 I'm Jessica and I direct the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We are a group of 21 conservation organizations in Southern Maine that come together to think about increasing our impact by working together. And one is to reach out into communities for new and strategic partnerships. And our partnership with the Portland Public Collaboration has been tremendous. Over the past year, we have had an event every month that celebrates our partnership through presenting new ideas, resources, and many, many, many different topics related to sustainability. It's been really exciting and really fun. So thank you, Meg. Tonight, I'm thrilled to have Eric Topper from Maine Autonomous Organizations. And he will be talking about bringing nature home. Eric is the Director of Education for Maine Autonomous. And he's also on the board of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We are an organization that really tries through collaboration to broaden the conversation of collaboration and develop new relationships. Right now, we're having a special fundraising event. We're selling round tickets for an opportunity to visit a oyster farm in Casco Bay, in Vasket Island Oysters, Rose Oysters, just off Vasket Island. And Mark Green, the owner of Vasket Island Oysters, is a professor at St. Joseph's College. And he is also the owner of Vasket Island. And he will take four people. The tickets are for four people to go out on his raft on his boat to the rafts for a couple of hours, one afternoon. See the operation, learn about agriculture, and eat the oysters, maybe have some other snacks. And we have information here. It's an online raft award. We wanted to purchase tickets for me. But it celebrates our connections that we all have in natural world and in our friendships that we create together. So without further ado. All righty. Thank you, Meg and Jess and everyone for coming tonight. I love working with Jess and Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. I also am a Portland resident. I spend a ton of time at the library and they're a wonderful community resource for all of us as well. So it's great to be here. So as Jess shared, my name is Eric Topper. I'm here tonight to talk to you about an initiative that we call Bringing Nature Home to Maine. For those of you less familiar, most people I think are at least vaguely familiar with Maine Audubon, but we are here to conserve Maine wildlife and wildlife habitat. That's what we do. That's who we are. That's what we're about. And so everything that we do sort of centers around that mission. Like many nonprofits, we get together every five or 10 years as a staff, as a board, as volunteers, as community members. And we talk about what our particular focus should be right now. And we come up with a strategic plan. And so our current strategic program plan has three priority goals that we're trying to set out to accomplish in the next five or so years. One of those goals, and again, I think you'll hear our mission and you'll hear these goals resonate a lot tonight. Goal number one is bringing more people in under the tent. So a lot of nonprofits are trying to do this right now. How do we increase our membership? How do we reach different demographics? Those sorts of things. Our particular focus in this is about people taking action. We don't just want more members. We don't want more Facebook likes. We don't want a bigger database. We want more people out in the landscape taking action on behalf of our mission. And so people for wildlife is goal number one. We have learned that you can't just yell louder to make that happen. Stay where you are and yell louder and do more flashy things. You have to go out there. You have to go do a presentation at 5.30 on the most beautiful night of the summer after three days of meh, you know? And you have to do that. You have to go to communities. And not just go talk at them. You have to bring things to say, we need your help with this. Can you take action? And we're pretty sure that that will get people doing other things. Oh, I do have a solution for that. I apologize. Goal number two is when we work to conserve species or habitat, wildlife and habitat, we need to focus on the most threatened, right? What are the biggest issues? So we're still gonna ensure the focus on endangered piping plovers that are here nesting late, having chicks on the beach late this year right now. And we have people out there at 5.30 on this gorgeous night. They get to work on the beach tonight. But they had to work on the beach the last three days, right? So we're still out there doing that. That's still a big priority. And then the third one is your first 50 cent conservation word of this evening. I'll give you lots of those and we'll run the tally up. But the first one is connectivity. A lot of our work is focusing on, you have a great habitat over here. You have a great habitat over here. You have an interstate highway running between those wetlands. The birds are fine. The turtles and the other amphibians are not fine unless we get in there and figure out how to connect those habitats. And that's true here in Maine, this and that. It's also true. That's where we also think about Maine on this international migratory highway. And we think about Maine as a baby bird factory, the number of species that are here just to make babies and then to go somewhere else. And they need Maine to be there. So we need to connect to those other places as well. So this project, this initiative that we're gonna talk tonight is called Bringing Nature Home. This is based on the book of that title that's the name is being used with permission. We'll talk about Doug Tallamy a lot, the author of that book. But the basic, the exciting part here is, and this is what Doug Tallamy is especially excited about is tonight we're gonna keep it in Maine. Doug Tallamy has an international readership. So he has to use these examples. He has to use these photos. He has to use these relationships to hold up this message. But everyone says, what about California? What about, you know? And so Doug Tallamy needs people like Maine Audubon, Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, the Portland Public Library to say, we got it here. We will adapt it. We will give people the relationships, the species and things here, and we'll only show him photos of Maine. So you're not gonna get, there are more beautiful photos other places out there, but most of these are homegrown. And so that's exciting tonight as well. So the project has a background like all of this. It's a fairly new project for us, a couple years old. I mentioned Doug Tallamy's work for those unfamiliar. Doug Tallamy is an entomologist. He studies insects. He's based at the University of Delaware. He lives in very Eastern Pennsylvania. He has spent his entire career crawling around his yard. He lives in a very suburban landscape where house lots are three acres. So everybody gets these big house lots and hubby gets a tractor and they just start mowing. And they bring in trees that like Bradford Pairs and other things. And so Doug Tallamy has this three acre native plant oasis where he's been crawling around studying insects there. He also sneaks into his neighbor's yard and counts the insects or the lack of insects in their landscapes. He gets permission from most of them. And then he has realized, okay, we have this huge plight of insects, but nobody likes insects. I'm an entomologist. I'm the only person who appreciates insects. We need to make this about birds. This is a huge threat to birds and people love birds. And the action is plants. So this genius model of an entomologist advocating for plants on behalf of birds and never really talking about insects, the focus of his entire existence, which is pretty neat and pretty revolutionary. And there's a lot of other really neat things going on here in terms of conservation psychology and things like that, what moves people to action. And hopefully some of you will be moved tonight because of Doug Tallamy. We had funders that came to us, Jim and Ann Hancock, which I'll introduce you to a little bit later in the presentation, their specific impact. But these two come from the horticulture background, have some resources to put back into conservation, into sustainability and came to us and said, you really gotta get on board with this idea. This is not your backyard habitat. This is not feeders and tape on windows. This is a deeper level and this is pretty neat. And it took us a while to really understand it. The book sat on my desk for probably six months and it was overwhelming when we did open it. And then Audubon at home, many people are familiar with national Audubon. Main Audubon is an independent affiliate so we get the best of national Audubon but we don't have to give anything in return. So if we like it, we can advance it. And if we don't like it, we say we're our own thing in Maine. So Audubon had this wonderful program for about 10 years, about 10 years ago called Audubon at Home. And again, it was based on, there's a poster set, I still have them in my office. There was a bird-friendly home, a bird-friendly school yard, and a bird-friendly community. And they all were based on, they all had 13 points that we needed to do. And national Audubon took a lead in selling a lot of solar panels and put a lot of tape on windows and put a lot of feeders out in people's yard and did some amazing things around pollinators and things like that. But number 13 on every, and in my neighborhood, I walk around, I live right down the street from Ocean Avenue which was underwent a school transformation that is very Audubon at Home. Solar hot water, stuff growing on the roof, all kinds of wonderful things, big veggie garden out back, playscapes, all kinds of great things. Number 13 on all of them was plant-native plants. And we never really got to that. Ocean Avenue has very few native plants. It's a pretty classic school landscape with all that amazing stuff. And then Wild Seed Project, I'll talk a lot about tonight there. That's, it's almost like that's the most kind of relevant for us right now in Maine of what to do. Wild Seed Project is a place where we can go and get resources right away tonight. And so I definitely want to leave you with that in terms of where to go next and we'll talk about that. So basically this is the idea here is this and this is really unique for an organization like Maine Audubon, right? We've been focused on out kind of in the Northern Forest, right? Out in these vast tracks of conserved land or working land. Huge watersheds like the Penobscot watershed where there's a lot going on and a lot of landscape and a lot of issues. Working in the state house and things like that. Where Maine Audubon has never been and this is true of a lot of conservation organizations and where I'm gonna spend the rest of tonight is in your front yard. We have not valued that. We've written it off. Conservationists for a long time have written off the landscape I live in. I raise my kids in, I work in. Cause it's developed, it's done. Forget it. We need to focus other places. We need to get on the front line. This is the back. This is like what happens when you run over, all right? And so that's a place that's kind of unfamiliar but hopefully you all will sort of help us navigate that as well. But when we come into your front yard the things we're thinking about is ecological function. This is something places like Maine Audubon and other conservation organizations have always thought about ecological function. How much nature can we pack into that space? What is supposed to be happening there and when is it supposed to be happening and how can we ensure that that happens? Cause we know that moment is related to everything else. So ecological function is critically important for us. We know if we come into your front yard in my front yard we need to think about landscape function. My kids, I have an eight year old and a five year old. They need a place to kick a soccer ball around. I gotta mow it. I gotta plant, bring in other things. I'm gonna put your Asian grass down there. We have a lot of lawn and we need it and we love it and we take care of it. And that's the landscape function. When my kids get too hot I want them to have a shady place to go and cool down and drink their lemonade. So we have shade trees and those sorts of things. So we think about that. We like to have colors in our landscape. So we plant things and I had a little moment just a couple of weeks ago where like whoa, we have no middle color. We're doing, you know, like next year and I made a big list, right? Cause it was like I was looking out there. We were between the early stuff and the next phase. And so we like all that stuff. I don't do a ton of this. We do a little bit of this, but lots of landscapes also have a social cultural function. We need to throw parties. When we do all this great work and we have this great lawn and we have the colors just right, we want to invite people in there and we want to share it. When we want to tell them what we did. We want those, we want projects out in the community that people congregate to. We want destinations, right? Everyone's going to climb Cadillac Mountain to go see the ecosystem there this summer. Are there places around here where we can get some of that going on and we can have social and cultural function? And so we have those in our landscape around us. We have a ton of opportunity to do all of this. And so what I want you to do is do a little guided imagery right now. I want everybody to close their eyes for a second. And let's go, you can leave your front yard if you have to and I have to leave it for this too, is visualize the perfect front yard in your mind's eye in terms of those. What does that look like? Picture it. Maybe it's yours. Maybe it's in your neighborhood. Maybe it's some magazine cover you saw somewhere else. And then open your eyes. You all envision this, I trust, yes? This is the ideal front yard, all right? How's the ecological function here? Top notch, all right? This is Portland. This is the Four River Sanctuary. This is fantastic ecological function. You can look at this for hours with people and experts and ecologists and forensic landscape interpreters and things like that. And you can see all kinds of stuff going on here. You see mature trees, big trunks. You see succession, you see little things coming up. You see transition, you see light penetrating. You have a lot going on here and you could come back every week and you're gonna see that going on, right? It's gonna happen here. That the thing to point out here is this ecological, a lot of the ecological function here is around disturbance. This place left to its own devices is gonna have fires and when people aren't around, they're not gonna get put out. They're gonna run rampant, they're gonna be storms, they're gonna be floods, they're gonna be things. And you can look at some of the evidence of roads and other things here with a trained eye and you see that disturbance. And our front yards are totally disturbed so we have a little bit of hope there that this disturbance is yielding some of the cycles that need to be happening. How are we doing on landscape function in this picture? Place to kick a soccer ball around, place to hang out, sit in the shade, those sorts of things, it's terrible. It's abysmal. You couldn't, you know, we've given it up on that. Not the place you wanna bring people either. This is where you go to get away from people, right? You don't wanna gather them here. In fact, there are even health risks these days of this. So this, it takes on an even more sort of sinister thing, right? But this is what we have to do and what we have to think about and there are so many great tools, that's the fun part is that's where the gloom and doom ends. It's all positive from here. And if you take this conservation, this landscape conservation approach, which is very classic one-on-one conservation, if you wanna conserve a species of wildlife, for example, think about what it needs, think about what you're targeting, think about the other threats that you also need to manage and start playing with your little habitat to do this, all right? Every good conservation project needs a keystone species and the way keystone species work is just like the keystone on a fireplace heart. It's the stone at the top. It holds everything else together. You put it on last. You pull the keystone off. The whole habitat collapses around it. So if you can identify species that can be ambassadors of these habitats and you throw actions to help them, you're likely gonna bring up a whole lot of other species as well and that one species and that one area of focus can do a lot of good. And we have identified and we would hold up the monarch butterfly to be that species for the meadow habitat and this is the neat thing about Maine and what I failed to mention on the Four River Shot is 97, some estimates say historically 97% of Maine look like that shot in Four River Sanctuary. It's forested. Over 90% of Maine should be forested, all right? When it isn't forested, you have wetlands, you have marshes, you have things like that. You also have meadow. What happens when a fire goes through and burns off tons and tons of forested land? Often the first thing to come up is a meadow and there's a couple years of regeneration that happens there and that's where these pollinators are still surviving and things like that. So as we look around Portland and we think this has been a forested landscape, right? This is no longer a forested landscape, all right? It is, this is a habitat where we can say I got a big sunny yard because all my trees are small and they're few and far between but I got open patches of sunlight. What can I do for a meadow habitat? And that's where the monarch comes in. So this is a main shot of monarch butterflies. Everybody know this flower? This is a New England aster, all right? And that, if you know about that flower that will cue you into the timing. That's a September bloomer. That is the peak, the fallacy of the monarchs being a mid-summer species. The bulk of monarchs in Maine is mid-August through mid-October. So this is a late species. So species of plants like the New England aster that are making nectar at that time of year are critical for this species that just like our black cap chickadee will survive as long as we do and we keep putting stuff out because it's a very opportunistic adult eater. It can eat anything that produces nectar. Monarchs don't care if it's native. They don't care if it's a clone or a cultivar. If it makes nectar, an adult monarch can eat it. But it has a favorite family of plants that it particularly loves the nectar of, the milkweed family of plants, all right? Asclepias. And this family of plants, this genus of plants has different species within that genus spread out all over North America. So here in Maine, we have three species of asclepias native to Maine. Common milkweed, which is this shot here. Swamp milkweed, which is asclepias incarnata and butterfly weed, asclepias tuberosa, which has been extirpated in Maine. So extirpated is another 50 cent conservation word. That means regionally extinct. So we can declare species of plants and animals extinct in Maine, and we refer to that as extirpated. So we do not see butterfly weed in the wild in Maine anymore, but does anybody have it growing? I have it in my yard. We have tons of gills and farm people are growing it. So that's pretty neat, right? So let's flag that, right? You have an extinct species growing in your garden. That's, you're onto something there, okay? So that's this family of plants. The monarchs enjoy the nectar off of that flower, but as most of us have learned, the caterpillars, the monarchs will only lay their eggs on asclepias plants, that genus that they find locally, because when their caterpillars come out of that egg, that is the only plant that they can eat. They have co-adapted with that plant, that family of plants over thousands and thousands of years, and their special relationship has a little to do with the poison in the milkweed plant, making monarchs toxic or bad tasting to birds. So they've had that impact, and then some birds have specialized on that. And you have this whole other relationship built on this, and this is what we've referred to as a host relationship, a host-plant relationship. The milkweed, the monarchs can eat anything as an adult, but only milkweed plants will host their reproduction, their caterpillars. The caterpillars will eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, and then they will crawl off onto another plant because they don't wanna be a sitting duck on milkweed, and they will make a chrysalis. They will spend two weeks in that, and then they will turn into a butterfly and eat any nectar it can find and look for milkweed where it's going. Milkweed doesn't need a lot of help. This is Stevens Avenue in Portland. This is on my commute to school. This is a common milkweed plant that has grown up here. Nobody has tested that soil. Nobody has checked the soil depth or feeds this thing or waters it through dry spells or any of that stuff, but nobody cuts it down. And so it does its thing here, and this plant is built to live everywhere. But the challenge with monarchs, we used to talk about 20 years ago, we used to all stare at Mexico and say they're deforesting the forest where the monarchs, that the monarchs depend on for their wintering grounds. Those wonderful photos we've all seen of millions and millions of monarchs hanging from the pine trees in the mountains of Mexico. That hasn't been true that it's Mexico for 15 or 20 years. That is the most conserved, stared at, studied patch of earth on the planet these days because of this unique place. And the issues have continued to be and have been in the American Midwest where we have transformed huge landscapes that used to look like this bomb-proof weed all over the place that was fortifying the ecosystem. And we've removed it for corn and soy and other places where I grew up. I grew up in Kansas. And so that's the peril. And that's the deal is when you can't, when you don't have milkweed in that landscape anymore, you can't have any caterpillars. So you can have adult monarchs fluttering around and they live for three weeks and then they don't find anywhere to lay their eggs. And then there's no next generation and it's not Mexico. There's no more monarch migration. So this is a picture I took on my phone out of a faded milkweed, common milkweed bloom at our Fields Pond Sanctuary up in Holden. And I sent this photo to Doug Taume and I asked him to help me count the number of species of insects on here. He sent me a list of 11 Latin names. None of them were monarch butterflies. And I don't know what they were, but there's a be, there's a wasp here, there's a beetle here, there's an ant here, there's another beetle up here. You can go around and see abdomen sticking out of those flowers, those fading flowers. So that's 11 species of insect that are not a monarch butterfly that are still going to this fading common milkweed bloom. So that's the whole Keystone species, right? If we throw milkweed at it, there's 11 other species that are supposed to be here that are gonna bloom, okay? It's a specialized relationship. And then you say, common milkweed, please don't plant it in your yards in Portland because you will call us in five years and say, what have we done? We have no more place to kick soccer balls around. Our friends won't come over anymore. You know, those sorts of, because they get the stuff, the little milk on them. And so, because that stuff spreads via rhizomes, it's meant to take over landscapes. But the two other species, butterfly weed and swamp milkweed, are wonderful little garden companions. This is a picture of swamp milkweed in my backyard, blooming, beautiful pink flowers about this tall, blooming right now, hosting one of my neighbor's honeybees. I didn't even know my neighbors had honeybees until they started showing up at my native plants. But this flower is built for our landscape function. It's a wonderful, again, it doesn't spread via rhizomes and things like that. And we can get the same benefits that we get other places. We planted a bunch of swamp milkweed, this beautiful plant at Gillsland Farm in Falmouth over the last number of years. We had leftovers a couple of years ago. We planted them in some raised beds, just a classic raised beds like you would have vegetable gardens right in the middle of our camp orchard. And the summer camp kids were coming to my office every morning in August to give me the report, the count of how many caterpillars they saw on the milkweed that was growing in raised beds that we planted. We never, they never saw butterflies, never fluttering around, no evidence of that. They were sneaking in, they were laying their eggs and the caterpillars were eating swamp milkweed and then probably leaving as well as butterflies. So we grew them like tomatoes, monarch butterflies in a raised bed. And then you take that out to a landscape like this one and you work with South Portland learning works after school enrichment students because milkweed is not hard to plant as we saw from the picture of Woodford Street, right? Little kids can handle this stuff, they can put it in the ground. And if you have a landscape like this one, which you all know, right? I asked this question in some of the talks I do elsewhere and people try to figure out, is that Port Clyde, is that? So this landscape, Fort Williams and Elizabeth will have, this pathway will have roughly two million eyeballs on it this year, this calendar year, right? So a million people will visit Portland Headlight in a calendar year. And if a bunch of them, I'll take 10,000, can see this in bloom when it's milkweed and there's monarchs fluttering around and you put a nice sign on there telling them what's happening and what we did. No longer do they feel like there's this, we can't do this, right? This is a place where we can have huge opportunity with programming that's already happening here. And so that's what this project is all about is stewardship actions that will have those direct benefits. And if we can celebrate them and talk about them, we'll do even better. I think this is the last slide on monarchs, I wanna point out the migration, the monarch migration, we wrote, so this is from a children's book that we produced. So the children's version of bringing nature home is the monarch butterfly story that we published, it's the last book in our series with Island Port Press, Wildlife on the Move, a children's board book series. This is the map, each of those books, it's Wildlife on the Move, it's the name of the series and we talk about the movements of animals. It was when we put the book out there, we always send it out for science edits and we reached out to Monarch Watch who's like sort of the North American conservation organization around monarchs right now and said, can we get a science edit on this? This is a book, we wanna get it right. And they really had a hard time with the fact that the notion that monarchs could go extinct. They wanted, you have to know that there are populations in California and Florida that are breeding and things like that. And you have to remember that you can call UP, you can go online if you're a teacher and you can order a UPS shipment of monarchs larva for your classroom year round and you can rear them and you can release them and they try to get you to not do it in Maine in January but you can do it in Maine in May and they will flutter around and they will find flowers in May and they will find no milkweed in May and they will die and not lay any eggs. And that's, so we will be able to make more monarchs, they won't go extinct was their point. But what we're losing is this, this phenomenon and this is what makes monarchs such a great ambassador species in this North American icon is what they do in their life cycle. Each of those arrows, so you see the little forest area in Mexico where they spend the winter. And what happens is the first generation is that yellow arrow. And that's March or April and the desert starts blooming and that generation travels North to South Texas and they start looking for the monarch bloom there. We're talking April now, there's the species of milkweed in Texas should be blooming in April. And they're gonna make babies and those butterflies are gonna then fly up through Kansas where I grew up is right in the middle of that orange arrow and they're gonna start looking for milkweed and they're gonna do the same thing, they're gonna lay their eggs and then that red generation is gonna come to Maine. What happens in Maine, right about now where monarchs are arriving here, they're looking for milkweed, they're laying their eggs, you can probably watch this on the internet. You can watch it at Gilson Farm right in front of our store window. We're literally watching monarchs lay eggs on the swamp milkweed right now. Those monarchs will flutter around in that peak period, right, mid-August to mid-October and then they will, that's the generation that flies all the way to Mexico. So our monarchs have to be particularly strong people. So we have to make good monarchs and we have to make a lot of them because that's a big trip. So that's important that, and that's just one of those phenomenons and that further asserts the relationship that this insect has with this plant and why we have to make sure that relationship is still functional everywhere where it's supposed to be. So now I wanna switch to where we really wanna talk about and this is other keystone species that people wanna love is monarchs. You can say what you will about them as the North American icon. They are still an evil little defoliator like all their evil little defoliating brethren. We're not gonna fall in love with insects as a whole but this is why we need to. Does anybody recognize this bird? What's it? This is a black pole warbler, excellent. No one ever gets that, so good for you. So this, if we described it, right, if you went out in the hall and you had to describe this bird, the person would be yelling black cap chickadee, black cap chickadee and you'd say no, no, no, it's something's not black cap chickadee and then if it was hopping around, you'd say it's a nut hatch. It acts like a nut hatch. It does that thing with the tail up and moving along the tree bark. So this is one of about 40 or 45 species of warblers that at least come through Maine. Many stop here to breed but many keep on moving. Your evergreen woods, the woods behind the conserved land behind evergreen cemetery is an international hotspot for warbler migration. People come here from very, very far away, Maine Audubon staff naturalist leads bird walks every day, 90 people in tow, 70 of them saying, what did he say it was, what is it, what is that? But people are coming there to see these birds when they arrive in May, all right? The black pole warbler is an ambassador species for a completely different habitat than we all live in, most of us. This is a resident of the high canopy mature forest. This bird prefers 50 to 75 feet off the deck. Up there, it only eats insects, its entire life cycle. So it's searching for insects on the trees that are supposed to be where they have been for thousands and thousands of years, the black pole warbler. This is its migration map, all right? All migration maps are basically exaggerations of lots of points and things like that, but this is one that has always resonated with me. So classic migration map, bird migration, species migration, winter, or blue is the winter grounds. So this bird spends the winter months in northern South America, Amazon basin, up into the mountains, things like areas like that. As the light start, days start getting longer, insects start hatching, the bird, the species leap frogs across the Caribbean, they don't all go together, they go, they generally go that direction over the course of weeks. They hit Florida and then they get on the North American continent mainland and sort of start dispersing across the continent. And they are in search of that orange area, which is their breeding habitat, the boreal forest. And that's where they're searching for a major insect bloom so that they can feed because not only do they need to eat those two adults, but they need to feed a brood of potentially six chicks, all right, up in that area. And then what happens is the days start getting shorter and the insect bloom starts slowing down and the chicks have fledged and they're ready to start moving. The entire species does this funnel shaped thing and you will see this yellow area here, this yellow line, this is probably Brunswick main, this is probably a Gunkwit main, this is where we are right here. The entire species is gonna funnel through in the course of coming down to this area, they're gonna put on, each bird is gonna add a third to its body weight. Bulk up, eating lots and lots of insects, fall, September, early October, and then those birds, when they feel like they're ready, they're gonna go whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. And they're gonna do that for 10 to 14 days on this path, those birds, that three ounce bird is gonna fly through hurricane season, it doesn't stop on buoys and fishing boats to rest, it doesn't do any of that stuff, it doesn't eat along the way, it does a beeline flying, and it loses a third of its body weight, a 60% swing in the course of that trip and crash lands in the Amazon basin to start eating insects there and start bulking back up for the winter migration. This is us people, this bird doesn't, you can exaggerate, yeah maybe there's some dots over here and here, but the pressure is on us to be there for this bird, and we can do it. So this is the female black pole warbler, all right? This is lattice work that is not 50 to 75 feet off the deck, this is somebody's rose bushes on their fence, this is the female black pole warbler coming down out of that high canopy because the habitat is good, the insects are good down there, and that habitat, even though that person doesn't live in mature forest, that habitat is still benefiting this bird as it passes through. It comes down, it recognizes those chewed on leaves, it sees an insect, it smiles for the camera, and then it heads out, and so that bird for me is this is what we wanna talk about tonight and this is what we want you all to do, the three dimensions of what we're talking about. If we need to feed the black pole warbler when they're passing through, or even more importantly, the birds that are here and breeding in Maine and switching over to 100% insect diet for them and their babies, if we're gonna need it, we, our landscape has to generate a lot more insects than Doug Talamay was finding in yards like ours, what Thomas Rainier and one of the other authors refers to our penchant for dark mulch, vacuumed areas that we treat like we do a carpet and meatballs, periodic sporadic meatballs placed throughout that landscape. That's not producing the insects that we're doing so we need to figure out and it's about, it starts at the species of plants and you can argue all day long about where it really starts but think back to the food chain that you all actually, we all learn the food, we learn the food chain, right? We're teaching food web now because of the interrelation, but we, remember this, the plant feeds the insect that gets eaten by the bird that gets eaten by the bigger bird or the mammal and it goes all the way up, right? We've taken out when you have plants from other places or plants that aren't produced a good old fashioned way, you're changing that base level and you're not gonna attract and produce the insects that you need to feed those birds. So what we need to start with is species of plants that match the place and those species will host the insects that they're supposed to and bring the birds. Then we need to focus on our management and cultivation practices, how we take care of that stuff, when we dead head flowers, when we mow, when we do big cutting and pruning and things like that and then the last part is if we're gonna leave this for people after us, if we're gonna truly replace these ecosystems, these ecosystems have to be able to reproduce on their own. So we have to make sure the genetic information is diverse and is able to sustain itself, that we're not filling the landscape with a bunch of clones of the same plant. And so those are the three dimensions that we focus on. So when we talk about species match, we focus on birds that we're really familiar with, okay? We all know this bird, you were right, you're gun shy now, but that's a black cap chickadee, or a licensed plate bird, and many people will understand that this is a winter black cap chickadee bird, or a winter black cap chickadee shot even without any foliage clues, and the reason is because of its forehead, all right? It is not a forehead, it is a five-head, it's too big to be a forehead right now. That is a winter bird because this bird's adaptation to live amongst us and amongst gray squirrels, this is not a winter black cap chickadee shot. Look at the forehead, that is not just fluffed up feathers to stay warm, there's a little bit of that going on here. What that is is that's brain that has expanded in the late fall to live alongside of us as a seed caching species. That bird expands its memory to compete with species like the gray squirrels, another cache species. So gray squirrels have this theory that if I get a nut and I bury nuts absolutely everywhere, and then if I dig up absolutely everywhere, I will get nuts. Chickadees can't compete with that. So what they have to do is actually remember where they put stuff. And so in fall, when the stakes get higher and the plants are producing less seeds, their brain swells so they can remember where stuff is. They can remember where their caches are. They will do really well here. This is like the monarch butterflies. These adults in this species will do really well as long as we feed them black oil sunflower seeds and have shingles and tree bark and other things for them to stick them in, to hide them in, they're gonna do just fine. However, black cap chickadees like so many other birds, the vast majority, the only ones that really don't on the birds that we're most familiar with are gold finches. But chickadees like other species of breeding birds have to switch over. When they have chicks on a nest, their chicks can only eat insects. They can't deal with seeds. So that parent, those chickadee parents are gonna take turns. And I know this because I work at Maine Audubon and it's July and the phone is ringing with people who are wonderful, diligent feeders of their birds who are panicked because the birds are all gone. They're not coming to their feeders and they're asking us what they can do about their roundup loving neighbor and all these other things and telling us we have to come out and we have to stop them and calm them and saying what you are seeing is ecology. July, you should not see birds on your feeders. Those birds should be taking care of babies, which means perousing your gardens and looking for insects, particularly caterpillars to take those babies. Chickadees, Doug Talmay studied Carolina chickadees. He put interns and video cameras on those nests and they counted the number of trips mom and dad were taking and the number of species of caterpillars that they were putting in those hungry mouths. And it was thousands and thousands of caterpillars to get four nestlings to the stage where they do this and they fledge. This is an adult-sized bird, it's out of the nest. We know blackcap chickadees spend two weeks and many of you hear this, the high pitch after they fledge, they still are dependent on their parents to bring them. They hop around and take little practice flights and scream for their parents to bring them caterpillars as they learn to forage seeds in that transitional season. It's still early for producing seeds in Maine anyway, right? So these birds, so just one, just to reproduce one nest full of chickadees, our landscapes have to have a lot more caterpillars and your plants I would submit like my plants are not getting that done. So this is what this is all about, is chicks, baby birds screaming at us to take care to think about the plants and the practices and the genetic information of the stuff in our yards and telling us what we don't, asking us what we really need and don't need from our yards. So that they can share it. I would submit to you that there's a lot, there's just as much of this and I give this talk to garden clubs and others like that that appreciate the beauty and things. And I think we can manage our landscapes with the same beautiful colors and the same expectation of oh, when is it gonna bloom? When are the frutillaries gonna be here? When are things gonna flutter through? I'm waiting for them. Oh goody, I got my first monarch and having our landscape colorful and vibrant and things like that and focusing on the benefit. Even after our landscape changes in Maine, it should still be feeding insects because those insects are still gonna be feeding birds. So things turn brown. We have out in the middle of the winter, we have moths up underneath the bark of our tree, up in the, you know, they're sharing the space with the chickadees where they're hiding seeds to be here year round. So we should have lots of those. And these birds, the interesting part is you start bringing in more interesting birds than the 15 or so species we see regularly here in Portland because they're all around us. We remember we have an international birding destination within our city limits. So they're in our yards, they're creeping out, they're not staying where they're supposed to, right? And they're eating things like brown-tail moths, all right, which are gonna be problems for us but this is a red-eyed virial. They aren't here in our landscape. They will eat brown-tail moths but they're not around right now because our landscape hasn't produced the other stuff to keep them around and breeding. So these things can benefit us. These other species of warblers can come in, they can help us clean up. We don't have to let everything get defoliated. That's not a healthy landscape either but they can help us with these insects and they can help regulate things as well. House wrens will go after cockroaches. So these are the kinds of things chickadees don't do much for us but we can get, if we can benefit other birds, we can get more of that going on. Even hummingbirds, the iconic hummingbird, right? Do you think they take their, when there's a nest with three baby hummingbirds in it, what are the parents taking those birds? They're not taking them nectar. They're taking, those birds need protein. They're taking them caterpillars. They're taking them inchworms. They're taking them other insects they're finding on the flowers and they're stopping foraging as well. Again, there's a period of time where you might as well bring in your hummingbird feeders because they should be on nest, right? So those times. And then our landscapes should also, we also have the granivores, right? The sparrows that we all see house sparrows which is an invasive species of bird that's not supposed to be here as brought here from England. It's taken over the landscape. It's done really well in habitats like this one but the native species of sparrows like white crown sparrows are relying on our seeds as well. That's a granivore that needs our landscape to produce a particular kind of seed in a particular timing. And even as the landscape fades and the blooms fades and things turn brown, our landscapes still need to be producing caterpillars and other insects for these birds. That's why we're not seeing them as they're not, the plants are not there and the plants are not getting to do their full thing. So cultivating and timing, we mostly understand, right? Does everybody know this plant? This is a common milkweed, gone to seed, built in dispersal mechanism. These things will fly, they will roll, they will get everywhere. They are good at doing this. Plants have all kinds of wonderful reproductive strategies, things like witch hazel which actually know that they wanna get their seeds away from mama, right? So mama shoots the seed and you can hear them popping in the fall and the seeds go up to 25 feet away because they wanna be out of mama's turf, right? And get going on their own. So letting these plants that we have in our landscape go to seed. We have this obsession in Labor Day, we wanna cut everything down, we wanna cover it all up, cover it with leaves, all these things that we read about are ecologically sound and I'm doing all that stuff right. But we get on this mission to be done on Labor Day, right? What happens to monarchs? At Labor Day, you're a quarter through when they're passing through. So if we cut everything back, things are not gonna be blooming when they're supposed to. New England asters aren't gonna be blooming in September and these other plants haven't gone to seed so this is another species of sparrow, a swamp sparrow that is bulking up on seeds of an aster in October to make its big journey, right? Its big migration. So it's relying on the seeds and those seeds are not gonna be there if those people cut that aster back after the blooms have faded. This is where it gets interesting. You get all these beautiful birds on top of that's the new color explosion, right? Is if you let these things go to seed, again I'm more asters and a different, this is a Savannah sparrow. So the warbler's on their way back down, goldenrod, leave it alone and it will feed, it will bring color, it will bring benefit to that landscape and another warbler, yellow warbler, all kinds of beautiful things that we can see. When you get past fall, you have all these plants that are adapted to the landscape to produce fruit that birds and other animals are gonna work with that plant to disperse that seed. Native species like cedar wax wings here are relying on things like high bush cranberries, those bushes and winter berries and things like that. Those fruit are gonna be super bitter in the fall when their seed is not ready. That plant says back off, we're not ready. They're gonna sweeten up after lots of cold, after frost thaw, frost freeze thaw, freeze thaw, that's gonna make them a lot sweeter. That seed is gonna get really ripe. When it's ready is when that berry is at the most tasty for birds like cedar wax wings that are gonna gobble this down in one bite. It's hilarious to watch. And then they're gonna fly off and they're gonna acid-scorify like we do on big lab tables now for big seed factories in their bellies, they're gonna do that last, second to the last step of that seed, they're gonna deposit it and that seed is gonna be ready to germinate. And that, those fruits, that same fruit can also attract birds like the pinegrose beak that we're at the northern, we're at the southern end of each range. This is like the tropics for it. It comes here to get warm. In January, as an eruptive species it has too many babies for its normal habitat. They expand temporarily, they go to new places just like this big snowy owl eruption here of the last few years. And then things settle down and they return to their native range. So we get those treats if we leave these plants alone to go. And then the genetic diversity is a sustainability piece, as I said. This is the real challenge, folks, so you get it. I'm doing it. I'm going to the nursery tomorrow as soon as they open. Having somebody walk me to their native plant section and I'm gonna take it from there and I'm gonna start doing this. It's not gonna work, folks. You're gonna go to the nursery, they're gonna try to do what the good business people do. They're gonna try to talk you into something that's gonna be easier and more reliable for you because they have done what most successful business models have done over the years. They've relied on replicability, quality control, all those things. They know when I go in there and I say, I want the same Korean lilac that my neighbor has, I literally want the same shrub. And two years from now, if mine blooms a little later or a little less pink, you know, a little more rosé, then I'm gonna be back there and I'm gonna be disappointed. So the easiest thing for that good business person is to say, is it a miss Kim or is it the, and we can work together, they can show me those and they can give me a clone of exactly that same plant. And that's what we have, we see in the nurseries, we have the species name, you have this quoted name afterwards. And what that is about is about Jim Hancock, I mentioned him earlier. Jim Hancock is a brilliant horticulturalist. He's a blueberry geneticist from Michigan State University who retired with his horticulturalist wife, Ann, to Maine. And Jim has spent his career genetically engineering cultivars of blueberry plants that can be adapted to different climates. The blueberry, think about the blueberry plant folks, low bush blueberry. You're gonna hike, someone's gonna hike this summer, they're gonna get up to the top of Cadillac Mountain or some other barren landscape. It's gonna be hot, it's not gonna have rain for three weeks. It's gonna be, that's as arid a place as you can find. And blueberries, depending on the season, are gonna be blooming, making berries, green, happy leaves. All of a sudden we should do what we have done, which is ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. We have lots of arid climates. We're gonna have more arid climates. We need antioxidants, vitamins, food. We need our landscapes to be more productive because they have to feed more people. We need to do what we've done with corn and soy and those other crops. And we need to genetically modify them to get the absolute best out there, to do copy cats and put those out there via tissue cultivation and things like that and put clones out there that are reliable. And so Jim Hancock has made a ton of these varieties. He's put blueberries in South America. He's put blueberries in Africa. He's put blueberries in my fridge year round, organic if I like, and they're there because those places they've been taken there. And that is, I would submit a very necessary part of what we need right now. We need our landscapes to do that, our food landscapes. What I would argue is we don't need that in our front yard. We do not need that technology, that 4,000 years of horticulture of cloning in our front yards because it's degrading the ecology of our front yards. We are creating clones and cultivars and we can envision all kinds of scenarios where a pest comes in, for example, that specializes on one tree, species of tree, for example, and we do a prescriptive cut of that species of tree until the pest is starved and gone. And then we tap the nursery industry to replace that species of tree. And organizations like the organizations Just Supports get big federal grants to buy a thousand species of these trees to distribute to land trusts to go out and do community planting. And those are a thousand of the same tree because the nursery industry has done those the way it reliable. And so that landscape is not the same as it was. It is not restored. It is way more, it is way more possible to, it's way more threatened from pests and things like that. So I offer you bearberry from my yard, a very difficult to grow, but beautiful species of ground cover, very small shrub. I grew seed-propagated ones. The top two on my right, you see my little phone shadow for scale. And the bottom one is that my supplementary one that I got from a local nursery that had that quoted name. I should have saved the tag, but I didn't. And this is why it's doing way better. It's like they modified all of me out of that plant so that even I can't mess it up, right? And that's much better, but you can look at it all day long and you can see differences in leaf shape, leaf color and things like that. I don't know if insects, if host insects can tell the difference like that the same way I do, but I gotta think it's a concern. And most people will. And so that's what Wild Seed Project is all about is collecting seeds, natural propagation. So that's the added step. This is like the new organic was, you know, everything's gotta be organic. The jargon now, when you walk into your nursery, is it, do you have native species? Are they naturally propagated or are they cultivars? And the question you are asking is, did they have a mom and dad make a seed and then that seed turned into the plant that you see before you, which indicates that probably those mom and dads had mom and dads and the things were raised and this plant was probably selected, right? Because it did better than some of its others, but that's okay. That's the natural selection. It wasn't engineered to be there in a particular way, right? Naturally propagated straight species, i.e. no cultivars. Cultivars are not bad by definition, but you raise an increased level of this thing may not be sexually reproductive. This thing may not be attractive to insects. That may be one of the things they modified out of it, was they shifted the bloom color or the things like that so that it didn't get defoliated by its host. So Wild Seed Project will tell you how to do this. They'll tell you how to germinate things. You can buy the seeds fall is the time when seeds are in Maine and so that's the time when they're in the packets at the Wild Seed Project online shop and you get the simple instructions and it's as simple as it seems. This is my backyard propagation operation that has produced thousands of plants at this point in this tiny space. I buy some seeds at Wild Seed Project. I take the, I do exactly what happens in nature. I fill up pots of dirt and I spread the seeds around. In nature, in Maine, the seeds are going, right? They're blowing around the landscape in September and October. They're settling on the ground and then these little garden elves, these little helpful fairies, are going around each seed and they're measuring, right? The seed has to be as deep as it is, as it is wide so they measure and they put them in and they, no, none of that happens. Those seeds lay on the ground. They have different shapes that help them find where they wanna be in the soil. They find little nooks and crannies or they don't live and they get left alone all winter and so you spread them on the top of pots. I did, I think here you see probably 120 pots, probably 15 species, probably took me 20 minutes to sow all of that and then I spent four hours building the Grace Squirrel Proof Box to go over it and keep that from getting rearranged. People were giving me tree seeds so I found these containers. I was having a trouble with the taproot and I found these containers that have these large, that are about this tall and this big around and species like oak that wanna send us back, taproot can grow in there for two years or things like that so someone like me can let it germinate and then spend two years going, should I put it here or should I put it here or should I put it here or should I put it here? And I shouldn't put it either because it's an oak and I live in Portland and it's gonna be huge but I should give it to a friend who needs a big shade tree or I should give it to a conservation organization and say this is a straight species naturally propagated, this will be great and I know you've got a place to put it. And so I can give those to my neighbor and then I leave it alone, I walk away and this happens and I every once in a while have to go tell my kids to stop climbing on it and those sorts of things and then in the summer, in the spring it turns green, all those pots turn green and everything germinates, I divide those up, they become little plants that in some cases in that summer so among the first species I did myself, blue vervein, verbena, propagated it, I told Heather Macargo at Wild Seed Project I wanted instantaneous results, I don't wanna do this two year, might take two year thing, give me something that's gonna give it to me now, she gave me blue vervein, I got that bloom the very first year, my son and I counted nine species of native bumblebees, we had fun identifying them, we even got a rusty patch bumblebee right before that insect was listed as the first ever insect on the federal endangered list so we are getting them in Portland, Maine by planting plants and paying attention, you have to do both, you can't just plant the plants if you wanna count the results, so again tree species, so the rewards are many and this is what it's all about is those birds, it's about bringing these birds, if we do those things, if we plant the right species of plants and produce the right species of insects, then we will and we maintain those plants the right way and let them serve their critical function, let them be there for the insects that have adapted to them being there and then we also make sure that those plants, that's a reproductive environment, that we're letting those self seeders seed and that's how they fill in, that we are doing some maintenance on the other things to maintain that and the rewards are many, you can comb through the staff naturalist photos at Maine Audubon and find the throw away pile of all the great birds that ended up in people's backyards that we got great photos of, but nobody wants these photos because they're these landscape, these developed settings, right? We want the birds in their habitat but we can get American red starts in our backyards and on our stairs. We see lots of woodpeckers in Portland, we see Downies, we see Harries, some of us see Piliated, we don't see Yellow Bellied Sapsuckers because the habitat just isn't there right now. We can get rose-breasted growth beaks on our feeders and interesting this is another eruptive bird that is not here regularly but they're a treat when they show up and they're gonna follow the habitat, right? Northern Perula, we should have these warblers in our yard in Maine, in Portland, it makes sense on the map and we see dozens and dozens and dozens of them in Evergreen Woods, why aren't they coming in our yards because their insects aren't leading them out there? This is a clay-colored sparrow, it looks just like a house sparrow until you drill down on those feet, that would never work, those feet would never work on a bird feeder, they'd have to wrap around each perch about four times. This is a meadow bird, this was a significant state record in Maine, this sighting, this bird would not leave the warmth of this Weber grill and this shot will never make the Nature Conservancy calendar but it's amazing demonstration of what's possible an extremely rare bird in a landscape like that. A hooded warbler, we're seeing these in Evergreen Cemetery these days, again on a rusty bike wheel surrounded by hostas, that's not special habitat but that's enough decent habitat to bring this bird around and give us that treat and give us that record. This is where the thousands of dollars of camera equipment leave, this is my yard and my feeble little camera equipment but this is a yellow breast, this is a yellow-throated warbler, this it turned out when I shared this, this sighting that my son and I saw on a suet feeder in November in our yard in the back COVID neighborhood in Portland, this bird it was November, the previous sighting was May of that year in Brunswick, the sighting before that was 2012. So this is a super rare bird that again you have to be paying attention it's a little bit about a bird or being there, you know, as much about the bird but those things are wake up calls to say these birds wanna come and see us and they wanna help out. This was even more significant, this is a much more common bird, we see these in Maine all the time, this is our black pole warbler, I happen to have a 75 foot tall red oak tree in my yard that was left over from somebody before, it's about a 75 year old tree, it's connected to a lot of other trees by virtue of there's a swath of trees that go up through the school, Baxter Woods, Evergreen Woods, so I'm kinda on this pathway, this is a black pole warbler in my yard in late September a few years ago. I had in my mind that migration map when I saw this bird, I know what's about to happen, this bird is about with the rest of them is about to set out, it's gonna island hop a little bit out on Casco Bay, it's gonna stop at Justice Place on Peaks and then it's gonna do its long flight, so I gotta take my yard seriously cause they are here and they're looking to gain the weight. So that's what the project is all about, we're trying to put it out there, I know many of you are part of community groups, garden clubs, community groups like that, churches, things like that, where you wanna do speakers, you wanna do projects and things like that and we wanna help, we wanna be out there advocating for education or working on education, working on stewardship, working on citizen science and working on advocacy and by advocacy I mean when we do all this stuff we have to do the most important step which is telling people about it and showing them and for me to say these are the pretty birds in my yard, don't come to my yard, do it in your place, I'll give you the plants, right? And so that's the idea and there's tons of great resources, lots of groups have tackled pieces of this problem, Oceanside Conservation Trust of Capsco Bay, a wonderful island-based land trust, decided they wanted to publish a list of native plants so people had, it's a wonderful list, it's one stop shopping if you want just a list of everything as a list, that doesn't, they were disappointed too that that doesn't totally become a user-friendly resource so there's other resources out there too, right? The Cooperative Extension has wonderful bulletins on native plants, why we should do it, which you know now. Each of those plants is identified and has a bulletin how to grow that plant and what it's about. Each of those bulletins has a section called wildlife value so we can start saying, man, cedar wax wings, why don't we have cedar wax wings around anymore? Let's find cedar wax wings in the wildlife value of one of these plants. And so these were plants when we went out a couple of years ago and tried to source these plants in Maine and we said, let's just work on trying to find them. We could only find them at one place, we found a list of wonderful woody plants at a wholesale provider called Pearson's Nurseries in Dayton. They don't sell to individuals, they have no retail part of it, but forever they have, there have been people, mostly wealthy people doing big landscape jobs, every once in a while someone tells their landscape designer we're only doing natives. I'm from Indiana, I bought a house on Prout's Neck, I don't know what the natives are but I know it's a big deal. You find me natives and get those in the landscape and so places like Pearson's have had to maintain naturally propagated native species and they've been growing them and doing big parts of their lots allocated to that. We've worked with them as a retail partner now for the last two years to do a big purchase of them and from them and make that available to handle the retail there. We also wanna work with Land Trust and other groups to do group buys like that. We've helped two other Land Trusts so far do their own plant sale, helping these group orders, taking order, put the checklist, we can call the list down, help you identify 10 great species to have out there where you are that are gonna be easy for people to grow and easy for them to see the reward. And then there are all kinds of these other resources online that I'd be happy to talk about, Cornell, where we can actually start mapping our communities and getting, my yard is on this map where you can sort of start seeing things and then that is also linked up for people to make, okay, if that person is planting these and they're reporting these bird sightings, we can zero in on those relationships and advocate for that, right? So those are great resources as well. Falmouth where I work is turning 300 next year and so we can make that a really cool theme, right? Historical societies and that. The history of this landscape is these plants. Let's celebrate it and let's bring them into the future as there was a big span where they weren't here, right? So that becomes a neat thing and these communities can also advance their other goals as well. So lots of other neat things going on, the Portland landscape with no mo, we still have to focus on the other issues, the toxins, the invasive species, things like that. As of next year, you can no longer sell this by this stuff in nurseries, Fragmites, Australias, what's called Common Reed, a innocuous name that is choking out waterfronts all over the place right now. Maine Audubon is wrestling with invasive species this week like purple loose strife and we're flipping the script, right? So if you're not supposed to deadhead plants because so that they can reproduce, deadhead invasive flowers, right? Because you don't want purple loose strife to go to seed and if you deadhead it every year, it will give up in that landscape and you will starve those roots and that thing will not be there and so that's a way to turn that and you still get to do all those other things. You don't have to go home and feel guilty about all of you have these in your yard. I do too. I have my grandmother's lilacs in my yard. You will not take those away from me. They're not native. They do a little bit for the bees and stuff but those get me out. They help me fall in love with that place, right? And then I can do the bring the benefit on top of that. And so if you're one of these partner communities, let us know how we can help and how we can involve things as well and we have a lot of great things. I'll close by telling you, I'm not probably gonna take questions as a group because we're out of time. Thank you all for letting me run over but I'm gonna hang out and I have a lot of resources up there, books that are available in the library here but also my favorite catalogs, seed catalogs if you're gonna sell native seeds and plants, you gotta have great information so those become wonderful educational resources as well and lots of the other cool projects that are happening in Portland. Thank you all for coming tonight. It's been wonderful and hopefully you'll get a little bit left of this gorgeous night because I'm sure it's so great out there. Thanks everyone.