from sunflowers. It turns out that pollen specialization is very common in our our native base. We have about four thousand species of native bees, and you're going to hear a lot about them in the coming uh webinars.
Doug Tallamy: But over a third of them are highly specialized. If you don't have the plant that they require. You don't have that be. Remember what habitat is. It's not just a place to live. It's the food requirements that you have, and in this case they're very specialized.
Doug Tallamy: We don't have the the Baltimore checker spot. Unless you have white Turtle head. I could go on and on. Talk about nature, specialized relationships all day, all week, all year. Point I want to make today, though, is that these relationships, Nature itself is now on the ropes, and it's on the ropes because we didn't take Teddy Roosevelt's advice
Doug Tallamy: way back in one thousand nine hundred and eight. Teddy heard that the state of Arizona was going to mind the Grand Canyon. So he went to the canyon, looked out over its edge, and he said, Leave it as it is, and with those five words he started the process of creating the the Grand Canyon National Park.
Doug Tallamy: Well, we didn't leave most of the country as it was. Um! It's only about five percent of the country that's anything close to its original pristine, ecological condition, and those are typically mountaintops.
Doug Tallamy: And that's because we have logged the country repeatedly. We have tilled it, we have drained it. We've grazed it it's seven hundred and seventy million acres of rangeland. That's four and a half times the size of Texas, dedicated to cattle,
Doug Tallamy: and of course we paved it, or otherwise developed it.
Doug Tallamy: We have straightened our rivers and damned them. You can spell that any way you want.
Doug Tallamy: We have polluted our skies and changed our climate for centuries to come. We've drained our aquifers. We've introduced more than three thousand three hundred species of plants from other continents May, which are running a muck in our natural areas.
Doug Tallamy: In short, we have carved up this natural areas into tiny remnants of their former cells, and each one of those remnants is too small and too isolated to sustain the amount of nature that we humans need to run the ecosystems that provide our life support.
Doug Tallamy: Excuse me,
Doug Tallamy: why have we done this? I don't know,
Doug Tallamy: but I suspect we thought that that earth. Our nest was so big we could foul it forever, and there wouldn't be any consequences.
Doug Tallamy: And of course we were wrong about that, and that's why we're seeing some pretty scary headlines these days, like the insect Apocalypse, is here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth talking about global insect decline
Doug Tallamy: followed by this one. North America is less three billion breeding birds in the last fifty years. That's just about a third of our North American bird population already gone
Doug Tallamy: you and says we're going to lose a million species to extinction, probably in the next twenty years, and they said it two years ago. So what is that now? The next eighteen years nice headline? But it is not an option, Folks, These are the species that keep us alive on planet Earth. We have to get serious about the conservation required to save these species.
Doug Tallamy: So I could go on talking about the pox that we humans have have uh delivered upon the environment that this on all of our houses. But that's not what this talks about. This talk is about a cure for that box and secure that it'll take small efforts from lots of people people like you and me
Doug Tallamy: that they will deliver enormous physical, psychological, and environmental benefits to everybody.
Doug Tallamy: Let's return briefly to this headline: It's just apocalyptic here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth. Well, back to Eo Wilson. He told us what it would mean if Earth lost its insects, and he did it in a paper way back in one thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven, called the little things that run the world.
Doug Tallamy: And his message again was clear. Life, as we know it, depends on insects,
Doug Tallamy: and this is this is one of the papers that that made me say repeatedly, And now it's not all about pollinators. It's not all about pollinators,
Doug Tallamy: but it might be all about pollinators. I I, I might have been wrong about that,
Doug Tallamy: As we know, it depends on pollinators because most of the plants that are
Doug Tallamy: established, the carrying capacity of planet earth are insect pollinated.
Doug Tallamy: If we lost our insects we would lose
Doug Tallamy: um most of those flowering plants, and if we lost those flowering plants, it would change energy flow through our terrestrial ecosystems to the point where the food webs that support everything else.
Doug Tallamy: The amphibians reptiles, the birds, the mammals, those food beds would collapse. If you lost the plants that are in sick pollinated,
Doug Tallamy: and all of those animals would disappear.
Doug Tallamy: The biosphere, the living portion of the earth would rot because we would have lost in sick decomposers, and all we would have is bacteria and fungi.
Doug Tallamy: And humans, of course, wouldn't survive any of those drastic changes.
Doug Tallamy: Now there is some good news here, and that is that we can save our pollinators. We can save all of our insects. We can save our birds. We can save nature itself.
Doug Tallamy: We can save ourselves, but we're going to have to change the way we landscape in order to do it.
Doug Tallamy: Why is that? Well remember,
Doug Tallamy: humans are products of nature. We are totally dependent on the life support that functioning ecosystems provide. That's what Wilson was talking about when he said, we need this on at least half of the planet.
Doug Tallamy: These are just a few of the things that plants do that we depend on like produce oxygen, pretty important. Cleaner water
Doug Tallamy: slow, its journey to the sea where it becomes too salty to use carbon capture enormously important. Today plants are are pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, building their tissues out of them, and then, even more important, pumping the carbon into the ground through their root systems for long term storage, and by long term storage I mean thousands of years.
Doug Tallamy: Plants are building top soil, holding it in place. They're preventing floods, dampening Severe weather converting sunlight into food. If we lost their plants we'd have to eat sunlight. That's going to be hard. This is plants. Most of them are created by pollinators.
Doug Tallamy: What do animals do for plants? Well, they do provide pest control services. That's good. There's that pollination. Ninety percent of our flowering plants are are pollinated by animals.
Doug Tallamy: They disperse plant seeds So designing landscapes like this that destroy the production of of um ecosystem services is, It's just not a good idea.
Doug Tallamy: Never was a good idea, but today it's It's actually terrible like the idea, because we have so many people demanding ecosystem services more and more every day. We're getting them, but only by taking them away from other living things.
Doug Tallamy: So if you're wondering, people argue about what the carrying capacity of the planet is. In other words, how much life can it support?
Doug Tallamy: You know you're over the carrying capacity when you're using resources faster than the earth is, is developing new ones. And just think about all the resources we're running at. We're certainly doing that today. Now we do have parks, and we have preserves, and they're doing the best they can.
Doug Tallamy: But we are in the sixth grade extinction event so obviously it's not good enough. We now need to move outside of parks and preserves and practice conservation on properties just like this.
Doug Tallamy: There have been visionaries through the ages who have recognized that that we humans need to work on our relationship with planet earth, and Aldo Leopold was one of the most eloquent. He wrote extensively in the first half of the nineteen hundreds.
Doug Tallamy: One of the things he said is the oldest task in human history is to live in a piece of land without spoiling it. There have been indigenous groups that have been good at doing that. But our huge Western societies and our huge Asian societies are terrible at doing that. We habitually take more from the earth, and it has to offer completely wrecking an area going to another area, doing the same thing, not sustainable behavior.
Doug Tallamy: But out of Leopold had a lot of faith in humans. He believe we could develop what he called a land ethic. He knew we had to use the land we had to farm and lumber and grays, and do all of those things,
Doug Tallamy: but he believed what we could learn to do them gently enough that we did not destroy local ecosystems. That's what he called uh a land ethic, and he wrote about it in the Sand County Almanac.
Doug Tallamy: But he did not write about, though, was developing a land ethic where we actually lived, and i'm not sure why that was. But I suspect the notion that humans in nature cannot live together. We cannot coexist in the same place, and the same time that notion was so deeply embedded in the culture of all the Leopold's day, still embedded in our own culture,
Doug Tallamy: that he may not have recognized it as an option.
Doug Tallamy: What I want to argue this morning is that not only is living with nature and option, it's now the only viable option that's left to us
Doug Tallamy: in the past. Of course, conservationists work pretty much exclusively Where there weren't a lot of people we now need to turn that on its head and practice conservation where there are a lot of people, because that's pretty much everywhere.
Doug Tallamy: In other words, we've got to find ways for nature to thrive in human-dominated landscapes, not hang on by a thread, not get diminished every single year. But actually thrive
Doug Tallamy: where should we start?
Doug Tallamy: Go back to back to private property.
Doug Tallamy: Uh If we don't practice, conservation and private property, we're going to fail because most of the land is privately owned, seventy-eight percent of the entire country is privately owned eighty-five point. Six of the Us. East of the Mississippi is privately owned
Doug Tallamy: we've got one hundred and thirty-five million acres of residential landscapes in the Us. We can't ignore all of those properties.
Doug Tallamy: I want to talk about conservation. I'm not really using the word correctly. We certainly want to conserve any bits of nature that are that are out there that we have not already destroyed. That has been our model for the last century, and we want to keep doing that.
Doug Tallamy: Uh. But now i'm talking about restoration, we need to put it back together again. We need to to reunite enough of the specialized interactions so that we have functioning ecosystems in places where we've dismantled them. It may not be exactly what was there at some point in the past, but it still can provide ecosystem services,
Doug Tallamy: but not all species contribute to ecosystem function equally. So we're going to have to start with the building blocks
Doug Tallamy: and those flowering plants and the pollinators that allow those plants to reproduce are one of the important building blocks, probably the most important building block. Excuse me
Doug Tallamy: Why? Because they are through photosynthesis, capturing energy from the sun and turning it into food. That is the food that keeps just about all the animals on the planet, a lot. But now the food is stored in plant parts,
Doug Tallamy: mostly leaves. If we don't get that food to the animals, we don't have any animals, and then we don't have any functioning ecosystems where most vertebrates don't eat plants directly.
Doug Tallamy: Most vertebrates eat invertebrates at eight those plants. Most of those invertebrates are insects and not just any insect. It turns out that caterpillars are transferring more energy from plants to other animals than any other type of plant eater.
Doug Tallamy: So if we design landscapes without a lot of caterpillars in them, without the plants that make those caterpillars. And then we're going to have failed. Food webs and failed. Ecosystems
Doug Tallamy: The good news is many of the adults of a lot of these caterpillars are pollinators in and of themselves. They do it at night, so we don't typically recognize them, but they're very important out there.
Doug Tallamy: Let's talk about Carolina chickadee as an example. Um! They, of course, are the birds. There's several species chickadees around the country, and they're the birds that are frequent Our feeders all winter long, eating seeds. We tend to think that's all they need to seeds
Doug Tallamy: uh, even in the winter time fifty of their diet is seeds. The other fifty is insects and spiders, but when they're reproducing their babies can't eat seeds at all, so they switch entirely to to uh arthropods, mostly insects, and if they're in a healthy environment they will re their young exclusively on caterpillars, and they are not exceptions.
Doug Tallamy: Ninety six percent of our terrestrial brows rear their young on insects, and most of this insects are caterpillars.
Doug Tallamy: How do I know that there's a number of lines of evidence that suggest that. But this is this is a citizen science project that one of my students, Ashley Kennedy, did a couple of years ago, she put out a call to bird photographers around the country and said: Please take pictures of birds during the breeding season, when they are carrying food to the nest. Send this pictures to me, Ashley. I will identify the prey items that are in the beaks of the birds and reconstruct the nestling diet for as many species of of birds in the Us. As
Doug Tallamy: I can,
Doug Tallamy: and this is a summary of her results. She got thousands of pictures that a lot of identifying the green bars are the percentage of those nestling dice of the twenty most common bird families in in North America that were caterpillars, and in sixteen out of the twenty common bird families caterpillars dominated the diet. So again, what would happen to all these breeding birds if we didn't have enough caterpillars, many of them, and not be able to breed at all.
Doug Tallamy: So why caterpillars? What special about caterpillars? A number of things are special, including the fact that they are soft.
Doug Tallamy: Think of this guys. If he's a little little sausage with a very thin wrapper, the thin wrapper is this exoskeleton. It's made of kite, and it's undigestible. The birds don't want a lot of of undigestable material, and because the caterpillar soft, you can stuff it down the throat of your offspring without fear of injuring them. If you've ever watched the parent bird where they're young,
Doug Tallamy: they're pretty rough, speaks like a plunger. They just stuff it down. There.
Doug Tallamy: Caterpillars are also relatively large prey items. One medium-sized caterpillar is equal to the biomass of two hundred. A
Doug Tallamy: How many of our smaller birds do chase a fits around, but you want to chase two hundred aphids or get one caterpillar,
Doug Tallamy: the nutritious, the very high and fat, very high in protein.
Doug Tallamy: Low percentage of of Titan of exoskeleton. Compared to many other types of insects, particularly beetles. Beatles are not like little sauces just they're like little tanks. Much of a beetle is is und adjustable, and many beals have really sharp edges, too.
Doug Tallamy: And finally, it turns out caterpillars are the best source of carotenoids, for birds during the breeding season,
Doug Tallamy: and I mentioned carotenoids. Um, not because I love organic chemistry, but because i'm a vertebrate near a vertebrate, and birds are vertebrates, and we vertebrates cannot make our own carotenoids. Only plants make Karatnites, so we have to get our carotenoids from plants, and we have to get them from plants,
Doug Tallamy: because carotenoids are essential components of vertebrate diets,
Doug Tallamy: where the birds getting the cotton nights from during the breeding season from from the prey that they're bringing to the nest, of course,
Doug Tallamy: but look right, and my content is not equally distributed among bird prey items. These first two bars here are types of caterpillars. They have far more carotenoids than other types of bird prey. Here the adult caterpillars. Here the moths and butterflies themselves.
Doug Tallamy: They have far fewer carotenoids, because they're not eating green leaves. The carotenoids are in the green leaves,
Doug Tallamy: only the caterpillars are eating green leaves, and here's the earth for them way down here. So the early bird gets the worm, but it doesn't get any karate nights when he gets the worm,
Doug Tallamy: so that study and several others are suggesting the caterpillars are not optional parts of bird diets really looking like their essential parts of most bird dies. So let's just say most birds need caterpillars.
Doug Tallamy: All right. The next question is, how many do they need?
Doug Tallamy: It's one or two enough, one or two a day enough. Let's go back to chickades. There's a lot of data on chickadees. How many caterpillars does it take to make a nest of chickadees?
Doug Tallamy: One or two is not enough right to a day? It's not enough. It takes thousands, six thousand and nine thousand categories to get one clutch of chickadees to the point where they leave the nest where they fledge, and after they fled. The parents continue to feed them caterpillars for another twenty-one days, but they're flying all around so nobody can count them,
Doug Tallamy: but it's got to be tens of thousands of caterpillars required to get one clutch of a bird. That's a third of an ounce for pennies worth of bird through to independence. And Of course, after they're independent they continue to eat caterpillars,
Doug Tallamy: and if you want chicken is to breed in your yard, and I would think uh you do, because in so many places that's all we have is our yards. You have to have all this caterpillars in your yard,
Doug Tallamy: because chicken is only forage. Fifty meters from the nest, and that is true for most birds. They forage very close to the nest, because they're making so many trips every day, and if we landscape in a way that uh
Doug Tallamy: does not encourage all of those caterpillars in our yards that's called insect decline,
Doug Tallamy: and it's really looking like in tech decline is directly related to the bird declines that people are measuring. We went to the original data set of Rosenberg at all The Smithsonian group that said, We have lost three billion birds in the last fifty years, and we divided the terrestrial species into two groups.
Doug Tallamy: The birds that require insects typically when they are breeding, and the birds that do not require insects. Things like doves and finches connect can reproduce on seeds. They make a little little milk out of the seas. They feed that to their baby,
Doug Tallamy: and look. The birds that do not require insects did not decline at all in the last fifty years, but the birds that require insects
Doug Tallamy: decline on average, ten million individuals per species.
Doug Tallamy: This doesn't prove cause and effect, but it certainly does suggest that as you take bird food away you lose the birds.
Doug Tallamy: So how do we landscape for for caterpillars, and for the pollinators that enable the plants to exist to make those caterpillars.
Doug Tallamy: That's how we have to start thinking about about landscapes. Um! In the past. We thought about them in in terms of one function that is being beautiful great We're going to keep that. But now we have to have beautiful landscapes that are also ecologically functional, and they've got to include these two groups of insects.
Doug Tallamy: But you do that by adding the insects that you add, you do add these insects to your landscape by adding the plants to support those insects. It seems pretty straightforward,
Doug Tallamy: but there is a catch,
Doug Tallamy: and that is that um! Most plants don't support a lot of caterpillars or a lot of specialist pollinators. So we have to be fussy. About which plants we're going to. We're going to put in our yard, and we have to be fussy about it, because the caterpillars and the pollinators are fussy themselves, and the monarch butterfly illustrates that perfectly.
Doug Tallamy: You can have all the crate, myrtle, and all the calorie pair and all the burning bush, and all the Ginkos, and all the Chameleas and all the hostas, all the things we typically landscape with in our yards, and you won't make a single monarch butterfly,
Doug Tallamy: the only he is going to make a monarch. Butterfly is a milkweed that's called host plant specialization. It turns out Most of the insects that eat plants are host plant specialists. They can only eat the plants. Um on which they have specialized over evolutionary time.
Doug Tallamy: Why are so many insects, specialists because plants have made them that way. Plants don't want to be
Doug Tallamy: plants, want to capture the energy from the sun, and use it for their own growth and reproduction. So they've loaded their lease with nasty tasting. Chemicals. Secondary metabolic compounds that make this leaves either bitter or downright toxic.
Doug Tallamy: And if you don't believe me, after this talk today, go out and eat a plant, see if you like it.
Doug Tallamy: You're not gonna like it.
Doug Tallamy: It's a it's a wonderful defense. It keeps most of the insects in the world from eating most of the plants of them. Well, that's why it's green out there. It's not because there's no insects out there. They want to eat those plants. It's because most of the insects that are out there cannot eat most of the plants, they are too well protected.
Doug Tallamy: There's a reason. It is hard to get our kids to eat vegetables. They inherently know that they're toxic,
Doug Tallamy: but we do know that in sixty plan. So how do we do that? How do we get around those chemical defenses? This is where the specialization comes in. Ninety percent of the N. Six plants are what we call host plant specialists.
Doug Tallamy: They can only eat the particular plants for which they have specialized enzymes that store an excrete and detoxify those compounds. Specialized behavioral adaptations, and, like history, adaptations minimize their exposure to those compounds.
Doug Tallamy: But it takes a long period of evolutionary history for those plant lineages for all those adaptations to fall into place, and once they do the insect just locked into eating that particular plan.
Doug Tallamy: So if you take the milkweeds out of your yard and replace them with hostas. The monarch's not going to start to develop on your hostess.
Doug Tallamy: It can't. It's locked in the milkweeds, and it has two choices. Then go find milkweed, someplace else,
Doug Tallamy: or star to death.
Doug Tallamy: Same story of a specialist piece, that third of the bees that can only reproduce on the pollen of particular plants.
Doug Tallamy: Um plants want these to specialize. They want their pollen to be carried to another
Doug Tallamy: uh flower of the same species. So you get very efficient Pollination and specialist Pollinators have particular hairs on their bodies. They're really good at doing that. They're not flying all over to a bunch of other plants and carrying the pollen away, whereas generalist pollinators are going all over the place, they're not not um that efficient in terms of transferring pollen.
Doug Tallamy: Uh: so specialist pollinators need particular plants. And if you're making a a a pollinator garden, you want to focus on the plants that supports specialists,
Doug Tallamy: because the generalists will use them as well.
Doug Tallamy: It turns out, let's just boil this down.
Doug Tallamy: There are three types of clinic plants out there. There are plants to contribute energy to local food webs. Their plants that do not contain contribute energy to local food webs and their plants that actively detract energy from local food websites. A good example of a contributor would be one of the Oaks
Doug Tallamy: genus. Quercus Oaks contribute more energy than any other plant in North America to local food webs. They're willing to share the energy they've captured from the sun. Good example of a non contributor would be a ginko.
Doug Tallamy: Nothing e to go. Um! So they there! They're pretty. They're sitting in a landscape. They're not invasive. They're not moving around. Um, but they're not contributing either and good example of a non contributor would be one of the invasive uh ornamentals like calorie pair, or burning bush or barbarian, got a bunch of them
Doug Tallamy: um that actively displace native plant communities. Um. And these guys are very terrible at supporting food webs, but they're pushing out the ones that are good at doing that.
Doug Tallamy: So i'm trying to say, here is that plant choice matters. If we're trying to re-establish the food webs that support local ecosystems, we need to choose the right plants, or it's not going to work. And I'm going to give you three examples of how well it does work when we do choose the right plants,
Doug Tallamy: starting with our house right here in Oxford, Pennsylvania, where my wife Cindy, and I moved in the year two thousand. It was to a farm that had been broken up into ten acre lots.
Doug Tallamy: Very old farm had been been uh mode for, hey, before we moved in so very, very few plants there. Uh, and and
Doug Tallamy: our general goal was to restore this this ecosystem. Put the plants back,
Doug Tallamy: and of course you're not going to restore it without putting the caterpillars back. So I targeted particular caterpillars. I wanted to see if I could get the Canadian outlet making a living at our house.
Doug Tallamy: Um! That's what a Canadian outlook looks like That's what the adult looks like, just like a leaf. We're not going to have Canadian allies unless you have meadow. It's the only plant that they can develop on, and we didn't have any meadow.
Doug Tallamy: Um, i'm sure it was here hundreds of years ago. Our Our area has been farmed for about three hundred years. Excuse me,
Doug Tallamy: so I got some meter of seeds from some place I planted them. They grew very nicely,
Doug Tallamy: but this was early on, and I I actually had very little faith. The Canadian outlets would be able to find my meadow. So after I plan to them, I didn't even go out and check it for at least two months afterwards, and I was walking by for another reason, and
Doug Tallamy: lo and behold, they were covered with Canadian outlets. They had found it right away.
Doug Tallamy: I'm still surprised about that.
Doug Tallamy: So now we have a good population of Metauru and Canadian, Alex. We've added two species to to our little ecosystem. The Restoration has begun
Same story with the golden Rod Stowaway.
Doug Tallamy: A beautiful orange moth. Actually, it's a misnomer has nothing to do with golden rod. It's a specialist on this plant. Biden's aristosa bitch daisy
Doug Tallamy: um. We didn't have any ditch, Daisy, but I knew where there was some in a power line cut about fourteen miles away, so I got some seeds. I planned them at home. They grew very nicely.
Doug Tallamy: They actually took over my front yard. That's what it looked like this year. Um, so nice display. But it took a full year for the Golden Red Stowway to find my biden's before they did
Doug Tallamy: they have. So now we have a good population in both of these. Now we've got a four species to the to our yard.
Doug Tallamy: I want it, Andrea facili.
Doug Tallamy: Um that's that's a specialist on facilitate we. So we plan it, Cecilia. Uh, and surprisingly it came right away. Um! So you can do this with pollinators as well uh those specialist pollinators
Doug Tallamy: wanted to Hackbury Emperor,
Doug Tallamy: not because it's most beautiful butterfly in the world, but because it's. It belongs here. It's one of the species that ought to be at our house, and, as its name suggests, it's a specialist on Hackbury
Doug Tallamy: on Celtus, so we didn't have any Heckberry, but I planned it on. I don't know four or five trees. I had to wait four years for the uh hybrid Emperor to come, but it finally did. And now we have a good population of of those.
Doug Tallamy: And so that's that's how the Restoration proceeded. I did not plant. Golden Rod came in on its own, and along with it came many of the things it's specialized on golden r, like the beautiful brown hooded outlet. The are Sid, you of flower moth, the golden red Leaf minor, the distinct sparrigan oaths,
Doug Tallamy: the golden rod, gall, moth, and many more golden r supports one hundred and ten species of caterpillars, bird food, one hundred and ten species of bird food. I planted Virginia creeper
Doug Tallamy: Uh: yeah, Virginia creeper. I hear that people don't like it. I I don't know why it's good for color. Um it. It can climb our trees without girdling, though, so that's good. It's. A good ground cover, makes valuable berries. Nutritious berries, for the birds in the fall. Migrating birds need berries that are high in fat,
Doug Tallamy: and that's what these these berries are. It's a great pollinator plant. Believe it or not.
Doug Tallamy: The flowers are tiny and inconspicuous.
Doug Tallamy: You don't even know it's in bloom until you see this big cloud of native bees around it.
Doug Tallamy: So remember when you're making a pollinator garden, you're making it for the pollinators. If it's not big and showy for you. That's okay.
Doug Tallamy: I plan a Virginia creeper, because it's the best source of the it's the host plan for the large Sphinx that are a primary component of cardinal diets. Things like the Pandora banks, and it's beautiful adult. The letter it's Banks, the hogs, banks, the avid stinks all on Virginia creeper.
Doug Tallamy: Want to see if I get the double tooth prominent uh at at our house just because it's such a cool looking caterpillar.
Doug Tallamy: Even if you don't like caterpillars, you gotta like this guy. Well, it's a specialist on on elm, particularly American now, and of course we lost our American elm to Dutch on disease decades ago.
Doug Tallamy: But there are two American elms at the University of Delaware that did not die. Every year they drop a lot of seeds.
Doug Tallamy: I gathered some seeds up from the gutter, planted them at home. They grew very nicely. Those trees are eighty feet tall now, and they brought in the double tooth prominent. Another big success American now
Doug Tallamy: wanted the evening Primrose, Ma. Just because it's beautiful.
Doug Tallamy: I like beauty like anybody else, and believe it or not. We had no evening primrose. No, no, Edith theorist. So I planted that the moth came, spends the day with its head stepped in the flowers. Sometimes it gets crowded, but they're all very cute,
Doug Tallamy: and I planted lots of oaks. Now these are just examples of the plant. Let me just. We put back on our property.
Doug Tallamy: Want to focus on oaks for a while, because they are such important plants. This is the Bedford Oak in Bedford, New York, Martha Stewart. Land
Doug Tallamy: people, are you about whether it's four hundred years old or five hundred years old. It's enormous,
Doug Tallamy: and I hear people say all the time, i'm not going to plan an oak because I won't live long enough to enjoy it, and if you can only enjoy your work when you're four hundred years old, or when it's four hundred years old, you're right. You won't live long enough, but if you can enjoy what your oak is contributing to your local ecosystem, you can enjoy it right away that very first year
Doug Tallamy: when I could say that with confidence, because I planted most of my oaks as eggcorns, which means they were free
Doug Tallamy: or two-foot bare root whips, which means they they cost a dollar fifty each, and immediately they started to rebuild the food red by attracting the mos to create the caterpillars that support everything else.
Doug Tallamy: Things like the solitary oak leaf, minor juveniles, dusky wing, the yellow sheltered mos; suzuki's promo lactus, the red wash caterpillar the yellow vested moth the orange tufted oneida the spiney out caterpillar, the two spotted oak, punky, the variable oak leaf, caterpillar, the red line, Panopoda, the laugher and litter.
Doug Tallamy: It's really hundreds more species of mos have come to the the oaks on our property, and they come right away. This is a pinnac that just popped its head above the leaves, and there's a caterpillar standing on the ground eating the leaves of that tree. You do not have to wait decades.
Doug Tallamy: It's for your oak to start to support the local food web. It will do it right away.
Doug Tallamy: This what our house looks like today. Actually, that's where the biden's was. So um took this picture a couple of years ago.
Doug Tallamy: Point is, we put a lot of plants back, and because we put the plants back we brought a lot of life back to to our yard. Now, over the years I have learned that. Um you can. You can quantify the stability and productivity of your local food web simply by counting the number of moss species because they're the major contributors, and that's what I've been doing for the last five years, taking pictures of every species of moth that could find at our our house. I am up to one thousand one hundred and ninety-five species of moss, so far
Doug Tallamy: added another more than one hundred this year, so it's still building. Who knows how high it'll get
Doug Tallamy: Now we have ten acres. Pennsylvania is two point, four million acres, so in one, two hundred and forty thousand of the landmass. Uh, we have forty-four of all the malls that occur in the entire state, and because so many of these are types of bird food.
Doug Tallamy: We have recorded sixty species of birds that have bred on our ten acres not flew by but bread.
Doug Tallamy: Why am I telling you this Well, this is another headline: We see all the time. The World Wildlife Fund says that Earth is less two-thirds of its wildlife, since one thousand nine hundred and seventy terrible statistic.
Doug Tallamy: But i'm thinking gee not in our house,
Doug Tallamy: i'm convinced we have increased biodiversity by more than two-thirds, and it didn't take that long, and it wasn't that hard. All we did was put the plants back.
Doug Tallamy: Think how good it would be if everybody put the plants back. We could turn turn this around,
Doug Tallamy: I guess I'm just saying, don't give up. We really can make a big difference here, but I know what you're thinking. Gee! We've got ten ten acres, and and a lot of people have less land than that. Will it work on smaller properties? Say in suburbia?
Doug Tallamy: That is a great question. So let's go to Margie and Dan Turfstra's house, and Kirkwood, Missouri,
Doug Tallamy: where they have point six acres eighteen times less land than Cindy and I have, and when they moved in their yard was completely um taken over by bush, honeysuckle, armor, honeycomb, and a basic plant from from Asia. So they got rid of that.
Doug Tallamy: They put in seventy species of native plants, most of them flowering plants that help pollinators
Doug Tallamy: a water feature, and then they set back their measure of of productivity in their yard is to count the birds that are using their yard, and they're up to one hundred and forty-nine species, including thirty-five warbler species.
Doug Tallamy: That's a big number Just to put that in perspective. Cindy and I only counted eight or of the species in our house, so does it work on smaller properties. Absolutely.
Doug Tallamy: What about urban yards? Let's go to Pam Carlson's house in Chicago, and I mean in Chicago that's O'hare airport right over there
Doug Tallamy: Pam has one tenth of an acre
Doug Tallamy: that's three times smaller than the average lot size in North America.
Doug Tallamy: Um! And she's not connected to any natural area at all. It's a pretty one-tenth of an acre, but it's a little tea island. It's pretty, because pam is a native plant Landscaper she's a good, one
Doug Tallamy: but she did the same thing. She got rid of her non-native plants, put in sixty species of native plants
Doug Tallamy: included a water feature, and then she sat back, she says, with a glass of wine,
Doug Tallamy: but she had more than one glass of wine and cat at the bird. She she's up to one hundred and twenty-four species of birds that have used her yard, including a woodcock. This Pam's woodcock
Doug Tallamy: so if you haven't seen a woodcock lately go to pam's house in Chicago.
Doug Tallamy: All right there. Four things we need to think about if we're going to succeed in a big way, and we do want to succeed in a big way. And the first thing is to address those big lawns. We've got forty-four million acres of long in this this country dedicated to an ecological deadscape. If you're talking about pollinator habitat, I don't see any right there.
Doug Tallamy: Why do we have that much land dedicated to an ecological dedicate? Because lawn? Is a status symbol,
Doug Tallamy: and we need areas to display our Halloween decorations.
Doug Tallamy: But what if we cut the area of lawn in half? What if we took areas like this and turn them into this. I got this picture from Dan Getman. Never met Dan Getman, but he's doing it. He had this big lawn, and he's putting in all these native plants, and he sent me this picture. This is the second year of his planning.
Doug Tallamy: Well, if everybody did that, that would give us twenty million acres we could start to restore right where we live. We could create what i'm calling homegrown National Park
Doug Tallamy: because we're gonna do it at home, and it'll be big. Get a bigger be bigger than the Adirondacks, plus Yellowstone. Let's Yosemite. Those grand Tetons Canyon lands, Matt Ranier North Cascades, Badlands National Park, Olympic National Park, Sequoia National Park, plus the Grand Canyon plus denali, which is huge,
Doug Tallamy: plus the Great Smoky man's. Add up all this park still less than twenty million acres. So Hong Kong National Park is going to be the biggest park in the country.
Doug Tallamy: What do you get when you put a park at home. What do you get when you put some part of nature right where you live? You get the chance to interact with it
Doug Tallamy: at your own time, your ownpace. All you have to do is go outside, or even just look out your window. You can avoid crowds,
Doug Tallamy: and if you go to real national park last year there are three hundred and seventy-five million people there with you. So you know what you're going to see
Doug Tallamy: it's free. There's no admission fee. It's never closed, no matter what pandemic comes down the pike. No travel hassles. You get to experience the natural world alone, which I think is essential to developing that personal relationship with Mother Nature
Doug Tallamy: not mediated by somebody else. And I think it's particularly. I know It's particularly important for our poor kids, who, according to Richard Lew, are suffering from nature deficit disorder.
Doug Tallamy: So we're trying. We get thirty kids. We put them on a bus
Doug Tallamy: with a teacher, and They drive for an hour, and they they go to a naturally, and then they walk around for an hour.
Doug Tallamy: Teacher tells them not to touch anything
Doug Tallamy: when they get back in the bus, and they go home.
Doug Tallamy: And that's your experience with the natural world which i'm sure is better than nothing. But it's really been an experience with thirty other kids and a teacher telling him not to touch anything.
Doug Tallamy: If they have some part of the natural world, right where they live. All they have to do is go outside alone and get to know it, become friends with it alone. No parental supervision. Let them work at this relationship on their own terms. When we hover over our kids we are sending the message that this is dangerous stuff.
Doug Tallamy: That's a bad message to send to to make our kids fear the natural world because they're the stewards, They're the future stewards of our planet.
Doug Tallamy: If they're afraid of it. If they don't how to be steward. If they don't love being a steward, they're going to be lousy stewards, and we can't afford any more lousy stewardship,
Doug Tallamy: and maybe they will learn how to hunt lizards. I'm learning this from my granddaughter Zoe, who's the one that gave me this cold
Doug Tallamy: um. She lives in Hawaii, and a very modest patch of of nature, piece of grass and a hedge. But there are an old lizards there, and when she discovered that she sent me this picture to describe how you hunt lizards. You get on the ground, and you cover yourself with leaves and sticks,
Doug Tallamy: so that the lizards can't see you coming, and Then you crawl very slowly toward the lizard.
Doug Tallamy: No, smiling is a serious business.
Doug Tallamy: You can wear your best dress. That's okay. But you sneak up on the lizard. You catch the lizard, you put it in an aquarium. You learn how to take care of a lizard. You form a personal relationship with that part of Mother Nature. You fall in love with that part of Mother Nature.
Doug Tallamy: I don't think Zoe is going to be crawling on the ground The rest of her life in her best dress, catching lizards.
Doug Tallamy: But I guarant well, maybe I don't know she sent me this picture, so who knows but I guarantee she's going to remember catching lizards in Hawaii the rest of her life, and I guarantee she's going to be a good steward of the planet because of that and other experiences.
Doug Tallamy: If you want your kids to do more than catch lizards, get Nancy Nature play at home dozens of examples of how to expose kids to the natural world, and if you want to join homegrown national Park, you can do it.
Doug Tallamy: Go to Hunger National Park, dot org it's free. All you're doing is registering your property in the area you're going to be good steward of. So if you really do cut your of the blonde in half, you put that area down there.
Doug Tallamy: Uh, if you plan a tree and you protect it. If you put an aster in a flower pot, it's good enough. You're now a member of homegrown national park. Your little piece of your county is going to light up, and the goal is to get the whole country to light up.
Doug Tallamy: You know, we had this three thirty initiative
Doug Tallamy: uh people call it Biden's initiative. It's really the Un's initiative where we're going to say thirty percent of the planet by two thousand and thirty. It's got to include
Doug Tallamy: homeowner conservation efforts, and we need to record it all on the homegrown national park. Matt.
Doug Tallamy: So what are we asking? Reduce The area of lawn would be great. Plant More natives, particularly those real contributors, remove the invasive species that are already on your property. Most people have them and protect any natural areas that are associated with your your property. What's our product to national awareness? Not just at what the problem is but what the solution is.
Doug Tallamy: It's a change culture, the recognition that nature is not optional. It's essential, and everybody has responsibility to sustaining it. And again the measurable progress towards that three thousand and thirty initiative,
Doug Tallamy: the benefits it converts hope into action. We get to do something, not just talk about it, but we can do it. It doesn't rely on any governmental support.
Doug Tallamy: Um, we'd love it, but it's okay. Grassroots, grassroots, solution. Here it merges all the conservation efforts that already exist automobile, national, wildlife, Federation, wild ones, or sees Uh, because we're not charging, You can join Hunger National Park, even though you remember all these guys, and then we get to have that that visual
Doug Tallamy: um record of of all of the conservation that's happening in the country, and if there are holes in our biological carters that we're creating. We'll be able to see it on the map.
Doug Tallamy: So we want to join Hunger initial park. You want to shrink the lawn. What plants should we put in the area that was once long? I'm going to argue that some of them have to be keystone plants.
Doug Tallamy: Remember what a keystone is. It's a stone in the middle of the arts, the Roman arts, and if you take that stone out of the arts, the arch collapses.
Doug Tallamy: Well, he take keystone plants out of your local food, but the food web collapses because they are making most of the food. Just fourteen of our native plants are making ninety percent of the caterpillar food that drives those food webs. So think of the keystone plants
Doug Tallamy: in the ecological house that You're building outdoors as the two by four that hold up that house. They're essential. They're the support system. You cannot build a house, an ecological house out of wallpaper, and that's what we've been trying to do for the past century.
Doug Tallamy: So the question, though, is no longer simply our native plants better than not natives ecologically. On average, they certainly are, but they, you know there are a lot of natives that Aren't contributing all that much, either. So the question really is, Do we want to focus on those big contributors the ones that are supporting the most uh pollinators and the most food web or not?
Doug Tallamy: What is the number one keystone plant in terms of of of supporting food webs. It's it's uh oaks, one of the oaks in eighty-four of the counties in which they occur. They support more cataclys than any other plant, genus over nine hundred and fifty species nationwide tulip, tree for example another great native plant, but only sports twenty-one. So the huge differences among our trees that's what I mean by contributor versus not
Doug Tallamy: um. If you uh
Doug Tallamy: want to know what the best keystone plants are where you live. National Wildlife Federation has a new tool up there. Keystone plants by eco-region There's the the
Doug Tallamy: Url. You go to this website. And it will give you the best keystone uh plants for making calculus and the best plans for supporting specialist pollinators um by eco-reaching. So there's a map there, you can see which Ec region you belong to.
Doug Tallamy: All right. We're going to put it in. We're going to shrink the law. We're going to put in keystone plants. We're going to invite a lot of insects to our yard, and then we're going to kill them with our security light, which is not the goal.
Doug Tallamy: This is all the ways that that light pollution at night is killing insects. Um!
Doug Tallamy: And but you know what I I find. This good news. We have to stop the decline of insects. Earth is already lost. More than forty-five of its insects. They are the little things that run the world,
Doug Tallamy: and if we can stop it and reverse it. Actually have insect populations grow again just by flicking a switch. We're getting off easy. So that's excuse me,
Doug Tallamy: that's great, but there's a lot of uh foot switches to flick, but we're good switch flickers, but I know what you're going to say. Well, I can't turn the the light off over my barn, or or my front porch, or my garage, because the bad man will come
Doug Tallamy: all right. Put a motion sensor on it, so it only turns on when the bad man does come. And the first thing you're going to realize is the bad man doesn't come very often, and If you don't want to do that, take the white bulb out of your security light and put in a yellow bow.
Doug Tallamy: Regular Yellow Bob, or a yellow led. You can get them at at your local hardware store. Yellow wavelengths are far less attractive to uh nocturnal insects, particularly those mars that make all of those those caterpillars
Doug Tallamy: so overnight. If we switch to yellow bulbs, we could um save millions of insects, and if we used Leds millions of dollars to
Doug Tallamy: all right. We're going to. We're going to shrink the lawn.
Doug Tallamy: I'm going to put in keystone plants we're going to modify our light system. Then we're going to invite a mosquito fiber to come, kill all our insects, including the pollinators. This is a booming business around the country. It is undoing everything I've been talking about for the last fifteen years. Um, it's terrible.
Doug Tallamy: So these companies will say, Well, gee, It's okay, because this is a natural product, and it is it's pyrethroids
Doug Tallamy: industrial strength. P. That. That's the compound which is in chrysanthemums, and it evolved there to kill insects.
Doug Tallamy: Um, But you know being natural that means nothing cyanide is a natural product, too, but it's still toxic.
Doug Tallamy: They also say it only kills mosquitoes, and I wish that was true, but it's not even close to true. It kills all the insects that comes in contact with it, including, uh, monarchs. Big monarch kills two years ago, when they flew through Mosquito Joe.
Doug Tallamy: The interesting thing is it doesn't control mosquitoes? You don't control mosquitoes in the adult stage you control in the larval stage. It is too hard to control mosquitoes in the adult cities you have to kill ninety percent of them to get control.
Doug Tallamy: Uh these these companies kill between ten and fifty, so they're not even close to being effective, which is why, I think, coming back, coming back and and charging you each time. If you really want to control mosquitoes,
Doug Tallamy: um use biological control, get it, get a bucket, fill it full of water, put in a handful of straw or hay, or maybe dead grass or dead leaves,
Doug Tallamy: and put it out in the sun. You're going to build up the populations of diatoms and algae, and that is what mosquito larvae. It becomes an irresistible brew to mosquito females that want to lay their eggs in there.
Doug Tallamy: So once they do. Then you go to the hardware St. And you buy a sheet of mosquito dunks, nine dollars. This is bacillus or ingredients. It's a natural bacterium that only kills aquatic diptera, and the only aquatic dipter in in your bucket is a mosquito larva,
Doug Tallamy: very targeted, very cheap, very effective. If a dragonfly gets in here it won't hurt it. If your dog drinks, it won't hurt. It this is the way to do it, particularly if everybody that would be very effective.
Doug Tallamy: But you know what, if you're going to have a party in your backyard, and you just worry about those mosquitoes. Get a fan turn on the fan. It it creates enough airflow. The mosquitoes can't fly into it very effective, and you don't have to kill anything.
Doug Tallamy: Okay? The fourth thing we need to think about is
Doug Tallamy: landscaping in a way that allows caterpillars to complete their development.
Doug Tallamy: What do I mean by that? Well, here's just an example. I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where oaks support five hundred and eleven species of caterpillars, a few of them, like the polyphemous moth, complete their development on the tree.
Doug Tallamy: The caterpillar eats the leaves, then it spends a cocoon and hangs from from one of the branches. Then it emerges as an adult. Then it does it all over again.
Doug Tallamy: I wish everything did that, but most species don't they will finish growing as caterpillars on the tree, and then they drop from the tree, and they wiggle their way beneath the the soil surface and pupate underground,
Doug Tallamy: or they spin a cocoon in the leaf litter that is under the tree.
Doug Tallamy: And that's the problem. There is no leaf litter under the tree. We don't tolerate it. We have this notion that it's good or stewardship to have grass going right up to our trees, and we mow and compact the soil, so it's so tough. The caterpillars can't get underground, which means the way we landscape in so many places is an ecological trap.
Doug Tallamy: The most command Lay the race caterpillars develop drop down and die. And I'm convinced this is another major cause of insect declines, particularly in our more developed areas,
Doug Tallamy: and of course the cement landscape is not the option, either.
Doug Tallamy: It's what most people do. They have a tree in a yard. I get a new grad student this summer this year, who is starting to measure how well caterpillars do in a situation like this. But I guarantee they're going to do better in a situation like this, where you have a layered landscape, a soft landing.
Doug Tallamy: This is a tree. Maybe a dog would Here native azalea and ferns and grand cover. Caterpillar drops down. The soil is not compacted. They can easily get underneath the soil. They can pupate, they can, they can spin their cocoon much higher survivorship.
Doug Tallamy: This is where you can do your spring ephemeral gardening. You put beds around your trees. That's how you shrink the lawn,
Doug Tallamy: the bigger the better it's. A great soft sites for soft landings for the caterpillars. Use your native ground covers um liberally. Things like wild ginger,
Doug Tallamy: native pack. Cassandra. Here's the Virginia creeper being a great grand cover golden seal a lot of options may may apple, phone flower ferns, all great options, you know. If you can see the ground, you don't have enough plants. Green mulch is the best moz, and it's wonderful for those categories.
Doug Tallamy: Okay. Another uh former grad student, Desere in Orangeo, did some wonderful work with um chickades.
Doug Tallamy: Excuse me in the suburbs of of Washington, Dc.
Doug Tallamy: And she had one simple question, which um, the results of which suggest there actually is room for compromise. For all of. You have heard that i'm not willing to compromise. Yes, I am. And here's the data to to uh support that.
Doug Tallamy: She asked. How well the chickadee populations do in landscapes that are dominated by native plants versus landscapes dominated by introduced plants,
Doug Tallamy: and she found, when they're dominated by introduced plans to support seventy-five fewer caterpillars. So right away you reduce the amount of bird food by seventy-five. They're sixty percent less likely to have breeding chickadees at all
Doug Tallamy: nest boxes up in everybody's yard, but the chickadees would come and look around and say they're not enough to eat. Here. We're not even going to try
Doug Tallamy: If they did try. They laid one point five fewer eggs. Those clutches were twenty-nine percent less likely to survive. If they did survive, they they produce one point, two fewer fledglings,
Doug Tallamy: and it's taken one point five days longer to do that. If you put all that into a population growth model as a function of the percentage of non-native woody plant biomass from none to one hundred percent
Doug Tallamy: in your yard. This is what you get We focus on what he plans because that's for tickets for it.
Doug Tallamy: The dotted line you see there, right in the middle. That is replacement rate. That is the rate at which
Doug Tallamy: Ah, the population has to make baby to replace the adults that die every year. If you, if you reproduce at that rate you have a sustainable population, it's not growing, but it's not shrinking either.
Doug Tallamy: If you make more babies and adults die, you have a growing population. But if you make fewer babies which happens when you have a lot of non-native plants.
Doug Tallamy: Then you have an unsustainable shrinking population. Now, right here is where those lines overlap um liberally interpreting,
Doug Tallamy: which means you can have up to thirty percent of the woody plant biomass in your yard non-native without compromising the the local food web.
Doug Tallamy: Now, we can't. We can't tolerate any uh invasive plans. Those are ecological tumors. They they escape our yards and and destroy local ecosystems. But there are plenty of um introduced plants that are not invasive.
Doug Tallamy: Remember, Dan get me? Did you notice that this was a ginko?
Doug Tallamy: Why does Dan have a Genko in his native plant planting?
Doug Tallamy: Because, Dan's wife said, I like Ginkos, and I want you to put one in And he did. Is it destroying the productivity of this landscape? No. Is it invasive? Is it moving around? No,
Doug Tallamy: it's not contributing anything, but it's not removing anything, either, so I I like to think of plants like this as if there were statues. So there you go.
Doug Tallamy: Um! There's Dan statue. But how many statues do you mind if you have a whole yard of statues maybe that's that's too many.
Doug Tallamy: It's not the presence of non-native plants that destroys food web. It's the absence of those big contributors there's. Native native keystone plants Um. And if we increase the percentage of these we can tolerate these as well.
Doug Tallamy: Can we use native plants and formal designs?
Doug Tallamy: Of course we can. This is a Linux Shaughnessy design. You don't get more formal than that. This is taken by a drone four hundred feet up. Every plant in that landscape, many of which are supporting pollinators
Doug Tallamy: is a native plant. Formality is a function of the design. It's not a function of the plants in the design.
Doug Tallamy: Our native plants are used in formal designs in Europe every day.
Doug Tallamy: I guess that's okay, because they're not native plants there. Can we get a polynomial garden into a suburban yard like this without offending anybody? Of course we can put a little fence around it.
Doug Tallamy: It's formalizes it. It tells your neighbors that this is This is not uh, just a bunch of ways you forgot to move.
Doug Tallamy: It's not very big,
Doug Tallamy: but it is meeting the needs of of several species of of bees. Remember why we need pollinators. You hear all the time we need them, because they pollinate a third of our crops. I don't like that argument if I hear people say, Well, I don't live next to a farm, so I don't need any pollinators.
Doug Tallamy: I forget the crop argument. We need pioneers because they pollinate most of the plants that are out there.
Doug Tallamy: So where do we need polynomials? Every place we need, plants, which is every place.
Doug Tallamy: How about this? A. Drew Latham design? Much bigger. Imagine the amount of life. The amount of pollinators supported here versus the amount of pollinators supported here.
Doug Tallamy: Seems like a no-brainer
Doug Tallamy: Can municipalities help us live with nature. Of course they can in Minnesota, but leading the way several years ago, it's got a cost sharing program. The State pays people to reduce or eliminate their lawn and replace it with appropriate prairie, planning, all of which are great pollinator plants. There's an island in Florida,
Doug Tallamy: or at least there was before the hurricane came
Doug Tallamy: that is paying its residents to allow burrowing owls to grow in the front yard. Burrowing out is their listed species.
Doug Tallamy: This is the way the endangered species act should have been been written.
Doug Tallamy: We're going to pay people to be good stewards of endangered species on their property rather than find you. If you use your property. Everybody would want an endangered species.
Doug Tallamy: Put a bounty on on invasive ornamentals like like Calorie pair. That's what St. Louis, Missouri did. Fayetteville Arkansas South Carolina has banned them all together. North Carolina has a ban on it. You take out a calorie pair. You get a free tree replacement
Doug Tallamy: and uh Utilities public utilities, particularly in the in the West, are giving people hundred dollars coupons to plant water, efficient native species rather than the thirsty non natives.
Doug Tallamy: And of course, the big Uh long replacement programs in California. This is going up. It's now three dollars per square foot rebate for every square foot of line you take out and put in
Doug Tallamy: a Zurich planning. We need to get this message to Kim Kardashian, who's using more water in Hollywood than anybody else.
Doug Tallamy: And if you want more information on all these programs. Memorize that?
Doug Tallamy: All right. I think we made three missteps in the early years of conservation. Um,
Doug Tallamy: This first one's important. We're starting to think of nature as if it's optional. We like it. We like to visit it uh, but it's not essential, and if it's not essential when push comes to shove,
Doug Tallamy: when resources are in short supply, which is always the nature, takes a back seat,
Doug Tallamy: went to the Cincinnati zoo before the virus broke out, and there's this well-sized poster there which to me epitomizes our society's view of conservation. We want to save wildlife. We want to save nature so the future generations can enjoy it. That was Teddy Roosevelt's argument for the National Park system. They're wonderful places we have to save them, so the future generations can enjoy them.
Doug Tallamy: But to me that just promotes the idea that nature is there just for entertainment, it's far more than that. We need to save nature, so that we have future generations a little bit more urgent.
Doug Tallamy: We've also assumed the humans in nature. Can that coexist? I talked about that. But if we restrict our conservation efforts to areas where there's very few humans we're going to fail because they're not enough of those areas left anymore.
Doug Tallamy: David Koman has a great analogy between a Persian rug and an ecosystem. This is a functional Persian rug that is not seventy-one Persian rocks at seventy. One rugged fragments none of which are acting like a Persian rug. And that's exactly what we've done to our ecosystems.
Doug Tallamy: The un designates bias here reserves this places of ecological significance. I don't like that language because it suggests the places on planet Earth with no ecological significance. Not so. Every square into the planet has ecological significance, including our yards, including our corporate landscapes,
Doug Tallamy: including our roadsides, including much of our agriculture. So we need to put the plants back and glue our rug back together again, and we can do it. We are doing it not just to make biological carters that allow plants and animals to move back and forth between viable habitat, but to create viable habitat
Doug Tallamy: where we've destroyed it. And when we do that, it's going to be the first time in modern history where humans are actually coexisting with the natural world.
Doug Tallamy: Our third missed up is to leave our stewardship to just a few specialists,
Doug Tallamy: few ecologists, few conservation biologists. For some reason we did not see it as an inherent responsibility of everybody on the planet. But I don't know why, because every single person on the planet depends entirely on the quality of local ecosystems. So why, when everybody bear the responsibility of taking care of those ecosystems,
Doug Tallamy: Stan Rushworth, the Cherokee elder, once said the Western settler mindset is, I have rights. The my set of indigenous people is, I have obligations.
Doug Tallamy: You're not born with those mindset. You're taught them. We've been really good at teaching this one. We've been terrible at teaching our kids and
Doug Tallamy: our peers that we all have obligations to good or stewardship
Doug Tallamy: that doesn't mean. You have to say biodiversity for a living, but you can save it where you live, and if you do it in parish, you,
Doug Tallamy: and right now more and more people are recognizing. The earth has some serious problems, but we all feel powerless.
Doug Tallamy: What can one person do?
Doug Tallamy: Well, One person can shrink their lawn. One person can can uh
Doug Tallamy: change their light bulbs in their nocturnal lights. One person can use keystone plants. One person can put in a pollinator garden. One person can remove the invasive plants on their property. We didn't talk much about that
Doug Tallamy: um.
Doug Tallamy: One person can do all the things I just talked about and totally revitalize the little ecosystem on their yard and then enhance their local ecosystem instead of continuing to detract it.
Doug Tallamy: And it shrinks the problem down to something that's manageable for each one of us. Don't. Think about the entire world's problem. Just worry about the piece of the world, the piece of the earth that you are influencing. If you own property, it's obvious. That's where you start. If you don't own property, help somebody who does up a land conservancy or park or preserve.
Doug Tallamy: They're all underfunded. They're all understaffed. They would love you as a volunteer,
Doug Tallamy: so as a property owner or a volunteer. Each one of us has the power, and we certainly had the responsibility to fix dead landscapes like this.
Doug Tallamy: Whether or not we do so is going to determine nature's fate, and then ultimately our own fate.
Doug Tallamy: I think I've convinced my grandkids that you are pollinators Best hope. I hope I've convinced you as well. Thanks very much.
Denise Ellsworth: Great. Thank you so much, doug the folks i'm going to open up the um chat box again, if you some of you wanted to share some links or other ideas in there. Um,
Denise Ellsworth: it's like I wanted to mention, because it came up in the Q. A. Box um several times that we do post this recording, and we invite uh everyone to share that recording. Um, You can share it with your garden group with a a local community. Some people asked about how to get their condo associations interested in and and and behind native plants. And that's exactly why we post these recordings. So in fact, I was down at a Garden Club meeting this past winter, and that's what they did. They They uh showed the Doug's presentation Them
Denise Ellsworth: we did some Q. A. Um. So please use those recordings. Um! Many of our questions were about. How do we get others interested? And there's a you know, a a real obvious place to start. You already have the choir kind of convinced. But how do you spread out from there?
Denise Ellsworth: I'm done. There were few questions about your uh five gallon bucket mosquito trap, you answered most of those. But uh, several people wondered if you're bringing in mosquitoes and trapping them. Are there enough mosquitoes or food out there for bats and other predators.
Doug Tallamy: Well, you know, life is full of trade offs. First of all, many of the mosquitoes that are really pestiferous to us, particularly the ones Spreading diseases are uh in basis species themselves eighties. Egypt, I, you know, comes from region Asian tiger, mosquito pesty little thing um. So they're not native mosquitoes. We're not wiping out the mosquito populations.
Doug Tallamy: Um, and remember you're we're talking about where you right where you live. You're not living in the middle of a swamp where you're producing lots of mosquitoes that support everything. I I trust if you don't want to kill your mosquitoes, that is fine with me, but uh rather than hiring Mosquito Joe, this is a much better way to go.
Denise Ellsworth: Okay, great uh folks. I know It's a little after the hour, so if you have to hop off. Remember, we're gonna continue to record the um ten minutes or so of Q. A. So you can always come back in on the recording. And um hear those answers.
Denise Ellsworth: So Alice asked very um nicely. How is it better to have oaked uh and lost, or never to have oaked at all. So she's wondering if you're on a property where you've only You're only going to be there five years or so. Um! Should you go ahead and plants a small oak. Uh, or is it something you need kind of a long view for?
Doug Tallamy: No. Remember that picture of the caterpillar eating the oak in the first year it'll contribute to your local ecosystem whether or not you live there, uh, and it'll start right away. So if you're going to live there five years and five years. You're It's going to be much bigger than you think it will be. I have a picture of a uh a young white oak in my yard.
Doug Tallamy: I think it was year three, and in the first scratch there was a nest of a field sparrow. So yeah, please
Doug Tallamy: please plant them. It does you? You're not going to chop it down when you when you move. So somebody else gets to enjoy the benefits of that o as well.
Denise Ellsworth: Um, So there are. Were a few questions about uh cold temperatures coming frost free. Do you have some suggestions for how to help insects and others over winter. Um, Some ways we can um, some some um practices we can establish outside.
Doug Tallamy: Well, yeah, this is all about uh that habitat we're talking about, uh, including bees, and I'm pretty sure Heather will tell you about this, but
Doug Tallamy: our bees need to over winner uh just like the other other insects, and many of them overwhelming when they are in the stems, the dead stems
Doug Tallamy: of uh the previous year's growth. So when we cut everything down when we clean up in the fall we're removing. So i'm saying that your golden rod and your your asters, and your your black eyed Susan, you're removing the overwintering sites of um a lot of those native bees when you uh rake up and throw away all your leaves, You're removing the overwintering sites of of a lot of those categories that we're in your trees.
Doug Tallamy: So it's the fall clean up. That's so hard on our our insects. Try to. I I get it. We have to move things around on our property.
Doug Tallamy: Um, we, you know, I say, reduce the lawn rather than get rid of it, and the long we keep should be manicured. That's a queue for care that we're not thrown out of our our developments, but so we have to get the leaves and things off the lawn. Keep them somewhere on your property, and your in your beds is the best place,
Doug Tallamy: and you will help overrunning insects a lot.
Denise Ellsworth: Okay. A few folks wanted to know if you could repeat the name of uh the um Nature play book, and I put the link in there as well.
Doug Tallamy: Nature
Denise Ellsworth: great. And then also, uh lots of questions around. How do I find the list of keystone plants? How do I find the specialist? These? Um! How do I find the plants for moss and butterflies. I put that link in there as well. It's also on our web page, but Doug and you can. You mentioned the uh plant Finder:
Doug Tallamy: Yeah, we you go to National Wildlife Federation website, and then there there's there's two tools called one's called native Plant Finder, uh and it you put in your zip code and the ranked list of both Woody and and her basis plans for your county.
Doug Tallamy: We'll pop up, and this new one is is keystone plants by Eco region that will direct you to the best place, particularly the specialists, the plants. That are great for specialist pollinators
Denise Ellsworth: by eco-region. So those are really nice tidy little list folks. So especially if you want to forward that to a friend who might be interested. Um, So I put the the both of those links are on our web page. I put the one in there, so it's handy.
Denise Ellsworth: Um. There were a couple of questions about. Uh, you know I don't have ten acres. I wish I did. And you you sort of answered this already, but maybe you could reiterate. What can someone with a uh who's maybe a beginner, or has a small space or a low budget? Where do you start
Doug Tallamy: The easiest thing in most most places of the country. It's got to be got to be biome appropriate. But the easiest thing is to plan a tree
Doug Tallamy: to plant a small trade plant that egg corn that's that is really easy. It's cheap, and it will grow and and do wonderful things for your yard uh. So anybody on a small budget can do that.
Doug Tallamy: Um, then take care of it. Put Put that bed around the tree you've reduced the area you have in line. You're It's still only one tree, but they they do grow a lot of people say, Well, i'm just gonna i'm gonna create a meadow, and that's great, But it's also one of the hardest things to do. Um, for a number of reasons. Um,
Doug Tallamy: So I don't know that's that's what I would. That's what I did do. I started by planning the woody plants, and uh, an awful lot of things have come to our property,
Denise Ellsworth: and and how do we get others involved? How do you get your neighbor? You know you've got this wonderful little ecosystem around you. But how do you get your neighbors involved, or your community your schools? Um. You know. How do we spread this word?
Doug Tallamy: Um, i'd love to have a a bring your neighbor night, you know, If you've got this recording,
Doug Tallamy: make some popcorn and invite your neighbor, who would never ever think about this over and say,
Doug Tallamy: You know, Don't proselyt, you know neighbors don't want their neighbors telling them how to live. But you can say, Hey, just stumble across. This seems pretty cool. Maybe we can watch it together. I don't know. I always wanted to see how that would work. But
Doug Tallamy: you know what I do Have a a almost a twenty year perspective on this. It It is spreading pretty quickly now. Um! I cannot keep up with with the interest in in this, so the needle is moving. The headlines are helping
Doug Tallamy: people. Don't want to hear how our birds and insects are disappearing. How we're going to lose a million species. They're upset about that, And the message here is you can do something about it.
Doug Tallamy: That's a powerful message, and a lot of people are. They want to do that? So? Um! The people who are the non choir usually just. They don't know that this is important. They don't know that they need nature. It's it's it's lack of information rather than I don't want to do it, and once they do hear about it. I hear about conversions all the time,
Denise Ellsworth: mhm and, like you said just a small step. You start to see the the results. Someone commented that she just planted an oak, and now is seeing lots of blue jays out there. It really doesn't take long for um for the animals to respond.
Denise Ellsworth: So again done. Thank you so much for your presentation, for your time, for all that you do, the energy and passion you put in your work, folks. I know lots of you have given a thank you um to Doug. I'm sure you would appreciate that if you want to put that in the uh chat box, and I will see all of you next week for our next presentation. I'll have this recording posted uh early this afternoon,
Doug Tallamy: and uh Doug. Thanks a lot. Well, thanks for the invitation, Denise.
Doug Tallamy: Take care.