Alright, so I mentioned last week how we have, we have gardeners a naturalist professional horticulturist agency folks researchers students so many diverse folks who've come to listen to the attending nature webinar series.
And I didn't mention that we have here in Ohio a small online course that's open just to to volunteer naturalists and volunteer Master Gardeners in the state we have about 150 people who are taking that program and and joining the webinars, each week.
In addition to the webinars we have some zoom meetings and some readings and so a feature that I've added to our web page that learn with us tab is actually linked I have some different readings and papers and other resources that go with each week's
webinar series, so anyone is able to visit that, learn with us web page, look at the readings I know a lot of people have talked about.
They've found a copy or got their old copy out of bringing nature home, I don't tell me.
A we're also working with attracting birds, butterflies and other backyard wildlife and breeding sweet grass are really wonderful books so we have all that information they're available to anyone on our website if you'd like to read along and learn with
us.
And did want to let you know that there is a subscribe button down at the bottom right of this web page, and if you'd like to subscribe to just this web page.
I'll give you a really short summary every week of where we are with the readings, just to keep, keep everything going kind of together.
So I I'm very thrilled to have Tommy with us again one of our OSU webinar favorites, we actually were going to do an in person quite a program, way back in 2020 before the pandemic fully hit.
And in the meantime, we've just I keep emailing Doug and saying, we'd love to have you come back again.
So we've on our website on the be lab website we have our new year's best top web recording link there we have the nature folks which we did last year, whole living landscape Lecture Series is also linked there on the V lab website, and then bringing
nature home, which is the real you know kind of seminal book that many of us have.
That was an introduction when it came out in 2007, Doug has really been instrumental in getting people excited and enthusiastic about native plants and why they're so important.
And I mentioned our class of about 150 people when I mentioned to the, the class members that we were using bringing nature home. Many of those participants several already have a copy of the book.
And I said, I want you to go back and reread it. So, there's so much great content in there as well as really fabulous illustrations and photographs that even if you have this already on your bookshelf I would encourage you to take it out again.
And really dig down into those fundamentals that Doug presents for us on why those native plants are so important.
So I, when I contacted Doug a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago and said, Will you come back and do bringing nature home for us and he's like don't doesn't ever want to know how I've done this so many times for you, surely we've, we've reached everyone.
And I said well we have a wider tent now lots more participants and we can never hear it enough dog we can't hear the townie rap enough, we try to keep up and learn all those plants and those those caterpillars we're so excited to have you here again
and to learn from you today.
So with that, Doug. folks, I can't.
Julian and Marsha I can't stop my screen share but if you'll stop my shared then we'll turn the podium over to you, Doug welcome and thanks again.
Thank you, Denise.
Here we go.
Okay.
Well that's, that's a good idea to me I should go back and read bringing nature how I haven't read it in a number of years.
I'm going to call this bring nature home, maybe 2.0 it's, it's an update we've learned a lot I wrote, read the original book and wrote it in 2005 it was published in 2007 so we've learned a lot since then.
And this should this should be an update.
But before I talk about bringing nature home I want to talk about IA Wilson's book in 2016, called half Earth.
Chris many of you know that that Eduardo Wilson died the day after Christmas, huge loss to the, to the world of conservation. But he was 92 and he spent a lifetime, giving it his all.
And one of the things he worried about the most of course was protecting biodiversity we've got a bio diversity crisis in this planet and he wanted to fix it, so he wrote this book, half Earth our planets fight for life.
And his message was clear, we need to save functional ecosystems, we need to save, save nature on half of planet Earth if we're going to have it on any of planet Earth.
And he spent most of the book talking about the science that supports that statement.
And they pretty much ended the book he didn't tell us a lot about how we could do that.
So people are scratching their heads I mean conservation biologists love the idea of gee let's put half the second half the earth, the side and every, everything will be great, but half of planet Earth is already in some form of agriculture half of the
terrestrial Earth is in agriculture. The other half has almost 8 billion people and all of our airports and roads and detritus and, and we don't have a third have to put aside for nature.
So how can we do what he says we should do.
Well, that's what I want to talk about today I think we can realize it Wilson stream, we're going to need a new approach to conservation to do that though.
In 2019, I don't know if you recall we had what we call an oak mast, and much of the East, members of the red a group got together and decided to make their a currency.
At the same time, this is what it looked like in a lot of places.
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 to its way out of the acorn for situate little hole for its head person's head through there.
Then of course its entire body through that little hole. It was a tight squeeze look like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Finally it plopped down and that's a dangerous time for this lava because it's good to eat. one of the things are after it.
So it gets the safety by wiggling and screaming and beneath the soil surface in about 30 seconds.
And once it's underground stretches in all directions and forms a chamber and within that chamber converts itself to a pupil.
That's surprisingly it stays there for two years after two years comes out as an inquiry weevil. That's what an acorn we will looks like a lot of people think we will 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, and they take those mouth parts to a hole into the center of the acorn turn around laying again that hole and that's how the larva gets down there.
Why do they spend two years underground.
Because it takes red oak acorns 18 months to complete their development. So they came at the very next year they wouldn't be enough acorns for it.
Well, once they leave the acorn course that leaves a hole, a true vacuum and you know that nature abhors a vacuum, and in this case she has filled it with three species of Tim to thorax ants tiny little dance with live in the holes made by acquiring labels
in ignorance entire colonies lives in there. And if scouts find a new home they get very excited because their old acorn is falling apart.
So they tell everybody, it's time to move they grab the larvae they grab the eggs they move the entire colony into the new hole into the new egg corn takes about 30 minutes, and they post a guard, make sure nobody else comes in, and that's where they
live. for the next two years until this acorn falls apart.
What's my point.
It's very simple. That is just one of literally millions of very specialized interactions, largely between animals or yeah animals and plants that comprise the bulk of nature.
This is another one, the relationship between Jays and oaks Jays are the primary dispersal of oak seeds acorns. They'll take an acorn fly up to a mile from the parent tree.
Then they tap it beneath the soil surface, and the object is you're going to go get it during wintertime and have something to eat.
But for every for acorns they bury the only remember where one of them is. So for every for a currents they buried they have planted three oak trees.
Specialized relationship between pileated woodpeckers and carpenter ants pileated woodpeckers rear their young on carpenter ants, so you won't have pileated woodpeckers unless you have a lot of carpenter ants and you won't have carpenter ants unless you
have the big trees that make those carpenter ants. You won't have this be and during the facility I unless you have this plant facility yet, because that is the only pollen that be, that'd be can reproduce son, and Colin specialization turns out to be
very common I'm sure and Brian Danforth will tell you this in a few weeks.
We got about 4000 species of native bees and over a third of them are highly specialized on particular pollens.
You don't have the Baltimore Checkerspot unless you have white turtle head. I could talk all day all week all year of that nature specialized relationships point I want to make today though is that these relationships nature itself is on the ropes.
And it's on the roads because we did not take Teddy Roosevelt's advice, way back in 1988, Teddy here that state of Arizona was going to mind the Grand Canyon.
So he went to the Kenyan looked at over the edge and he said leave it as it is.
I mean it was five words he started the process of creating the Grand Canyon National Park.
We didn't leave it as it was only about 5% of the, the lower 48 states it's anything close to its original pristine ecological state.
That's because we have logged the country repeatedly. We have killed it. We have drained it, we have grazed it gets 770 million acres of range land in the US.
That's four and a half times the size of Texas.
And of course we've paved it or otherwise developed it.
We have straightened our rivers and bam them. and you can spell that any way you want.
We have polluted our skies and changed our climate for centuries to come. We've drained our aquifers. We've introduced more than 3300 species of plants from other continents, many of which are running a muck and our natural areas like kazoos doing here.
In short, we have carved up those natural areas into tiny remnants of their former selves, and each one of those remnants is too small and too isolated to sustain the species that run the ecosystems that we all depend on.
You might wonder why we've done this. I wonder why we've done this, And I don't know but I suspect we thought that our next planet Earth was so big, we could fall it forever and there wouldn't be any consequences.
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, followed by this one North America
is less 3 billion breeding birds in the last 50 years. That's almost a third of our North American bird population already gone.
Now the UN says well you know we're going to lose a million species to extinction probably in the next 20 years. I don't know if you heard but what, two months ago we remove 23 species from the endangered species list up because we've saved them but because
they're already extinct.
So this is happening, but we can't allow it to happen it's not an option to lose the species that keep us alive on planet Earth.
So I could while I'm talking about the pox that we humans have delivered upon the environment, this upon all of our houses but that is not what this talk is about this talk is about a cure for that pox its security that'll take small efforts from lots
of people. But those efforts have delivered enormous physical, psychological and environmental benefits to everybody.
Let's return to this headline briefly insect apocalypse is here what does it mean for the rest of life on Earth.
Well, again, eo Wilson told us what it would mean if we were to lose insects, and he did it way back in 1987 with this paper the little things that run the world.
And again, his message was clear life as we know it depends on insects, and if they were to disappear so with most of our flowering plants, and most of our flowering plants disappeared, that would so drastically change energy flow through our terrestrial
ecosystems that the food webs that support our animals. Yeah Fabians the reptiles the birds the mammals, even many of our freshwater fish. Those food beds would collapse in the animals would disappear, the biosphere the living portion of the Earth would
rot, because we would have lost in 60 composers that rapidly turned over nutrients. And all we would have is bacteria and fungi.
And of course humans when survive any of those drastic changes.
There's some good news here, believe it or not, and that is, this didn't have to happen. We can save our insects, we can save our birds we can save nature itself.
But we're going to have to change the way we landscape to do it, and we're going to have to change the way we landscape. Pretty soon, why is that well.
Remember humans are products of nature, we're totally dependent on on the life support systems that healthy ecosystems deliver as we call them ecosystem services.
These are just some of the things that plants do we totally depend on like the production of oxygen pretty important clean water.
We all need clean water plants are cleaning water and it's slowing its journey to the sea where it becomes too salty to use carbon capture that pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere out of harm's way.
Using the carbon to build their tissues but then pumping the extra carbon into the grant extremely important these days.
Plants are building topsoil holding it in place preventing floods dampening severe weather, converting sunlight to food, if we lost your plants, we'd have to eat sunlight, very difficult.
What do animals do for plants they provide Pest Control services, they pollinate nearly 90% of our flowering plants they just first plant seeds.
So designing landscapes like this that destroy the production of ecosystem services just not a good idea, never was a good idea but today it's terrible idea.
We've got almost 8 billion people on the planet we need more ecosystem services today just to keep the people happy without wiping everything else than ever before.
And we do have parks and we have preserves and people. Isn't that enough.
Because you know if it was enough we wouldn't be in the sixth great extinction event right now so we now have to do conservation outside of parks and preserves.
There have been visionaries through the ages who have recognized that that we humans needed to work on our relationship with with Planet Earth and elderly Hippo was one of the most eloquent, he wrote extensively in the first half of the 1900s, one of
the things he said is that the oldest task in human history is to live in a piece of land without spoiling it.
There have been indigenous groups have been good at doing that.
But for the most part, our huge Western societies and our huge Asian societies are terrible at doing that, we habitually take the earth and has to offer.
Completely wrecking an area, going to another area doing the same thing, not sustainable behavior.
But Allah had a lot of faith and in humans, he believed we could develop what he called a land ethic, he knew we had to use the land we had to use the earth, we had to farm and lumber and graze in mind and do all of those things but he believed we could
learn to do it gently enough so that we did not destroy local ecosystems. That's what he called the land ethic, wrote about it in the same County Almanac what he did not write about though is developing a land ethic, where we actually lived.
And I'm not sure why that was, but I suspect the notion that humans and nature cannot coexist in the same place at the same time.
That notion was so deeply embedded in other Leopold's day still embedded in our own culture that he may not have seen it as an option.
But what about, are you this morning is that not only is living with nature and option, it is now the only viable option that's left to us.
You know in the past, conservationists work pretty much exclusively where there weren't a lot of people. We now need to turn that on its head. We need to do conservation we need to save nature actually reconstruct it, where there are a lot of people because
that's pretty much everywhere.
In other words, we've got to find ways for nature to thrive in human dominated landscapes, not hanging on by a thread but but thrive.
Where are we going to do that let's go back to private property.
Most of the land is privately owned, we can ignore it.
85.6% of the US east of the Mississippi is privately owned 98% or 95 forget of Texas is privately owned 78% of the entire country is privately owned again if we don't do conservation on private property, we're going to fail.
Because the places where we've been focusing are too small and too isolated to conserve the amount of nature that we all need.
Now when you use the word conservation I'm not using it correctly, I don't mean we need to, I don't mean I'm not focusing on saving areas that arts as yet undisturbed.
We certainly want to do that, you know, and that's what we've been doing we want to keep doing that but there's not that many of those areas left. I'm talking about rebuilding nature where we've already destroyed it.
So we're talking about restoration. But before you tell me what you'll never put it back exactly the way it was. I know that, but we can reunite enough of those specialized relationships to rebuild enough of nature, so that we have functional ecosystems,
even if they're not exactly what they were before we dismantle them.
So that, again, we're producing ecosystem services that we all need in order to do that though we have to start with the most powerful species not all species contribute to ecosystem function equally.
So we have to start with the building blocks.
And there are two groups that we can't do with that flowering plants and the pollinators that allow those those plants to reproduce, those plants are capturing energy from the sun, turning it into food assistance during that food in their tissues.
So now we have food stored largely in plant leaves. If we don't get that food to animals, you don't have any animals. That's what they're depending on.
Well most vertebrates don't eat plants directly. They eat invertebrates that ate plants. Most of those invertebrates are insects, and most of the insects that are passing on energy turn out to be caterpillars caterpillars you're transferring more energy
from plants to other animals than any other type of plant eater. So if we don't design landscapes that have a lot of caterpillars.
We have failed food webs, and eventually failed ecosystems.
I'm going to use the Carolina chicken he is an example.
They of course our feeders. Well, you've got black cat chicken in Ohio, but all the chickens are doing the same thing they're eating seeds during the wintertime, where they comprise 50% of their diet 50% of a chicken these diet is seeds, the other 50%
is insects and spiders, even in the wintertime.
But when they're reproducing their babies can't eat seeds, so they switch entirely to insects, and if they're in a healthy environment they will rear their young exclusively on caterpillars
and chicken ease or not exceptions.
Most birds are wearing their young insects 96% of our terrestrial birds are very young and insects, and most of those insects are caterpillars. How do I know that.
Well there's a number of lines of evidence that suggests that, but this is a project that one of my grad students did a few years ago Ashley Kennedy.
She put out a call for bird photographers to take pictures of birds during the breeding season, when they were bringing.
items and the beats of the birds were, and reconstruct the nestling diet for as many species of birds in North America, as she could.
And she got thousands of pictures, so she did a lot of identifying. This is a summary of her results the green bars are the percentage of those nestling diets that were caterpillars teen out of the common most common 20 bird families in North America,
caterpillars dominated the diet.
So again, what would happen to breeding birds, or the ability of birds to breed, if we didn't have enough caterpillars in our landscapes most of our birds would not be able to break.
That makes caterpillars really important. What is special about caterpillars number of things are special First of all, they're soft, think of this guy as if he's a little sausage, with a very thin wrapper.
With the thin wrapper is it's exoskeleton it's cuticle is made of tighten it is and digestible and the birds don't want a lot of that.
And because caterpillars just soft you can stuff them down the throat of your baby your offspring without fear of injuring it. If you've ever watched a parent bird we're too young, they're pretty rough, they, they're big is like a plunger they just stuff
it down there.
caterpillars are also relatively large prey items when medium sized caterpillars equal to the biomass of 200 agents.
And some of our birds do chase a Putz around but you want to chase 200 800 get one caterpillar.
They're nutritious, they're high in fat, high in protein, low percentage of cotton of exoskeleton compared to many other insects, particularly Beatles Beatles are not like little sausages they're like little tanks.
So much of a beetle isn't digestible and many vehicles have really sharp edges to.
And finally, it turns out caterpillars are the best source of carotenoids for birds during the breeding season.
I mentioned carotenoids, not because I love organic chemistry but because I'm a vertebrate and your reverberate and birds invertebrates, and we vertebrates cannot make our own current nights only plants make correct nights.
So we have to get our current nights from plants, and we have to get them from plants because carotenoids are essential components of vertebra diets, where the birds getting their current nights from, from their prey items of course but look primates
are not equally distributed among bird prey Adams these first two bars here are types of caterpillars have far more carotenoids and other types of a bird pray, here the adult caterpillars down here the Muslim butterflies themselves.
Here the adult caterpillars down here the Muslim butterflies themselves. Again far fewer current nights because they're not eating green leaves that's where the carotenoids are. And here's the earthworm way down here.
So the early bird gets the worm but he doesn't get any current nights when he gets the worm.
So that study and several others are suggesting very convincingly that caterpillars are not optional parts of bird diets, they are essential parts of bird diets.
So let's just say birds need caterpillars. The next question is, how many caterpillars do they need is one or two enough, or one or two a day enough.
Well, it's a good question let's go back to chicken ease. There's a lot of data on chicken is how many caterpillar's does it take to make a nest activities.
One or two is not enough, one or two a day is not enough, it takes thousands of caterpillars to rear one clutch of chickens, depending on the number of chicks in the next 6000 to 9000 caterpillars to get them to the point where they leave the nest.
And after they leave the nest the parents continue to feed them caterpillars for another 21 days.
And then they're independent, and then they keep eating caterpillars. You're talking about 10s of thousands of caterpillars to make one nest of a bird that is a third of an ounce for Penny's worth of bird.
And if you want chicken ease to breed in your yard, you've got to have all those categories in your yard because they only forage about 50 meters from the nest.
They're not flying five miles down the road to the nearest would live.
And if we landscape in a way that does not make all those caterpillars. That's called insect decline.
And it's really looking like that's directly related to bird decline.
We went to the original data set of Rosenberg at all that's the group that the Smithsonian group that said, we have lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years.
And we divided the terrestrial bird species into two groups, the species that require insects at some point in their life history. Usually when they're breeding and the species that do not require insects when they're reading so things like dubs and finches
that can actually, they make a little milk out of seeds and they can feed that to their babies. Well, the group that doesn't require insects didn't decline it all in the last 50 years, but the group that requires insects declined, on average 10 million
individuals per species.
It doesn't prove cause and effect, but it certainly does suggest that as you take away bird food, you take away the birds.
So that gives us a new goal and landscaping, you know in the past we've essentially had one goal and landscaping, we want to make it pretty. And we're not going to bend in that we still want to make them pretty but but now, if we're going to coexist with
nature.
We have to create landscapes that are ecologically functional. So they've got to be producing insects. So how do we add caterpillars to our landscapes caterpillars by adding the plants that make those caterpillars.
Seems easy enough.
But there is a catch and that is that most plants don't make a lot of caterpillars so we have to be fussy about which ones we landscape with, or at least which ones we include in our landscapes, and we have to be fussy about it because caterpillars themselves
are fussy about what they can eat, and the monarch butterfly illustrates it perfectly.
You can have all the calorie pair, and all of the crape myrtle and all of the box wood and all the hostages and all of the burning bush and all of the Asian plants that we typically landscape with, excuse me, in your yard.
And you won't make a single monarch butterfly The only is going to make a monarch butterfly, as you know, is milk weeds. That's called host plant specialization.
And most of the insects eat plants are post plant specialist.
Why, because the plants have made them specialized, the plants don't want to be, you want to capture the energy from the, from the sun and turn it into.
They want to use it for their own growth and reproduction.
So they've loaded their leaves you want to protect those leads from insects they've loaded them with nasty tasting chemicals secondary metabolic compounds that make those those leads either bitter, or downright toxic, and it's a really effective defense
that keeps most of the insects in the world, from eating, most of the plants of the world.
And that's why it's green out there in the summertime, it's not because there's no insects out there that want to want to eat those plants. It's because most of the insects that are out there cannot eat.
most of the plants that are too well protected.
But we do know that that insects.
He plants so how did they do that how do they get around those chemical defenses.
What is where the specialization comes in, 90% of the insects that eat plants or host plants specialist, every plant lineage that's out there protects itself with a unique cocktail of chemical defenses and an insect can adapt to all of them.
So they they pick one or two plant lineages that are really similar and how they protect themselves and they develop the adaptations necessary to circumvent those defenses, the enzymes that allow them to store and excrete and detoxify those compounds,
the behavioral adaptations and life history adaptations that minimize the insects exposure to those compounds.
But it takes a long period of evolutionary history with the plant lineage for all those adaptations to fall into place and once they do insects locked into eating that plant.
So if you take out the milk weeds from your yard and put in hostas the monarchs not going to start to each asked us can't do it, it's locked in to milk weeds.
And that's why when we landscape with plants from Asia or South America or someplace else.
We are destroying the local food because most of our insects cannot eat. Most of those plants, and if this plants escape our gardens become serious invasive species and 86% of our woody invasive species in this country are escapees from our gardens, then
we're destroying the food webs out in nature as well.
So all I'm saying here is that plant choice matters.
If we are trying to rebuild functional food webs rebuild ecosystems, share our landscapes, with nature, we're going to have 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 starting with our house right here in Oxford Pennsylvania.
This is where Cindy and I moved in the year 2000. We got a piece of a farm that was broken up had been farmed for a long time almost 300 years, last thing they did before they broke it up, was mow it for Hey.
So very, very few plants they're certainly very few woody plants there.
So our goal was to restore the you know the functional ecosystem that should have been here, and we can't do that without bringing the caterpillars back so I'm going to give you some examples of how we did that still working on it.
By the way, I wanted to see if I could attract the Canadian our to our yard. This is what a Canadian now it looks like it's cute little thing. I'd never been seen a Canadian Alec before that's what the adult looks like just like a leaf.
Well Canadian outlets or host plan specialist on metal roof, you won't have them if you don't have metal roof, and we didn't have met a room. No matter row anywhere around here again areas farm to death for hundreds of years the middle route was long
gone.
So I got some, some seeds seeds planted them grew very nicely.
But this was early on and I actually had very little faith that Canadian Alice would be able to find my little patch of metal roof. So I didn't even go out and check it for about two months after I planted it.
I walked by for another reason and glanced over and here it was covered with Canadian Alice, they had found it right away. I'm still surprised about that.
So now we've got a good population of Metro and Canadian Alice, we've added two species to the property.
Same story with the golden rod stowaway this beautiful month actually has nothing to do with golden rod that's a misnomer. It's a specialist on this plant Biden's RS dosa, which Daisy.
I didn't know where there was some ditch Daisy and a power line cut 14 miles away. So I got some seeds planted at home they grew very nicely.
Well took a whole year for golden rod Stairway to find my Biden's finally did.
And now we got a good population of both of those now be better for species to the puck to the property.
Pat Barry Emperor What the heck Barry Emperor, not because it's the most beautiful butterfly in the world but because it belongs here. It should be a member of our community.
Well like its name suggests it's a specialist on hacked very unselfish and we didn't have any act Barry. So I planted heck Barry took four years for the butterflies to find my hacker but they finally did I looked at one of my head very branches in June.
There were nine Hector Emperor caterpillars on a single branch. another big success. Now we've added six PCs.
And that's how it went.
I did not play golden rod came in on its own and along with it came many of the things that specialize on golden right like the beautiful brown who did Alec the flower Martha golden rod leaf minor the distinct sparing and notice the golden rod goalmouth
is one that hasn't come the golden rod flower mouth. I don't know why it hasn't come get some ideas but it's not here that's what it's caterpillars look like.
But this is you know this is part of the fun, this is anticipation.
It's like waiting for the ketchup to come out of the bottle. Every year I go out and I check my goal around trying to find the golden rod flower month what is yours are going to find it, and that would be a great day plan in Virginia creeper yes Virginia
But I don't know why it's a great native plant. It can climb trees, without girdling them without pulling the trees down, makes a good ground cover. It's got great fall color.
It makes very nutritious valuable bird berries for the birds in the fall. It's a good pollinator plant, believe it or not, it's flowers are small and in conspicuous.
And the reason you know it's in flower is because there's a cloud of small native bees around it.
Remember when you're planning a pollinator garden you're planning for the pollinators. So they don't all have to be big show me flowers for us. I planted Virginia creeper because it's the best host plant for the large Sphinx mas that are the primary component
of Cardinal diets, so things like the Pandora Spanx, and it's beautiful adult.
The Leonard Spanx the hogs thinks the habits banks, all on Virginia creeper.
Want to see if I get the double tooth prominent at our house.
Just because it's such a cool looking caterpillar. I mean even if you don't like caterpillars you gotta like this guy.
Well, it's a specialist on elm particularly American element of course, we've lost our American Ellen's to Dutch Elm disease. Long time ago, but they're too big American films at the University of Delaware that did not die and and every year they make
seed and I got some of those seeds, when we moved in planted them here.
And now I have a number of films that are about 80 feet tall so big success there, and they have attracted the double tooth prominent American L.
Evening Primrose month I wonder the evening premise month because it's beautiful I like beauty like anybody else.
And believe it or not, we didn't have any Evening Primrose on the property so I planted it, the math came and spent the day with its head stuffed in the flowers, it's very cute.
And I planted, lots of trees. Now those are just examples of the plant lineages we put in our property, but I want to focus on Oaks, because they're such important plants.
This is the Bedford oak in Bedford New York.
People argue about whether it's 400 years old or 500 years old. It's an enormous.
And I hear people say I'm not going to plan it out because I won't live long enough to enjoy it, I hear that all the time. And if Europe has to be 400 years old before you can enjoy it.
You're right. You will not.
but you can enjoy your oak, if you enjoy what it's doing for your property what's contributing to your local ecosystem right away because it will contribute right away and I can say that with confidence, because I planted most of my jokes as egg corns,
which means they were free or two foot bare root whips which means that cost $1 50 each, and immediately they started to rebuild the food web by bringing in the MAS have the caterpillars that support, everything, things like the solitary oak leaf minor
minor juveniles dusky winning the yellow shouldered month Zoo keys promo practice. The red wash Caterpillar the yellow bested month the orange tufted Oh knighted the spiny a caterpillar the to spite of punky the variable oak leaf caterpillar.
The red humped hookworm the air and jumped a worm the pink striped hookworm. The hesitant dagger month the lesser of dagger month the greater of dagger, the streak dagger bought the afflicted Decker Ma, the crown Buca late tricks the orange patch smoky
wing the white black hetero camp at the oblique header Kappa the red line peanut butter the leper and literally hundreds more species of mothers have come to the folks at my house and they have come right away.
This is a pinup that has just popped its head above the leaves and here's a caterpillar crocus geometry, standing on the ground, eating the leaves of that tree to tree start to tribute to the food web substantially immediately, is what our house looks
This is what our house looks like today actually in the summertime. Got a little on here we're very traditional but we've added a lot of plants and right away I noticed as soon as I started planting native plants, lot of organizations, particularly those
those caterpillars came to our house, we've since learned that if you want to measure the quality of your food when you simply count the caterpillar species and that's what I've been doing for the last four years, taking pictures of them.
And I am up to 1140 species of Mars recorded at our house.
Now we got 10 acres. That's.
Well, Pennsylvania is 2.4 million acres. So on one 240,000 of the landmass we're supporting 44% of all the species that occur in Pennsylvania.
And because so many of these are types of bird food. We have recorded 60 species of birds that have bread on our 10 acres not flew by but bread.
Why am I telling you this well this is another headline we saw recently the World Wildlife Fund says that, that planet Earth has lost two thirds of its wildlife since 1971 I'm thinking that at our house.
I am convinced we have increased by a diversity by at least two thirds probably a lot more than that.
And it didn't take that long and it wasn't that hard. all we did was put the plants back.
So these are scary headlines that really makes it seem hopeless. it's not hopeless, we could turn this around and by we I mean, all of us, if we simply start planning the right plants, and we can start by doing it right at home.
But I know what you're thinking we got 10 acres and a lot of people don't have 10 acres will it work on smaller properties in suburbia.
That's a good question. So let's go to market and enterprise house and Kirkwood Missouri.
They have point six acres 18 times less land that Cindy and I have, and they're in the middle of a development all their neighbors had the big ones.
And when they moved in their yard was choked with armor honeysuckle bush honey saga, you know, you know I'm a honey saga major invasive plant, so they remove that and they put in 75 species of native plants, including a water feature for the birds.
Then they set back and start to count the birds that have used their yard.
And they've got 149 species that have used their yard, including 35 words or species, just to put that in perspective we recorded eight, we're species at our house.
So does it work on smaller properties of course it does.
But what about your urban yards. Let's go to Pam Carlson's Xs Pam and Mike Parsons house in in Chicago, and I mean in Chicago, that tower back there is one of the terrorists at O'Hare Airport can add can be expressways every here.
She's got one 10th of an acre and she's not connected to any natural area at all, one 10th of an acre is three times smaller than the average lot size in North America.
It's a pretty one 10th of an acre all native plants.
But she did the same thing she got rid of her invasive species put in 60 species of native plants water feature for the birds, then sat back and started to count the birds.
And she's up to 120 species of birds that have used her yard, including Woodcock there's Pam's Woodcock right there in Chicago, so if you haven't seen it would calculate we go to Pam stance.
All right.
There are 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 one of those things is we've got to shrink the area that we have in one.
As of 2005. That was a long time ago, there were 40 million acres of one in the US, which is the size of New England, dedicated to an ecological dead scape.
Now I know we need lon to display our Halloween decorations and we need lon to display our status, of course. But what if we cut the area of land in half.
What if we took areas like this and converted the materials like this I got this picture of just a couple of weeks ago from Dan Goodman I think he lives in Missouri.
That was a big line but he's recently this year, this planning is only one year old is converting it to natives.
Well, that would give us 20 million acres we could put towards conservation. And if we do it at home we can create a new national park that I'm calling homegrown National Park.
And that will be bigger than the Adirondacks. Bless you.
Great Smoky Mountains, and above this park still less than 20 million acres so homegrown National Park The biggest part in the country.
What do we get when we put a park at home or at least some part of nature we get the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with that part of nature.
And we could do it at our own time and our own pace so we have to squat sign, we can avoid crowds, you know, if you go to a real National Park, you be there with 375 other million people that went at least last year so you're really going to see a lot
of people.
It's free, there's no admission fee, that'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 if you're going to develop that personal relationship with nature.
Not mediated by any anybody else you've got to be there just one on one, you and Mother Nature, and I think this is extremely important for our kids who are suffering from nature Deficit Disorder.
According to Richard Lou. You know, I think we're all suffering from nature deficit disorder but our poor kids were trying we get we get 30 kids we put them on a bus with a teacher and they drive for an hour and they walk around and natural area for an
hour and the teacher tells him not to touch anything, then they get back on the bus and they they drive home.
And that's their experience with the natural world, which I'm sure is better than nothing but it's really been an experience with 30 other kids and a teacher telling him not to touch anything.
If they have some part of nature right where they live all they have to do is go outside and interact with it, get to know it become friends with it alone, no parental supervision, they can work it out on their own, they need to work it out on their own.
They'll come home, believe me, they will.
This is so important because our kids are the future stewards of the planet, and if they don't know why they need to Stewart the planet, if they don't know how to steward the planet, if they don't love stewarding the planet, they're going to be lousy
stewards, and we can't afford any more lousy stewardship.
And maybe they'll learn to hunt lizards, I'm learning this from my own granddaughters though he lives in Hawaii and a very modest pets, of nature.
It's a piece of land with a hedge, but there are little an old lizards there and she discovered that and sent me this picture, to tell me. Show me how you hunt lizards, you get on the ground, and you cover yourself with leaves and sticks.
So the lizards can't see you coming and then you grow very slowly toward the lizard know smiling. This is serious business. 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 get to know the lizard you learn how to take care of the lizard you don't learn how to be a good steward of that part of nature, you've got that personal relationship.
Now, I don't think, as always going to be crawling on the ground and her best dress catching lizards the rest of her life. I don't think she sent me this picture recently so who knows.
But I guarantee she's gonna remember catching lizards in Hawaii the rest of her life and I also guarantee that's going to help her be a good steward of the planet.
You want to your kids do more than catch lizards get Nancy's finished use nature play at home, dozens of examples of how to expose your kids to the natural world, right where they live.
And if you want to join homegrown National Park, you can do that now go to our website homegrown National park.org, and get yourself on the map it's free, what you're doing is recording your location and the amount of area that you are going to steward
the amount of loan you're going to convert or would like you're protecting or what you pledge to protect, then that will that little area will light up in your county you'll get to see who else is on the map.
And we're going to.
We want this message that everybody's important component of the future of conservation to go viral.
We got about 12,000 people in homegrown National Park, so far.
If everybody who's a member of homegrown National Park convinced somebody else to join homegrown National Park, and then everybody convince somebody else again that's called geometric growth, it keeps doubling will reach 100,000 people in no time at all
and that's what we need to do if we're going to reach that 20 million acre homegrown National Park goal. So please get yourself on demand. Thanks very much.
We're going to shrink the line.
What plants are we going to put in the area that is now. Lon. Some of them have to be what I'm calling Keystone plants.
Remember what a keystone is this is the, the Roman are sick Keystone is a stone in the middle of that arch and if you take the stone out the arch falls down.
We're calling these Keystone plants because if we take them out of our local food web the food web collapses, just 5% of our native plants are making 75% of that Caterpillar food that dries food reps, 14% of our native plants are making 90% of the caterpillar
for the Dr Seuss food whips.
So think of the Keystone plants and the ecological house that you're building as the two by fours that are holding up that house, they're essential they're the support your house is not going to stand up without it.
You cannot build a house out of wallpaper, and that's what we've been trying to do for the last hundred years in that through building your house after you put in your Keystone plants but they're an essential step.
So the question is no longer simply are natives better than non natives ecologically they certainly are.
But there's a lot of natives that aren't contributing all that much either. So really the question is do we want to put the native species that are supporting the most pollinators, and the most caterpillars.
Excuse me into our landscapes, or not used to get emails from somebody saying, Don't you know that Kinko's, think of by logo from Asia, actually grew in North America.
What 7 million years ago, that makes them native, and that means we can plant them and everything and be great.
Yes I do know that Kinko's grew in North America 7 million years ago, we can argue about whether that makes them native today.
But I'm not going to have that argument because that's not the metric anymore. It's not whether they're native or not it's whether they're doing anything, whether they're participating.
I don't care if King goes grew on the moon 7 million years ago, they're producing zero caterpillars here in North America today. And that's what counts.
What is producing the most caterpillars. What plant, it's, it's one of the folks in 84% of the counties in which they occur oaks have the number one Keystone plants in the Mid Atlantic states they support 557 species of caterpillars over 950 species nationwide,
that we know of, there's still lots of caterpillars we don't know what to eat some shirts more than that. There's no other plant genius that comes close to that.
So if you want to know what the Keystone plants are where you live, go to native plant finder the National Wildlife Federation website, put in your zip code and the ranked list of both the woody and herbaceous plant Jenner that are supporting the most
life in your county will pop up.
Notice I say native native cherries native ones if I go to the nursery and they say I want to buy a cherry, they're going to sell me an ornamental cherry, a flowering cherry from Asia, guaranteed.
If I say I want to buy a willow, they'll send me a weeping willow from Turkey, but I want to buy an birds, chances are good it'll be a European birch.
You have to specify that you want a native member of these very powerful general because if you don't get a native member it's going to reduce Caterpillar use by 68%, we did that experiment.
These are the top herbaceous plants in a lot of places around the country.
Golden Roger always way up there in gold the rest support 110 species of caterpillars. The various Jenner that asters were broken up into Healy and this sunflowers particularly the perennial sunflowers very high.
Not only are those three general really high in in supporting caterpillars they're also really good that the best ones at supporting our specialist beast.
When you're planning a pollinator garden you want to plant for the specialist bees, because the generalist can use this flowers, as well. If you only play it for the generalist like honey bees and bumble bees, you lose your specialist piece.
So with these for general line you can have at least 44 species of bees in your yard that won't be there. If you don't plant them.
So we're going to shrink the alarm we're going to put in Keystone plants, attract a lot of insects to our yard and then we're going to kill them with our security late at night, which of course is not the goal.
Light pollution is turning out to be a major cause of insect decline, these are all the reasons that lights are killing are nocturnal insects, particularly those all important laws, but you know when it, this is good news to me.
We have to turn around insect decline, we can't tolerate it. They are the little things that keep us alive in this planet. We've already lost 45% of them.
Not good. But if we can turn that around by simply flicking a switch, turning your lights off at night. We're getting off easy, but I know what you're going to say, I can't turn the light out of my garage or over my porch, because the bad man will come.
Okay, put a motion sensor on your security light so it only turns on when the Batman does come. And the first thing you're going to recognize the Batman does not come very often.
And if you don't want to do that take the white ball out of your security light and put in a yellow ball.
A yellow LED bulb is, is the best nocturnal insects are far less attracted to yellow wavelengths than they are to wake wavelengths.
If we switched out our white bulbs for yellow bulbs overnight we would save millions of insects and millions of dollars to, because if we use the LEDs there's a lot more energy efficient.
So we're going to shrink the loan we're going to use Keystone plants, we're going to turn out our lights, then we're going to invite mosquito Joe to come kill our insects.
Since we have no end to the way we wage war on insects.
This is a this is a booming business all over the country. Mosquito Joe is undoing everything I've been talking about for the last 15 years, but he says it's okay because this is a, this is a natural product.
It's pyrethroids. Same, same compounds that are found in chrysanthemums, and he's right, it's by reef rates.
But cyanide is a natural product too so I'm not sure that's a good argument.
He also says it only kills mosquitoes and boy I wish he was right. But in fact that kills all the insects that comes in contact with two falls ago there were big headlines of big monarch kills monarchs were migrating through mosquito Joe hundreds of dead
monarchs on the ground. The big thing is it does not control mosquitoes. You don't control mosquitoes in the adult stage in order to do that you have to kill 90% of the mosquitoes.
You control them in the larval stage mosquito Joe kills between 10 and 50% of adult mosquitoes so he's not even close to getting control. You can control them cheaply, using mosquito dunks in the larval stage you get a bucket.
People say how big a bucket.
I don't care, get a bucket, fill it full of water, put in a handful of straw or Hey, let it ferment for a couple of days during this during the warm part of the season, and you're building up the population of diatoms and the excuse me diatoms in an LG
and that's what mosquito larvae. So adult mosquitoes want to lay their eggs, that's an irresistible brew to them they will lay their eggs in your bucket.
Then you put in a mosquito dunk it's bacillus Thuringian sis you buy this at the hardware store.
$9.
If a dragon fly gets in here it's not going to hurt it. If your dog drinks it or a bird drinks, it's not going to hurt it at all. You might put a course screen over it so your local chipmunk doesn't brand itself, but otherwise you can control your mosquitoes,
if everybody did this we get good mosquito control very cheaply and very targeted for thing we need to do is to allow caterpillars to complete their development.
What does that mean well here's an example, I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where oak support 511 species of caterpillars.
Some of them a few of them, like the poly famous month complete their development on the tree, those categories, eat the leaves of the tree then they spent a cocoon and hangs from from the branch.
Then they emerged as an adult and then they do it all over again.
But I wish everything did that.
Most things don't though, 480 of the species 94% of them. Finished growing as caterpillars on the tree and then they drop from the tree to the ground where they they tunnel underground and loose soil and pupate underground, or they spin a cocoon.
And in the leaf litter, that is under the tree and that's the problem, there is no leaf litter under the tree and we mow and compactor soil to the point where it's rock hard and the caterpillars can't get underground.
So the way we landscape in most places creates an ecological trap. If these are attractive trees the must come in later eggs caterpillars grow, drop down and die.
And I'm convinced this is another source major source of insect the clients, and of course the cement landscape is even worse option. This is what most people do you get a tree in a yard.
We're just 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 got a tree, and then a layered landscape, maybe a dog would here and native Azalea ferns ground
cover.
This provides a safe site, a soft landing for those cannibalistic can then they can easily get underground the soils not compacted nobody's going to mow them nobody's going to walk on them, they can spin a cocoon in the leaf litter under here, much higher
survivorship. This is where you can do your spring ephemeral gardening around your trees. This is how you shrink the line folks, put a big bed around all of your trees and all sudden you've got a lot less lawn, and you've created safe sites for those caterpillars.
You can literally use your ground covers here your wild ginger. your may Apple, your phone flower your, your ferns all safe sites.
This is a hotel and Athens, Georgia.
He's your red maple trees, any Caterpillar developing on these leads can drop down into the sperm bank and complete its development successfully even though this is the middle of a city, so we can do a lot better with Caterpillar survivorship by the way
we landscape under our trees, another former grad student desert and Rambo he's done some wonderful work with chicken ease in the suburbs of Washington DC and her results suggests that there's actually room for compromise and our plant choices, and that's
good news.
She has one simple question How well do chicken e populations do over time in landscape suburban landscapes dominated by native plants versus ones dominated by introduced ornamentals when they're dominated by introduced ornamentals those landscapes produce
75% fewer caterpillars so the 75% less bird food there to begin with. They were 60% less likely to have breeding chickens at all their nest boxes up in each landscape, but the chickens would come and look around say there's not enough food here, we're
not even going to try to reproduce. If they did try to reproduce they lead 1.5 fewer eggs, the clutches were 29% less likely to survive at all.
If they did survive they produce 1.2 fewer fledglings and it took them 1.5 days longer to do that. And you might say that they're not huge differences but when you put all that together into a population growth model as a function of the percentage of
non native woody plant biomedicine you're here, and we look at what do you plant biomass because that's particularly sport john woody plants. This is what you get
this dotted line is his replacement rate that is the rate at which the population needs to reproduce in order to replace the adults that die every year.
I'm sorry I'm getting a terrible message up here I'm going to get rid of that. All right.
Replacement rate you produce babies at that rate and, and you will replace the, the adults that die. Just chicken you don't live very long, and if you reproduce at that rate, you have a sustainable population.
It's not growing but it's not shrinking, either. If you make more babies than adults die you've got a growing population and if you make fewer babies, the areas underneath the dotted line here, you have an unsustainable declining population and look where
that happens, the most where you've got a high percentage of non native woody plants. Right here's where this plants overlap, very liberally speaking, so it suggests you can have up to 30% of your What do you plant biomass non native without destroying
the integrity of your, your food web. We can have any, any invasive plants here, so no burning bush no calorie pair, because those are ecological tumors that just keep growing.
But, you know, things like forsythia and then ginkgo and many other things are not invasive. So, we can tolerate them without destroying the food web as long as it's less than 30% of your landscape.
Remember this picture.
This is Dan get mints. This is a Ginko. So why does he have a Ginko in his native planning here, because his wife loves Kinko's and she wanted one so he put it in there, is that tree destroying everything that this landscape is doing.
No, it's not.
It's not the presence of non native plants that destroys our food webs. It's the absence of native plants so if we get more native plants into our landscape, we can tolerate some of our pretty non natives.
Can we landscape formerly with native plants and crispy can. This is a design from Linux Shaughnessy.
You don't get more formal than that, it was taken from a drone 400 feet up every plant in this very formal landscape is a native plant formalities a function of the design.
It's not a function of the, the plants that are in that design our native plants are used in formal designs in Europe, every day.
I guess it's okay because they're not native plants over there.
Can we get a pollinator garden into a landscape like this without offending anybody. Of course we can put a little, little fence around it.
It formalizes it It tells people that this is not just a patch of weeds that you forgot to mow.
It's not very big but it is satisfying the needs of a number of bees, remember why we want pollinators you hear all the time we want them because they they pollinate a 30% of our agriculture, it's really about 12% of our agriculture, but then people say
well I don't live next year farm so I don't need any pollinators.
You need pollinators, because they're pollinating 80% of all plants and 90% of all flowering plants. Where do we need pollinators. every place we need plants, which is every place.
What about this this is a drew Nathan design, much bigger imagine the amount of life supported here versus the amount of life supported here seems like a no brainer.
can minister palette is help us live with nature.
Of course they can.
And more and more of them are doing it, Minnesota kick this off. Some years ago with a long to legume program. It's a cost sharing program where the state is paying people to reduce the size of the law and replace it with appropriate Minnesota prairie
plantings.
Very popular Pennsylvania has a new long conversion program up to $5,000 per acre from the state to convert your big lawn into a native planning.
There's an island of Florida, that is paying residents to allow burrowing owls listed species to grow in the front yard.
This is the way the Endangered Species Act should have been written with carrots, rather than sticks.
So that if you have an endangered species on your property, we're going to pay you to be a good steward of that species, rather than find you if you use the property, everybody would want an endangered species on their property.
St. Louis, Missouri Fayetteville, Arkansas, South Carolina, and I think parts of North Carolina have a bounty on calorie pairs you get rid of a calorie pair Bradford pair, and you get a free tree replacement, and even water utilities are getting into
the act, paying people to San Antonio they're paying people giving $100 coupons to put in water efficient native plants, rather than those thirsty non natives, and of course the big long conversion programs in California.
This is going up now you get $3 per square foot for taking it every square foot of lawn, that you haven't been replacing it with Zurich plantings that don't require any extra watering California does not have one drop of extra water for its lawns.
Okay, I think we've made three missteps in the early years of conservation.
And the first one is important we've come to think of nature is optional, for some reason, We like it, but it's not essential.
So, when you know resources are in short supply and push comes to shove nature's going to take a backseat. all those essential things will come, come first.
I went to the Cincinnati Zoo before the virus broke out and there's this wall sized posts you there.
That to me epitomizes our society's view of conservation we want to save nature, so that future generations can enjoy it.
That was Teddy Roosevelt's argument for the National.
You know our national parks.
We want to say these beautiful places, so the future generations can enjoy them.
And I understand that, but that implies that nature is there just for our entertainment. No wonder we don't think it's essential.
We need to save nature so that we have future generations. So a little bit more urgent.
We've also assume that humans and nature cannot coexist and we've talked about this but if if we do that we're going to restrict conservation to areas that are too small and too isolated from each other, to actually have conservation work.
David common has a wonderful analogy between a Persian rug and an ecosystem.
This is a functional Persian rug. That is not 71 Persian rugs. That is 71 rug fragments, none of which are acting like a Persian rug and that's what we've done to our ecosystems.
The UN designates Biosphere Reserves as places of ecological significance. And I hate that language because it suggests their places on planet earth with no ecological significance.
Not so every square inch of the Earth has ecological significance, including our yards, including our corporate landscapes, including our roadsides and even much of our agriculture.
So we need to glue our read back together again folks we got to put plants back, not just to build biological Carter's that connect natural areas, so that plants and animals can move back and forth between viable habitats, but to create viable habitats
where we've totally destroyed them.
We can do that by simply putting the plants back we've already shown that it works. When we do this, it'll be the first time that that humans have quickness coexisted with nature in modern history.
Our third misstep was to leave Earth stewardship to just a few specialists, a few conservation biologists, pure ecologist, for some reason, we didn't see it as an inherent responsibility of everybody on the planet, but I don't know why, because everybody
on the planet. Every single person depends entirely on the quality of our ecosystem so why wouldn't everybody bear the responsibility of taking care of those, those ecosystems.
Stand Rushmore at the Cherokee elder one said the western settler mindset was I have rights mindset of indigenous people is, I have obligations.
You're not born with those mindsets you're taught them, and we have been very good at teaching this one we've been terrible at teaching, both our kids and our peers about their obligations to good or stewardship.
It doesn't mean that you have to save bio diversity for a living. but you can save it, where you live.
And if you do it empowers you.
The Earth has huge problems, these days and people are very upset about it What can one person do well one person can shrink the line one person can use Keystone plans one person can turn out the lights, one person can get rid of the invasive plants that
that are already on their property we didn't even talk about that one person can plant a pollinator garden, one person can fire mosquito Joe, one person can totally revitalize the their little ecosystem in the yard and enhance their local ecosystem.
One person can also.
Well I mean this approach shrinks the problem to something that's manageable for individuals. Don't think about the entire planets problems you know you'll get depressed, just worry about the piece of the planet that you can influence.
If you own property it's obvious that's where you start.
If you don't own property help somebody who does help a Land Conservancy or a park or preserve. They're all underfunded they're all understaffed they will love you as a volunteer.
So as a landowner or a volunteer, each one of us has the power, and we certainly have the responsibility to fix dead landscapes like this.
Whether or not we decided to do so is going to determine nature's fate.
Fortunately, nature has proven to be really valuable, really resilient. Really, forgiving, not endlessly forgiving that endlessly resilient. But I do think she would give us one more chance.
Thanks very much.
Thank you so much. What a great presentation, and a lot of really inspiring comments in the, in the chat so now the mentions that she says, I think this was the best talk I ever attended and Libby says that you gave me hope so I'm excited for, for what
you do and for the inspiration you give folks if you have to stop off I know that Doug would appreciate a thank you in the chat box so please do that I'm going to turn the chat box off back on to everyone.
There we go.
There were some questions that went into the chat box remember that we couldn't go through those we're going to go through some of our questions from the q amp a box but there's just a ton for Doug I don't know if you have till next week.
286 open questions, you probably don't have time to get through those.
But let's talk. Let's start with Jennifer's question that says who decides what is native to my county or state.
Nature decides is the definition of native my definition of native is a plant that has, has a evolutionary history with the plants and animals around.
They all grew up together interacting with each other developing this specialized relationships.
So your county your state that's a political division means nothing. It's whether or not these plants and animals have interacted with each other over long periods of time.
Now that moves when the glaciers came down and push these interacting system south, and then the glaciers receded and those interacting systems move north, so they move around a bit, but it's it's the, the communities that are interacting together that
create native.
The native status.
So what resource Do you use or suggest that people go to I mean I use USDA plants that, you know, where can people go to find the range, the native range of plants they're interested in.
Okay I use a website called bone app, BONAP, it's via biota of North America, blah blah blah.
It's the guy who created the USDA website actually went on to to do bone app and it's more accurate.
It will tell you every county that every native plant.
There be plant in the country occurs and it gives you the distribution it also shows you the non native plants but they're different colors. So that's what I use bone up it's the easiest to use and it's and it's the most accurate.
Okay, great. And I'll add that resource to our readings page folks if you didn't get that will or if it's in the chat box but it's too hard to get to put that back on our readings page, there's the question about so we've all heard a lot about no mo may
in fact we had a session recently with Matthew Shepard from Xerxes talking about nomo May. And so the question is about dandelions, and of course it's not a native plants.
Is it beneficial for pollinators is it worth leaving. What do we do with some of these non natives that may play important roles. Right. Yeah, the native non native concept is not black and white dandelions clover, the things that used to be in our lives
a lot in the 50s, they bloom.
They do service they provide pollen and nectar for a number of generalist pollinators, honey bees love them of course and number of bumblebees use them as well, not great for specialist pollinators, but much better than lon that has nothing in it which
is contributing absolutely nothing. So, you know, if you can. The reason we don't have these things in our lawn anymore is because the status now is to use fertilizer, which actually has broad leaf herbicide and it kills everything except grass.
You know you can have dandelions to bloom occasionally if you keep your lawn mowed really most of the time you can't even tell the difference, but they do provide some resources for some pollinators.
Okay.
If you have to cut back dead perennials before March, how close to the ground to do cut them what do you do with the cuts down Do you have an opinion on that kind of habitat.
Yes, and Heather home is going to tell you exactly what to do with that she has found that most of the bee's nest in those dead stems.
When there was 1215 inches from the ground.
So you can cut the tops off and in March, it's okay because the seeds are already gone the sparrows and things of eating the seeds already.
But if you leave 1215 inches of the stem, first of all, most of your garden rose above that, so you can't even see it. And it's that stem that was produced the year before that the bees will nest in the coming summer.
So you do want to protect those other things, if you cut your your your stems back lower, you can punch them up and put them. Tie them like the corn stock decoration and put them in the backyard, we've been saying that for a couple years, I don't know
that anybody's ever actually tested whether anything's are using that or not but it makes sense that they probably would. So
where can we find a comprehensive list of host plants and their corresponding up adopter butterflies and loss.
Well that's what that that made a plant find you're supposed to give you, it will, it will give you the number of let the doctor that are using each plant genus and then you go backwards, you can put in a particular species of mouth or butterfly, and
it will tell you what plants it uses.
And I do have that linked on our webpage folks I dug I use that throughout the state and I love how nimble, it is when I change locations, it's really telling me you know which love adopter are in different places and knowing that you are behind that
data makes me feel like okay I can you know I can trust this sometimes you go to websites and you don't know you know what was the science behind it.
Well, it's a current state of our knowledge, keep in mind.
We've got about 14,000 species of Muslim butterflies, and we only know the host plan for about 7000 of them.
So there's a lot of species we don't know what they're eating.
And it would be great to fill in the blanks there but a lot of, lot of unknown biology, yet to be done.
As we need more doctors out there guys collect caterpillars and Monson, you know, user community science skills.
Steve asked, as we decided what natives to plan what role should changing climates play should we plant for the climate, we have or the plan for the climate that may be coming.
Well you know this is controversial. I think we should plant for the climate that we have now first of all climate change is here. It's coming. It's already here and you can see it every day with extremely variable climate where it gets really hot really
cold and it's just a lot more variable than it used to be. And it says really cold periods that, that gives me pause if you start moving plants up from the south.
you still get the polar vortex. Remember last February.
There is the Deep Freeze, than went all the way down into Mexico.
Kill all bunch of things including natives because it got so cold. We start moving plants north, those things are going to still, still come.
So I don't think it's going to work we, what we want to do is put as much genetic variability in the landscapes as possible, and the ones that are able to handle these extreme variations will will make it.
That's just my take on it.
There are a few questions about winter habitat and you mentioned this kind of already but can you talk about leaves rock piles other strategies folks can use to help insects find a place to overwinter.
Right.
Well most insects everyone is eggs.
Many of them over winter as as poopy or crystal IDs, and they're hiding, as best they can. So the leaf litter, that all those leads it fall from the trees, many of them already have cocoons wrapped up in them, and you don't know it, if you break them
up and throw them away you've thrown away all that, that life, it's providing a blanket on the ground for all those caterpillars the tunnels underground they need to be protected so they don't desiccate bare ground dries out very quickly and and a Rhodes
away to it's not good for soil biota.
So the leaves are protecting the organisms that live in the soil course, what do you debris, believe it or not, there's a lot of things including bees and caterpillars that actually tunnel into would to pupate or over, over winter.
So we don't seem to tolerate that at all in, in suburbia. But if you don't get a decorative log or something I son is actually started to rot a little bit and have that under under a tree is part of your garden, It's a very valuable resource that a lot
of our overwintering insects will will use.
Okay so Kathleen wonders if you're planning to update bringing nature home to include your latest research, or what's what's on the horizon dog what your next project because I bet there's a book in the works.
Well, nature's best hope really is the update of bringing nature home it's what we've learned and where we are today.
And and my vision of hope we really do have hope but it's it's grassroots it's got to be everybody you know all hands on deck. I've got a couple of bucks in mind, and I'll start writing them as soon as I finished my email which never seems to happen.
So let me share my screen with your personal email I'm not going to do that. Yeah, right.
Since 2600 questions to me.
So Doug I think we'll end there thank you so much for coming again another really great webinar. Appreciate your practical answers and also your scope, bringing in the science there have been lots and lots of good comments and thank he's in the chat box