 Okay, I think we have most of the people we are expecting TJ went inside. He'll have to catch up with us later Can people thumbs up if they can hear me? Okay Excellent Well, I am Jespen West from the Conservation Commission Randolph, thanks very much. There's a couple of us who are also here in the chat. We've got Emily We've got Jenny. We've got Rachel. We've got TJ. I think I saw Chandler here This was a presentation that was going to be live, but instead it's going to be like this and I really appreciate Jim's flexibility and being willing to work with us for this. I'm just going to do a quick introduction We're going to get started if you have Questions we'll have time at the end for questions but also there's the chat function which you can type questions in and Emily is going to be moderating and we'll can relay them to Jim either sort of During the talk or afterwards. So thanks very much for having for being here and If you've got any other questions about the Randolph Conservation Commission, we've got information about us on the town of Randolph website So just a little bit of introduction for Jim and then I'll let him get going Jim grew up in Tennessee with roots in southern and northern Appalachians His mom's parents raised most of the vegetables they ate Loved reviving old ways to sustain the land and made every visit a celebration of the good earth as he helped process produce His dad's father was a landscape architect whose eye for design with nature Seemed to stem from the wonders he loved finding in wild lands like the Vermont Highlands near where he and Jim's grandmother grew up At an early age Jim took to the woods and natural history and his dad's 1930s vintage bird guides Discoveries of piliated woodpecker nest trees and Kentucky warblers led to studies in biology at southwestern at Memphis Graduate research and plant ecology at the University of Georgia and University of North Carolina Jim's passion is to understand the structure and function of plant communities and their associated fauna at Green Mountain College He and other faculty developed programs in environmental studies and biology He and his students documented regional flora vegetation History ice storm effects plant succession in clay plain and flood plain forests and restorative methods as part of their campus floor project Jim and his students developed native species gardens and campus policies based on conservation biology reducing landscapes ecological footprint and improving bird habitats on campus this year Jim's major goal is to conserve the Green Mountain College Herbarium he's annotating repairing and filling gaps in the data for 4,000 plus specimens that will be donated to UVM's Pringle Herbarium Preserving important documentation of the flora in southwestern Vermont. So I'm gonna take our poster off the screen Give the floor to Jim Hopefully this will be seamless and amazing and thank you very much and thank you Jim for doing this presentation for us Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very kind jessamine and Hi, everybody. This is very this is truly distant from you, but I Tell you it's been exciting that We went ahead and did this Virtually even though we couldn't do it live And what I want to emphasize. Yeah is is something just mention is if you have questions Things you want to talk about Either if it seems like it fits within the talk go ahead and enter and put it in the chat Or it will have time at the end to to talk about these things One thing I wanted to mention well, let me let me go right into the I've got some slides that'll accompany this and so Let me I'm gonna share my screen So Again, thank you for that introduction. I just wanted to mention that Yeah, it was a pretty early age that I went into plant ecology or got interested in plant ecology because of a love of birds and It seemed like as I was getting really interested into bird watching that I Kept needing to know well what plants are those that they're living in hiding in The the information I given Jessam and mentioned Kentucky warblers I remember coming home from school every day because I was hearing an unfamiliar song Down in the woods and I would kept looking for this and it was very Secretive bird and finally got a glimpse of this warbler, but those plants kept Making themselves Obviously part of part of that bird's habitat part of that bird's life. That's the interest there Before I get started I wanted to mention Rutland County Audubon Kathleen Guinness who is the current Chair or the president of Rutland County sent me these images And in a way, we've had this neat collaboration to line me up to do this talk Through Rutland Audubon and I wanted to mention Some things about them if you're ever looking for a Club to be involved with it's a pretty active Audubon Over there one of the things I'll highlight that you see here as you glance through things They have a fairly unique set of data this 15 years of Data from the West Rutland Marsh where they Monitor that area monthly and they have 15 straight years of this data and Wonderful programs and that sort of thing So I would encourage you if you ever over in Rutland or if you're near enough to be active They have members from all over the region probably as far away as as Randolph Now this is this is the slide that says supposed to make you chuckle this this is sort of like movie credits That go on and on and on and on at the end of a great movie when everyone's leaving So I'm putting it here at the beginning. I just wanted to you can look at this later If you are perhaps interested But I just wanted to thank of course the Randolph Conservation Commission Rutland Audubon Glenn Gwynn-Causer up at Audubon, Vermont who collaborated a little bit and then a whole slew of Organizations and individuals some of whom I'll mention during the talk But you see the say the fifth item there the global strategy for plant conservation from the Tenet Gardens Conservation International It was the first good model. I found for how a college might design its work on its designed landscape to be more sustainable to have a smaller ecological footprint and indeed a lot of those aspects have to do with creating bird habitat And I won't go through all of these here, but I just had great fun Digging back into my old notes and putting every student who was sort of closely involved with with the campus for our project. I Did want to mention this very last item Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology I'm I don't do much photography myself And so what I've done is when I have done included bird photographs I'm heavily using photographs from all about birds the Macaulay Library and I should also mention Go botany, which is an online version of flora nova angliae, which has great images of plants And so some of those are used in the talk as well Okay, let's get started with This interesting topic. So what I want you to do is imagine a habitat any habitat and Think about what is it about plants that attracts birds? I've got a couple of examples here You see a long-leaf pine savanna. They're on the left and The famous red-cockade woodpecker associated with those older long-leaf pines. They depend on Pines that are old enough to have heart rot into which they can dig their nest cavities and that will go into some things a whole slew of things that are related to This relationship between the woodpeckers not these particular we won't deal with the woodpeckers much but Plants and their habitat have many ecological aspects as you know Something closer to home might be a cattail marsh Just like you'd see at West Rope and marsh you see on the right and And you're you're very familiar with the fact that some birds are pretty Pretty specific to certain habitats like the Virginia rail you see there the marsh ren and the bittern Some birds are a little more generalists or they they have broader ranges of Tolerance to conditions like redwing blackbirds. You'll sometimes see nesting and very Like ditches along roads as long as the there's a little bit of young Growth in a in a ditch for example, so Let's Here's the two here the topics. I'd like to cover and as I was putting this together. I realized The real heart of this talk is this first topic. I've listed here plant ecology plant bird interactions and Then the evolution of plant bird interactions and plant selections before a discussion So the real heart of the talk is this background on plant ecology and the reason is I Just want to provide something maybe a little different than then you've had on on this topic of bird plants for birds and really It comes from my perspective that it's enormously useful to know As much as possible or have a understanding as much as possible of all these factors that do influence Plants and birds and their and how their interactions function To then understand well much better. How are you going to manage your plants or what plants would you select? so The bulk of the talk will be in this plant ecology background section and then I'll have a brief but but very I think nice nicely Summary kinds of sections on plant bird interactions and their evolution and Plant selections and they'll you see they'll build on that background So and hopefully there will be plenty of time for for discussion and questions Okay, so I'm your plan ecology. I guess my overall question might be what are plants doing and We'll cover just just a quick review of how plants change the resource environment And I should say how are they depending on that environment? But the organic matter oxygen carbon soil nutrients water and temperature will be topics will cover quite briefly and then Getting more specific to plant bird interactions Very important topic of how plants create habitat how they interact with other plants and how they interact with animals So this is a review in some ways of things you've known and I promise I won't dwell on this slide very long But plants do photosynthesis. Yay It supports All animal life as you know, I'm gonna and let's look at the lower hand box lower right hand box You'll see Functions of that organic matter. Well, it produces the food that Everything else depends on creates habitats recycles nutrients and these plants sequester carbon and they even modify Water I'm going to skip through that and go back up here If you look on a broad scale and you start thinking about plants and birds Yes, globally we can think about broad vegetation types and Again detail here is not important. We're going to do these briefly But just to note that net primary production. That's what NPP is This is in grams per meter squared per year Various tremendously So for example, the highest you see there is that top one the tropical rain for us and the the deserts down at the bottom with with Only 70 grams per meter squared per year, but then we have characteristics that are Maybe surprising that's something like a tropical rain forest and maybe the The tiger the cold moist cold Boreal forest has very similar resonance times in other words if you look at the total biomass and You divide it by the net primary production you get An average of revenue resonance time very similar in those cases These are just things to keep in mind Where we obviously know that plants make oxygen and I just mentioned it because There are some very important ecological factors about plants that we don't worry about on a local scale because the atmosphere is highly mixed And so we have a pool of oxygen there that serves the whole world as long as plants are doing their job and I do want to mention that plants have been a force in geologic history To I really change the atmosphere as well soil is the same way You see the graph on the the middle right Where it's showing Relative amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere back Even back 600 million years, but what a lot of Times maybe folks don't realize is how much CO2 there was a tremendous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere Before there were vascular plants so vascular plants and Came along in about the late Devonian and really reduced the CO2 dramatically in the atmosphere and Doing things that roots do they get down in the soil process a lot of nutrients and Then also sequester lots of carbon and I'll be even more brief here. We know that plants help cycle nutrients. They're taking up nutrients They're preventing the erosion of those things. They affect water cycles This is a kind of a cool study in the graph Showing that In a in a watershed where the Trees were cleared There was an increase in the mean flow of in the flow of stream water And this has everything to do with the fact that trees Engaging a lot of uptake of water they take a lot of water out of the soil They put a lot of water into the air through transpiration and if you cut those trees then you have Really reduce the amount of water that is is going up in the air and increasing the amount that goes into streams and Some of the history of flooding in Vermont Is characterized by some tremendous early large floods Probably because of the tremendous amount of land clearing in the 1800s And in the early 1900s we still had much less forest cover Than we have today And finally on these sort of physical factors plants change the temperature Quite a bit these are on this graph on the right you see That the little green bars show Temperature fluctuations in stream water in the shade the green bars being less extreme Versus an open pool where there's lots of sun How's it the goal here right now is to just provide this background this foundation to be thinking about well how is this going to affect birds and Will do more specific thinking about that here in a minute Yeah, so let's just I'll skip the one on the on the left there But so we've done a little bit of looking quickly at these bullet points and I want to move now into how plants create habitat and You think well, okay, let's look at a plant just one plant. It has some interesting plant morphology That looks like what you see in a botany course Well, let's put it all together though and imagine a Habitat and this is This is from work. That's become rather famous MacArthur MacArthur study from 1961 you now imagine full-grown trees and Pardon their their typos in their figure there. The black warbler is a black thread of blue warbler their myrtle warbler sorry about the spelling there, too, but They found that There were these very interesting Yeah, you might call it habitat partitioning going on Between these different species of warbler and it gave that it was a study attempting to see well, how can these warblers coexist? one way they coexist is To spend time feeding or specializing and feeding in different parts of those trees They found that the Kate may warbler's were Feeding in the very tops of these trees Black 30 green and black 30 blue pretty similar in the upper reaches outsides of those trees and myrtle warbler's lower and They they breasted kind of up in the middle part of the tree but including a lot of the central branches, so you have this Habitat partitioning and in fact, that's part of their niche niche parts partitioning As those plants create habitat now this slide we need to spend a little bit of time on because And also I pulled some pictures for my own photographs And what I'd like you to do is think about habitats familiar to yourself Yeah, and it could be your backyard it could be the woods in back of your your your home It could be any natural area or otherwise but Think about vegetation structure because it turns out that MacArthur MacArthur were on to something extremely important foresters know about this There when you're looking at multiple use of Forest and civil culture for multiple use There there are many prescriptions that address vegetation structure and Recognize its importance to birds Just to run through some of the things that say an ecology a plant ecologist might describe In terms of vegetation structure You'd certainly look at how tall is the canopy? how open is it and It could be anything from 95% Closure where it's a very closed canopy to more of a woodland picture the Longly Pines of Ana we saw earlier. It might be Have only 20% closure. It's mostly open sky Composition refers to well what species are there and A lot of first prescriptions there's a recognition that it's useful to have Softwoods or the the evergreens here's some hemlocks on the left. Here's some deciduous trees on the right, but this particular stand of you see a lot of Hemlock and white pine in the foreground and there were deciduous trees in the background. This was Taken while a black burning and warbler was singing up in the canopy. They they they actually prefer there seemed to be associated with Deciduous forest that has a good component significant component of of evergreens in it so that composition and then snags are their dead trees the dead trees are part of that forest and in fact Ecologically quite important and we'd also look at understory layers. We might describe Tall under storage trees or short under starting trees. We might look at the shrub layer Similar aspects how tall is it? What's the cover? What's the composition? and then the ground layer is Simply the vegetation near the ground. It could be even low shrubs, but Often it's herbaceous. Sometimes there's very little there as you see under the hemlocks And But but similarly we want to look at The cover how what percent of that ground is covered and and what the species composition is Many birds are associated with certain Structures of vegetation and many birds are associated with certain kinds of litter The litter being the dead organic matter on the surface and whether there's surface water surface soil exposed Um Woody debris and what kind of woody debris there is Um, and then we're also interested in that the parent material and soil and drainage The same time In looking at these structures You want to keep in mind the dynamics that is what are The past disturbances. What's the disturbance history and by disturbance? I simply mean fire and wind throw and flood This is a on the right here is a flood plain forest along the poltney river which experiences annual flooding right near the river almost every year and then Less frequently it'll it'll flood a larger flood plain Very dynamic that way and then the succession is the slower Regrowth following those disturbances, but of course what you see in the vegetation It may be nicely explained by parent material and soil and drainage, but More often than not we have a disturbance history in a Successional track that is also affecting what we see Won't you want to mention heterogeneity It's simply what you think it is. It's the variation from one spot to another Where you have a log fall in the forest Um, that is a different environment from what's adjacent to it um, and then there are There's heterogeneity of different scales Uh on whole landscapes Uh, or on a small scale in the in the local stand Um, and keep in mind too, there's species interactions. We'll talk about these more later um, but for example under these hemlocks it it's it's It's hard for some herbaceous plants to grow there due to shade and due to soil conditions But it's also there could be a player involved for example deer could be browsing Um vegetation there as well accounting for the openness Um, and so sometimes it's not as simple as one explanation Well, let's look at how plants interact with other plants and Uh So we have plant competition very familiar in our area. We have competition for light And you see on the left here fairly this is a fairly closed forest, but um the trees there's sort of a young patch over in there, but um Shade tolerant trees are the only ones that can survive in that that understory shade um, and Very often you'll have um the ability to Read the history of the landscape if you see paper birch in a stand for example Uh, the age of those paper birch trees gives you a good good read on when That was a site that was open to very high light and uh, even probably had some bare mineral soil, which is Uh, generally required by paper birch to establish And if you look at other habitats, I thought I'd throw this in this is kind of an interesting study. This is an aerial view of excuse me of the It's on the chaparral and in california where the in the surroundings around the sage clumps you see bare zones and so The idea was that there's probably some allele apathy going on Um, and it's also been discovered and there's there's a competing hypothesis that maybe herbivory is part of this That rodents take cover in the sage and they'll come out and graze the um the grasses and then uh Seek shelter in the in the sage and both of those factors are involved What about um The consumer resource relations with birds uh, I want to just We should just make clear we're talking about food birds are fed by plants either directly or indirectly and but uh, there are some birds that that do uh directly consume plant material um and Uh, here's what here we have red crossbill eating seeds And oops, I'm getting Trigger happy here. Um We also have Mutualisms between birds and plants And I wanted to contrast that with um the situation where a plant is Doing the same thing without an animal mutualism here. We're talking about pollination. So we have a hummingbird uh collecting nectar from jewelweed and and Helping pollinate those flowers And then on the left a cottonwood that um It doesn't have to have big showy flowers because it's using the wind to disperse its It's pollen and we have uh, similarly there are wind dispersed plants as you see on the left cottonwood um But there are mutualisms with birds for dispersal. So they these mutualisms we sometimes think of first Especially the the dispersal when we when we think about planting You know planting plants for birds sometimes the thing we think of first would be these um fruiting species Um, and the mutualism is such that the bird gets nutrition from that fruity pulp um It's going to excrete a seed that's unharmed and intact um And be deposited elsewhere and and that's accomplishing dispersal for that species um now I want to mention one other thing uh plants interact with other organisms and it and All right the example here are mutualisms of birds for defense and i'm calling this defense because from the plants perspective um It's useful to the plant or to have uh the birds Doing what they're doing, which is eating Lots and lots of invertebrates that are feeding on that that uh that plant Uh, Doug Ptolemy who i'll be referring to again here in a moment um Notes that one clutch of young chickadees consumes Somewhere between six thousand and nine thousand caterpillars In the rearing of that clutch um They eat a tremendous number of these little critters um Now that was sort of a whirlwind uh background in ecology and but before we leave the ecology topic I'm not even done yet I wanted to Have as a last segment something on stressors And uh, so be thinking about how Each of these might affect The characteristics, uh the functions of plants what they're doing in terms of um providing Vertical structure here. We have a chalk grassland. This is over in europe with with a lawn in the same region um And without that vertical structure you you have uh fewer bird species that are going to be using that environment um you Even with the chalk grassland you have some niche specialization of the birds that use it um, and of course there's a lot more plant diversity there and then, uh Thinking about that last category of plants with Um that are feeding birds by way of insects that eat the plants there would be A lot more services provided in that regard by something like a chalk grassland, but one of our biggest stressors on bird populations is merely habitat loss the loss of these uh particular vegetation types one of the famous studies, um of A transition in a whole landscape in this regard And then dealing also with what we what we now refer to as fragmentation Is the cadiz township study in wisconsin It where In 1831 you had pretty continuous forest and then by 1978 These very small patches are forest islands And what's interesting and you can think about this wherever you live is to think about Beyond your borders and what your context is in that landscape is very important Uh, this is up on the upper left. Just a photo I found on the internet of the view from mount phylo To show fragmentation in the shambling valley and actually currently the nature conservancy is Is interested in one of their initiatives is to restore parts of Uh the original forest To the shambling valley because it is so highly fragmented Um a really great study that took a lot of a lot of work That was done back in the 90s on oven birds, which you see on the lower left a bird that um Has a lot of convergent evolution. You might say with thrushes it feeds on the ground It likes invertebrates it builds its nest on the ground with a side entrance like an old fashioned oven And uh one of their findings from this study they study pairing success in these various size patches So on this x axis the log of core area. This is a logarithmic scale. So like 10 100 1000 Um I think these are in Uh, yeah, I think these were hectares but um And what they found was that you know a pretty good relationship Uh pretty negative relationship with uh as these core areas get smaller in other words as patches get smaller The pairing success goes down Um, you might find a male oven bird singing in a small patch on this landscape Uh But it's not ideal habitat and a female may never never settle down there knowing that it's it's not a Very good habitat other other things they discovered what were some actual They found uh lower invertebrate Uh prey availability in these smaller patches But let's think about other stressors. We know there can be eutrophication Um, interestingly, uh, I'll use the chalk grassland again because uh, there's some really good work that was done over many years Um, where uh This number of plant species fell from a little after 1970 to the mid-80s And at the same time they were seeing this great increase in a in a grass um that was Uh very well adapted to high resource availability. This was getting a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus inputs or nitrogen inputs from the atmosphere um being surrounded by heavily industrialized areas and uh, so ironically as the plants grew better The stress tolerant Plants were out competed And so you actually had a drop in numbers of species as you had an increase in the percent cover of one of those species Um, and so these are just things to keep in mind that can change For us, they don't affect our uplands in vermont too much with one important exception um In higher elevations we know, uh, this was studies were Bringing this to light in the 80s We know that acid precipitation and we're downwind from some pretty heavily industrialized areas in the midwest acid precipitation was Not only acidifying soil, but increasing uh nitrogen availability in some of those soils and some folks are pretty sure that This actually uh reduced the ability of spruce and fir to harden off for the winter Uh, and may have led led to some of the mortality increase mortality. You see I'll skip those aquatic systems Um climate change is is imminent in our thinking as well right now Uh, I what I have here is the big nails thrush representing um One particular kind of threat if you have a birds in these island populations of high elevation spruce per forest As temperature rises those forests might actually just blip right off the top of the mountain and uh leaving them with no suitable habitat So that's an actual serious situation where is it down by the coast If sea level rises and uh humans human settlement is not ready to adjust which is probably a given It'll there will be more stresses on coastal habitats I should point out that if if human population was not so Well established along the coast these shorelines might be able to adjust up and uh, and so I'll leave you at some of that problem, but uh, we don't have that luxury right now Um non-native species is huge and I'm gonna I'm gonna refer back to this in a moment Uh, a couple of things I'll mention. Uh, the hemlock willy adelgid is one that I'm familiar with And in a sort of a painful way, uh, uh, I grew up going to smoke. He's quite a bit I've worked in the smokies but These are dead hemlocks along this valley seam here and hemlocks in the smokies a very moist environment fairly warm There were 400 500 600 year old hemlocks that were six feet in diameter huge that would die in a in a few years from this introduced non-native species Um tremendous effect on structure and I've mentioned black burning and warblers. Well, it turns out that um Their populations have declined in the southern Appalachians as you see the decline of hemlocks uh One familiar and and pernicious in our area garlic mustard um It affects the understories and tree regeneration when we find Sorry for the fuzzy pictures here, but um, it's actually been discovered that Yet we we knew earthworms were non-native, but there are some large earthworms That have more recently been introduced And where they've gotten established there's been some studies done showing that these earthworms are speeding the processing of forest litter and effecting things like oven birds and making making it so that there's less leafy structure there So these are things that we have to think about um, and uh one other thing Changes to disturbance regime. Uh, one of the famous ones I've illustrated here is that um Um Longleaf pine which depends really these savannas depend on uh periodic surface fires as you see in the lower left um One of their adaptations to That the surface fires is is a very thick bark um And they have a growth strategy such that the young plant stays with its growing tip Buried in the soil as the tree grows for several years before then it bolts to a to a sizable height um all Because that is uh very adaptive it helps the plant survive surface fires If fire is suppressed Um, you get something like this on the lower right And so yes, we can change um an environment dramatically Uh by suppressing something like fire which and maybe in most people's way of thinking is Is a destructive force something we ought to prevent but of course, um, we know it's it's part of this Longleaf pine ecosystem and suppressing it has led to A real a real decline in Longleaf pine surround all right, so um This was our sort of major foray through plant ecology and um, I put here a picture of uh a mockingbird because um We have a we have a winterberry holly not far outside our our kitchen window where a mockingbird of all things came And we were hopeful it would just take up residence all winter one year But it stayed with us about three weeks And I knew that there were many there probably weren't enough winterberry hollies to to be good winter habitat and it moved on But what a joy. I mean, um, so, um Let me summarize these bird plant interactions This way Uh and just simply like this, um, think of the plant niche in a bird's life. So, um, what's It doing for the birds? It is affecting the physical environment as we saw um It's creating habitat and that habitat is going to include places to nest cover Uh nesting materials and it's going to produce food and some of that is direct Directly consumed food, uh, which we call herbivory where you're eating the seeds of those trees generally And some of them are mutualisms where you might be co-evolved with the plant to help with pollination or food dispersal Plant defense is it's less tight co-evolution. But nonetheless, it's it's a fairly mutualistic because it's benefiting the The the birds that the insects they eat and it's benefiting the plants Uh by removing the consuming insects what I'd like to do with, um This the next topic and and these are really brief topics here Um, but but what an important one. I wanted to pull out any a specific example Of this evolution between birds and plants That does have to do with with the invertebrates And some of you may be familiar with Doug Ptolemy's book bringing nature home Um about 15 years ago that came out uh, he is an entomologist and uh in studying he's in Delaware and he's in studying uh The insects in his region he began to realize pretty quickly that where he could find insects and there were some uh kinds of plants that he wasn't finding much many insects on and these were the the non-native plants And in fact, you you probably lots of you you you've all seen ads in catalogs uh Advertising plants that are insect-free or problem-free Well, it turns out that um that in itself might be a reason that some non-native plants become invasive um We'll see in a moment some some figures on Well, how how how do non-native plants compare to to native plants in that regard, but um, we've mentioned that caterpillars are the main food for For many of these insectivorous birds During the nesting season some of them switch over to fruits and seeds in the winter Uh, but Doug Tollamy was bemoaning the fact He actually came to Green Mountain College and gave a talk He was bemoaning the fact that there were very few studies to to really see if If in fact these lower numbers of Tremendously lower numbers of invertebrates he was finding really make an ecological difference for the birds And so he collaborated. He finally he found someone Desiree Narango who you see pictured on the upper left Took this on as a project with a fairly common bird and recruited lots of homeowners landowners and it is sort of a Diffuse residential area Where she she actually recorded For for particular nesting Chickadees she recorded their nesting success And numbers of burge birds fledged tremendous amount of work to do this And then she had to record within its hunting area Things having to do with will the suite of plants the plants that that were available In that area and you see in the graph in the middle, uh, the x-axis is percent non-native plants Um, they actually modeled their results are on the y-axis, it's a population growth factor where A population growth of zero is a is a replacement level um, but you see that There's even even with small Percentages of these non-native plants in their territories. Chickadees aren't really doing that. Well, he They discovered that's below about 30 There's some chance of replacement or even producing young that can disperse to to other sites But even even they're uh, not not ideal until you get down below 10 percent of Plants being non-native If you look at The numbers of fledged and the same Axes in non-native plant percents of non-native plants The estimated fledged young this is this is from a model built from her data Uh, again, you see if you're above about Yeah, 40 percent non-native plants in the area Uh, they average one fledged young per clutch um whereas if you're if you're down to No non-native plants in the area. They're averaging between two and three and This is yeah, and then the um I what i'm forgetting is is how this graph is different but if um, if you look at their the way their model was built they looked at the uh different steps in the process toward being fledged and actually Took data on each of these steps um now one of the cool things and duck told me came i mentioned he came to green mountain college and uh, this really helps in a way With our thinking about plant selection Uh for birds um He's a photographer as well as someone who does some does the science uh of an entomologist he um I remember him putting up a slide of Some of these insect larvae that would appear on black cherry. Here's black cherry depicted here in flower and in fruit Um, and we know that gee there's something like 40 bird species that are known to Consume fruits of black cherry Um, but he started showing slides And of incredibly beautiful uh and diverse Uh insect larvae and and there and there's in the structures Uh that they take on Uh, but instead of just showing two or three like i'm showing you he went on to four or five He showed us a sixth one a seventh one And then he got up to 10 12. He kept going he kept going and What he was doing was he wanted to make and drill in and make the point That ladies and gentlemen This tree hosts an incredible number of species uh He says here You find that it hosts about 450 insect species Um and one of his the interviews he was said Now why don't people plant black cherry instead of zelkova zelkova is is a ornamental that Apparently is popular in that area He said i can't find any insects on zelkova none zero and um, so that you've got this incredible diversity Some of these are specific to cherry some aren't like the eastern tiger swallowtail is not specific to cherry But some of them are um this cherry gall azure is is is specific to Yeah At least the cherry group it's the prunus genus Is is where you're going to find These little galls That eventually hatch out whoops into this beautiful little cherry gall azure right here um This last one on the right here here is the red spotted purple. I accidentally underlined viceroy So i've got the eastern tiger swallowtail here The cherry gall azure here And the red spotted purple here, which is is one of the sort of bird dung memex If you've heard of such a thing these are caterpillars that Really for all the world look like Yeah bird dung At which apparently protects them from detection by at least some bird predators um so if you take these uh factors That we've been discussing um and You can see where i'm ending up here I want to dive into our discussion here in a minute um, but I want to talk for I'll take about five more minutes. I guess It to talk about plant selections So rather than this being a talk where i'm giving you a tremendous number of of uh interesting plants My goal has been to um To encourage you to think about these sorts of things in making plant selections first ecological assessment um, think about your site conditions The landscape context the species composition the history of that land and the stressors Get familiar with the plants if possible the plants and the birds Flores and field guides are going to help there I mentioned sites here not because I have time to go into it now, but the sustainable sites initiative A global strategy for plant conservation These and other there are other things and and I put these and others into What it's a it's a shared google Folder that that will be shared with you after the talk um That if you're interested you can look at but basically sites is is Was an attempt or is an attempt To do what lead certification does for buildings It's like lead certification is for buildings. It's it's certification ecological certification for landscapes and one of the first things It advises or really expects is instead of going in and just wiping the slate clean on your land Is that you you evaluate what's already there? This species composition that's already there sometimes is tremendously valuable Um things that are already on your land are going to be very attractive to the birds um, and I mentioned the global strategy because It it sort of incorporates things that oops if I keep um hitting my trigger. Yeah that um Are going to be useful For uh birds of these particular environments In vermont, um, we have a good guide excuse me to um plant communities in vermont this wetland woodland wildland um What I would suggest though, I mean I I would strongly advise Seeing if you can get somebody to uh, you might want to You know see what they're going right is but have an ecologist come to your land and do uh an assessment I put an example of one that uh We've done a couple of these That I've done in our area, but you could find somebody in your area that um could come spend a couple of a couple of hours for a rapid community assessment of your land um You know one thing they might be able to do is tell you well what what plant communities would develop here and what species are in those plant communities that That would do well here and what birds might be associated um, so When you're looking for at species selection in particular look at your existing plants and then think about the plantings um, I wanted to Mention just uh something I wanted to come up with a real example that would illustrate your um how Something as humble as as a goldenrod might in fact be golden um Last fall And many of you know green mountain college closed in the spring of 2019 and I was a faculty member there So last fall, um, I was actually Decided to stay with my plan to take a sabbatical I was working on plant collections and on the data sitting at a south facing window. It's just a little to the left of Of what you see here looking out on this view um And over the course of a period of time from september 6th, and I'm looking at my notes september 6th to um Oh Let's see The end of september september 30th um Right outside my window in a little patch of common goldenrod with a little tall goldenrod mixed in And a little bit of astro mixed in to nashville warblers A black turret green pair and then another black turret green warbler uh Later on the 14th Chestnut sided warbler on the 8th chestnut sided warbler on the 12th Magnolia warbler on the 8th Philadelphia virio on the 10th. I don't see many of those at all in the fall Uh, these were like within six feet of me Where I could study them as they were gleaning insects from the goldenrod Uh an unidentified bird, which is was the dickens. I couldn't I was it Really seemed like a prairie warbler, but some of the field marks were incorrect and a tennessee warbler on the 12th and on the 30th This was a total of seven six or seven different warbler species that came to Um the goldenrod outside the window. These are not my pictures, but just to illustrate This these are the kinds of birds I was seeing the nashville warbler Here's your black turret green and the chestnut sided warbler. These are fall And I managed to find some photos with them with with goldenrod The fall magnolia sometimes the side streaks are not very obvious Here's that philadelphia virio um Notice that the yellowish undertale cupboards they don't Yeah, a tennessee warbler might look similar, but it doesn't have that Here's your prairie warbler Although I wasn't sure about that one in tennessee warbler. See those wide undertale cupboards These are the what you what these birds look like in the spring Uh some of our most colorful glorious spectacular warblers and I was sitting at my kitchen table Looking out and going. Oh my goodness uh, this is an illustration of uh, how This ecosystem service was dramatic by providing so much Food for these birds by the way, those were males. These are males and I thought Well, that's no fair. I shouldn't show females same species. These are in the spring uh females That of all of those that you saw magnolia black turret green nashville chestnut sided and uh philadelphia virio in the middle And on the right you have the tennessee warbler prairie warb um In closing, um, you think about plants that um Are going to function in in your system and it turns out that native plants are going to be uh The best choice because of their ability to Uh provide food For so many invertebrates invertebrates being what even seed eaters depend on to feed their young And if you're looking for an explanation of this phenomenon um think about millennia not just millennia but millions of years of co-evolution uh plants defend themselves with chemical chemicals and um Let's go back to some golden rod here if you uh But if you think about uh the golden rod that's grown here uh with insects that Are evolving to consume that those species Um, we have a co-evolution going on. It's been called an arms race at times But there are insects that can detoxify those chemicals or handle them Um, and they they made it maintain a kind of balance And so in fact golden rod when it's introduced in other continents Is often invasive Golden rod here, although some people will say it's invasive. It's it's a very well behaved just an old field successful old field we So, um And you'll you'll find a lot of pleasure, of course in, um Planning some of these species that these birds have co-evolved with over millennia Here's back to our black cherry um and Yeah to close So I realize that, um I've only sort of maybe piqued your interest in Thinking of about some of these drivers for plant bird interactions rather than Giving you a talk about particular species Um, I have included in the list of shared documents a list of the woody native woody species of vermont you'll see that in there and um You'll see a really interesting Uh pdf On silver culture for the birds Which is really useful for those of you have some some land besides What's what's a very heavily? design landscape right around your house Uh, it has suggestions on things like maintaining snags and Maintaining the support structure and so on so you see lots of other things there um And there there's also going to be a list with some links to Sources of plants and Sources of information that will give you a great pleasure to look at Sources like conservation gardens like the garden in the woods Of the native plant trust in north carolina botanical garden and ladybird johnson wildflower center in texas Now let me I'm I'm done and I think I'm over Over what I hope to be at but I think we have over 20 minutes here if we want to Have q&a and discussion Um, let's see. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. How's that? I don't see any questions in the chat box if anyone has a question You can either type it in and I can read it out for you or just go ahead and unmute yourself and ask jim yourself Here we are And it doesn't have to be a question it could be Um a comment or maybe something you've observed Jim I would ask you this question. So, um One of the um I do a lot of silviculture on my property and uh, I've been Uh favoring maples over ash as you can imagine and right and But I'm wondering in terms of black cherry versus Uh red maple or sugar maple Um, if you were to pick one of those two, I have certainly way more maple and cherry right Of those two, which one would you think would be the better to figure Yeah, I you know My hunch would be to go on the the characteristics of the site Between the sugar maple and red maple the sugar maple is going to like your you probably know this likes the slightly richer soils Then red maple you're going to find more red maple on sites That um are a little more acidic a little more calcium or less less calcium rich um but both the maples and and the um The prunus genus are going to be good Uh good supporters of of uh invertebrates So I wouldn't have any recommendations on those based on that Um when you know, it seems like around here is this the case around you that you have Black cherries are pretty common tree The maples are pretty common. You're gonna you're gonna often find both in the same woods Yep Yeah Yeah, and so um There is some I mean That it is attractive to maintain the diversity of that forest and One of the things we do sacrifice sometimes like when we create a sugar bush We we may be reducing that overall diversity On a landscape scale That may not be a problem whatsoever because somebody may have A sugar bush that's dominated by sugar maples Uh, but if if you look at the whole region There are areas with Substantial portions of these other other species Um, so I don't even worry about that on a small scale Okay, we have a few few other questions coming in first one from donna Which is we have approximately three to four acres of meadow those increasingly taken over by buckthorn. Please comment Yay Oh dear. Um, yeah, um, is this common buckthorn. Do you know? Or or glossy buckthorn Unknown So, uh, either way Um, when I was at green mountain college in uh in the sort of 2004 2005 range um Uh What was his name chris matlack, I think is his name who works for the forest service now in vermont Anyway, he was with the new england wildflower society. He came to give a talk He walked our land with us and people the students like to say Wow, did you see his reaction when he saw the glossy buckthorn? He he nearly fainted he he said get that plant out of here so, um Here's the good news. I think with three or four acres You you can manually control it as surprising as that might sound. Um And We've done that on our land on seven acres pretty easily without too much work. It's the it's the It's the gout weed that's causing us the greatest problem, but I would pull it And if it's too big to pull Um, you can do one of two things if you know somebody who does a lot of conservation work who Works with invasives borrow a weed wrench, which is this device that basically Leavers plants out of the ground it grabs them Um, and has a fulcrum down right on the ground and you're pulling it back um And uprooting the plant that way and then if it's too big for that You might just cut those bigger stems um If you if if you want you could use glyphosate to paint on the cut stem and um There's a lot of evidence that just that kind of targeted use of glyphosate Is nothing in the world like the abuse of glyphosate that you see in agricultural settings So, um, I don't I wouldn't just categorically Avoid it if you if you are right rightfully concerned about it Which I would be too, but you can it's it's called the cut cut and paint method Where you just take a little brush and you paint that that Glyphosate around the cambium layer of that cut stem Uh to get rid of it Do you have any uh suggestions for non glyphosate options? Yeah, I mean my my main one is and we've done this almost We haven't had to use any chemicals on shrubs in our in our woods and it's it's back to the pulling method So and then if you cut it Um, you can then You know go back the next year and cut it again. In other words, you could cut it at two feet height And then go back the next year and cut it at one foot and that plan will be substantially weakened so Yeah, the other thing is I've heard of a neighbor getting rid of Um multi-floor rows with their tractor and a chain You wrap it around there and you pull those pull them out so I was just pulling that out of my garden Thanks, Jim. Thanks Donna for the question. Um Next question is why is there no botanic garden in vermont? You are that is a wonderful question You know when I put together you'll see this list of plant sources and this is Related to that as well There are lots of little Nurseries and my hats off to the hard work they do but A lot of the nurseries are dealing with ornamentals in a traditional way There's a lot of of non natives that are being sold and you know, they try to avoid the invasive ones, but We don't have Too many good suppliers of native plants the exception being the ones that grow for Restoration and thank goodness for those we have one near us the Champlain Valley native plant rest a restoration nursery Things like that It's not a botanical garden I think whoever asked the question you should start I'm a native plant. This should be a native plant garden um We don't have one in the state and uh, it it could be such a An interesting and educational place I remember when I Was really into birds and I I flew in I went by myself. This is back in the 1980s to newfoundland landed in st. John newfoundland and discovered a botanical garden at the university which had a bunch is this huge area of just native plants Labeled and before I headed out into the wilderness of newfoundland I went to that and I was like in in heaven. I was just like Whoa, these are all labeled and I can learn these plants so easily So, um, go for it I do not know the answer. I do not know why by there isn't one um Rachel is asking I'm wondering what resources you might suggest for a small yard in town I have led as much goal and ride grow as possible and I'm trying to get milk We'd started as well in a strip of unmowed grass. I also have leaf litter on site anything else I applaud that I we went to see a site near us where the family was uh tending milkweed and they had monarch butterfly Uh larvae on there. It was it was great and it didn't take a very big yard um I think the I would look at your surroundings um For what's in that area and this is where the it'd be nice to have a somebody who grows these plants but, um That that would be my take is I'll give you one image for this. Um This was this was very this had a big impact on me when I was like Probably mid teens Uh, and we remember going to the smokies and coming on the walker sisters cabin, which is this Cabin lived in by these, uh, sisters who lived together And they were grandfathered in to to live in the park out the the rest of their days from the 1930s All the way up into the 60s They had brought plants from their surroundings to their yard And what it was beautiful mux hood and b-bomb and things like that um resources I think What I'll I'll think about this question as I as I look at the resources I've shared I would go in there When you when you look at some of these botanical gardens, they do have Cool examples of yards with designs like one that's not close to here But I'm just thinking of it right now is that Santa Barbara Botanical Garden. I know that's not us But but they you can look at this little cottage with all the plantings around it And it's all native and it and it gives you some really great ideas. So that That might be a good way to get ideas as to what you can do But resource-wise yeah go for, um Find out as much as you can about plants in your own area. Maybe try propagating some Thanks, um and rachel I'd love to come over and take a look and give you some suggestions if you want Um, Jonathan Jonathan asks can you speak about deer impacts on native versus non-natives and thus the impact of survival of natives as food for invertebrates? Yeah, that's a great question. Um We've been seeing some herbivory on on garlic mustard which we think is deer But it is true that um Deer are more generalists Than many of these insects. So there is a chance that they can can consume some non-natives but But it's also true that we have some real Bad examples of invasive shrubs that are not eaten by deer. It was a great example to be barberry You know where you have a woods that's heavily grazed or even moderately grazed Yeah, that's What you'll find is that the barberry thrives So I do think you still Yeah, have a have a similar problem One of these stressors I didn't talk too much about was the Trophic imbalances Where where you have let's say you you lose a predator Deer increase, uh, there's been some really neat exposure studies that have shown Uh a real decline in trillions and some of the other spring wildflowers because of deer brows And it is it is true that some of the non-natives aren't are not as eaten as effectively I don't have As much knowledge about Particular species except Except that I know that we don't we don't see control of these non-natives Either by insects or deer enough to prevent their fast increase And so that's circumstantial evidence that the deer are not browsing back say buckthorn or honey suckles or multi-flora rose or barberries very very effectively Do you think that it Yeah, it's not a good answer, but that's that's my attempt And what from what what we do know is that We we have some herbivory of those non-natives, but not enough to keep them in check I can I can tell you on my property that is exactly the case Okay So you see a little bit of herbivory, but not enough to control Now I don't see basically any Especially yeah It's it's just right. I put a lot work into getting rid of buckthorn and it's just sprung up and It's not being browsed. Yeah Nor right right And are you near Randolph? I am in Randolph. I was 17 acre parcel surrounded by Right, and I'm a pretty active Right, right Yeah, I I I think I think it's it's difficult once it gets thoroughly established, but If you I got a student from remountain college to come help me remove all my honey suckle once now honey suckles a lot easier than buckthorn um And the guy weighed 230 pounds and We would sometimes both lean on the weed wrench and we popped those things right out of the ground so maybe my recommendation is Uh hire a high school student who's probably wanting work this summer If you can I don't know if you can socially distance on a weed wrench though, but anyway um Oh, I I I Yeah, it's tough, you know because it just had one one stand of ash almost pure ash and All of a sudden I had I had cut all the big buckthorn on my property hundreds of stems and then few years ago suddenly this buckthorn just came into this ash stand and oh boy I could spend the rest of my life pulling the seedlings Right, right unfortunately, but I Your point about roundup is is a good one, you know that um Yeah You know you you use it judiciously and it it can have an effect at least of knocking especially the bigger uh Specimens back Right, right You know because I do the same thing chop it chop it chop it But It's tough. It's tough Yeah, I wish I wish you well. Is it is there a lot of buckthorn surrounding your property? um There is um my What I can gather from what I see of the based on history of the property as I kind of looked at it Is someone obviously brought some buckthorn as a hedge and You know the rest is history You know, it's it's uh, I have the chervil who's just taken over um Which is a whole other issue but um Yeah, boy, it's it's tough to take to take care of These invasives at scale Not my my internet connection is unstable for some reason, but uh, can you still hear me? Can you still hear me? Yeah Okay, can't hear you. It's just a little delayed Yeah Well, we're coming up almost on eight o'clock and I don't have any final questions for jim anything Thing else to wrap up or we starting to to lose everyone's connection I just want to say The list of links to jim's resources that he sent us Right, and I will um I will put the uh, I haven't put the slideshow in there, but I will do that All right Thank you everyone great, and I just wanted to thank you very much jim For being willing to work with us in this in this new format and everybody else for trying it out with us And thank you emily for helping. Yeah, I have a lot of fun with the q&a and everything else in orca media for maybe recording it It was great fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're great Enjoy it Thank you jim. Thank you jasmine, I'll um, I'll be in touch by email and Uh, I'll I'll put the show up right now into that share folder By everybody perfect. We'll let you know if we have a good recording that we're gonna put up somewhere Thank you. Thank you jim. Yeah, I know a couple of people who'd be interested in that Okay, great. Yeah, we'll send we'll send the links around. That sounds wonderful. Everybody laugh. Thank you so much