 Well, thanks. Thanks very much. Eric has encouraged me not to dawdle for the same reason if it, you know, we don't want to get too dark. He also implied you could leave in the middle. You can't. Nobody leaves. Actually, if you got it, you got to go. I understand. So, we'll just get right into it. I'm calling tonight's talk, A Chickadee's Guide to Gardening. And the idea is that we're going to reverse the perspective. We normally look at our properties from what can they do for us? And they can do a lot of things for us. And I'll work that in too. But if we want to share our properties with other living things, we have to think about what those other living things need. So, I'm going to march through a year looking at primarily what birds need. Because if we, if we restore landscapes for birds, we have restored landscapes for a lot of things. Well, we'll slip into a few other creatures as well. So, the first thing I want you to do is pretend that you are this bird. What is, what is that bird? Blackthroat of green. Am I standing in front of you? Yes, I am. You're all blackthroat of green warblers. And you have just finished overwintering in the forest, the, of Central America. You can't hear me. Yeah. Yes, I talk fast all the time. I can't move over there, right? Because you're all, can you follow me if I move over here? All right. Yeah, I don't project as well as I should. So, thank you. Good. You're still a blackthroat of green warbler. And you are still overwintering in the Talamaika Mountains of Costa Rica. But now it's time for you to migrate to, to, people say, come home. You actually don't spend very much time in the north. You spend most of your time in, in Central America. But when you breed, you come north. So, you're going to undergo the most dangerous thing that you'll ever do. And that is migration. But you are having a good flight. You are not one of the one billion birds to be killed by window strikes every year. That's billion with a B. And let me remind you, a billion is a thousand million. It's a lot of birds, a lot of birds. But that's not you. You're also, oh, there's the take from one tower in Toronto during migration. It's a serious, a serious problem. You're also not one of the 2.5 to 3 billion birds to be killed by house cats every year. And I can't take, talk too much about that because I get death threats, if I do. And I'm not kidding. Or the 100 billion birds to be hit by cards. So these are, these are the things that happen every year on top of all the regular dangers from, from migration. You're having a good, a good flight. You take off about 9 at night and you fly essentially all night long until you run out of gas. Now before you left the Yucatan Peninsula flying north, you ate as many insects as you could and you built up fat, fat stores. But they're declining on a regular basis. And every night you have to come down after you've crossed the gulf and you've got to, or every morning you've got to come down. You've got to rest and you've got to eat. And this is typically what you're eating. Now a lot of people think that birds eat seeds and berries, but not during migration, not during spring migration. There aren't any seeds and berries. They're gone from the winter and they haven't been produced yet. So they're refueling on insects. So there you are. You're, you're flying. You have flown all night. It is about 4.30 in the morning and now you're out of gas. You've got to come down. You've got to refuel and you are in suburbia. So you come down where you are. Now you already know you're not going to get any food on, on those calorie pair right there. Or in the, the cool season Eurasian grasses we use for lawn or the ornamental conifers that we have. You do have enough energy that you can look next door. Uh-oh. You can look across the street. Hmm. This is the neighborhood down the street for me. I didn't have to go very far to find this. This is the way we landscape almost everywhere. And of course those landscapes are designed for beauty. They are not designed to help migrating birds. And we're literally starving our migrating birds. We're starving our resident birds as well, but they have the option of moving someplace else if there is, is someplace else. Now we can, we can fix this. All we have to do is think about the plants that we put into our, our landscapes. And if we're doing that in order to help other things, we have to understand what those other things need. So that's why I am going to focus on, on birds because they do have, have specific needs and they're all tied directly to plants. You're not a black, third of green warbler anywhere. Now you are a chickadee. This is a Carolina chickadee. Up here would be a black cap chickadee, but they're doing the same, same thing. Um, so let's march through a year looking for what chickadees need in our yards. And the first thing you're going to do is try to reproduce. Now I don't mean fly down, you know, to the nearest woodlot, fly five miles away. That's not in your yard. I want you to reproduce right in your yard. The first thing you need is a cavity, but not just any cavity. That cavity is too big. You've got to find one that is the right size. That's, that's better. That looks good. Yep. That's good. But cavities are in short supply. Mr. Titmouse wants that cavity too. So there's always a lot of competition. So if you have the option, and a lot of people don't, but if you do have the option of leaving a snag, a dead, a dead tree in your, your yard, and I've even known people to put dead trees up in their yard. They stake them down so that they can get breeding birds. If you were to study that, there are a number of tree cavities. The woodpeckers come and then they create cavities for other things. You're really helping these birds out a lot. We've got 85 species of North American birds that breed in tree cavities. And they're always in short supply. All right. You've got your tree cavity now. Now it's time to build your nest. Now, you could build it out of horse hair. So if you put a horse in your front yard, that would be good. If that doesn't work, you could try cat hair. What we do is we brush our cat and put the hair out on the back porch. We put the hair in the back porch, not the cat. And the chickadees come and make their nest out of it. Or you can go to Wild Birds Unlimited. Is that what it is? And buy a hairball. Why not? And hang it up. And the birds love that as well. Okay. You have made your nest. You've laid your eggs. Now comes the hard part. Those eggs are going to hatch and you have to feed these birds. And a lot of, again, people think chickadees are seed eaters because they are at our bird seed feeders all winter long. Eating seed. But when they're making more chickadees, when they're reproducing, they're not feeding them seed. They're feeding them caterpillars. And if you live in a rich habitat, you're going to feed your young exclusively on caterpillars. So we might want, and you know what, you're not an exception. Most, about 80% of the terrestrial birds in North America rear their young, not just on insects, but on caterpillars. So why caterpillars? What's special, what is special about caterpillars? Well, it could be because they're beautiful. Got a lot of beautiful caterpillars. We've got the fawn spanks. I think that's art in the garden. We've got the Pandora Sphinx and the Spinja Kampa Caterpillar, the Spiny Rose Caterpillar, Coletta Silk Moth, the Smeared Dagger Moth, the Hieroglyphic Moth, the Purple Crested Slug, the Spun Glass Caterpillar. These are all really pretty caterpillars. Could it be because they have cool names? Like the Green Marvel, the Once Charred Punky, the Confused Woodgrain, the Cynical Ground Cat, the Turbulent Phosphilla, the Neighbor, the Donald? You know, sometimes we just have to laugh. But actually, I don't think it's because they have cool names or because they're pretty. I think one of the reasons is that most caterpillars are soft and that means you can stuff it down the throat of your young. It's a very practical reason without injuring your baby. The other is that they're just really nutritious. They're high in protein. They're high in lipids and fats and they're also the best source of carotenoids when these birds are breeding. Now later on in the season, birds get a lot of their carotenoids from berries, but the berries haven't been made yet in the spring. So best source of carotenoids. Who cares about carotenoids? Well, those are compounds made by plants, only by plants. Vertibrids don't make them. And a number of them turn out to be essential for good diets. And that's why my wife Cindy tells me I have to eat my carrots to get my beta-carotene. I have to eat my tomatoes to get my lycopene, my whatever that is to get my lutein. And she makes me eat all this stuff. But why do I need that? I need it because these are antioxidants. They run around our bodies and they repair damaged DNA that's been damaged from oxidation. They stimulate the immune system. They improve color vision. So when your mother said that you have to eat your carrots for your eyesight, she was right. They improve sperm vitality. Who doesn't need that? Improves sexual attractiveness. Now, we're talking about birds here. They're taking the pigments from carotenoids and putting them into their feathers. So that's why the scarlet tenager here is very, very red. And of course, the reddest male gets the most females. Well, chickadees don't make their own carotenoids. They're vertebrates. They're not making them. They've got to get them from plants. They're not eating plants when they're reproducing. So they've got to get them from something that does eat plants. And that something, of course, is insects. But here's the key. Caterpillars have twice as many carotenoids as other insects. We're not sure why. And that includes spiders in there as well. But they do. So it seems that caterpillars are essential parts of the chickadee diet, of all these breeding birds. They absolutely have to have caterpillars. And that means if you live in an area where there's not enough caterpillars, you're not going to be able to successfully reproduce. So that's the next question. How many caterpillars does it take to make a clutch of chickadees? It takes a lot. And it was these birds that taught me that. I put a little chickadee feeder up in my yard and set up my camera so I could see what they were bringing back to the nest. That's when I learned they were bringing back caterpillars. But I also learned they were bringing them back really quickly. One caterpillar every three minutes. The male and the female are cooperating when they're foraging. So somebody's always out looking for a caterpillar. In one 27-minute period, they brought back 30 caterpillars. How do they do that? By bringing back more than one at a time. Sometimes a whole bunch. And they're doing this all day long. 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. So they're working very hard. Alright, next question is how many species of caterpillars are they bringing back? Well, in three hours, just three hours, they brought back 17 different species of caterpillars. Now, remember, they are foraging about 50 meters from the nest. They are not flying five miles down the road to get to the nearest wood lot. Why are the number of species important? Well, if I had one or two species of caterpillars in my yard and it happened to be a bad year for those particular species. All species fluctuate. Sometimes there are a lot, sometimes there's just a few. And a lot of it is weather dependent. This year has been lousy at my house for caterpillars. It's been cold and wet and there are very few caterpillars. If I had one or two species, it wouldn't be nearly enough for these guys to reproduce successfully. But if I have 17 species or 34 species or 134 species, there will always be some combination of species that will be common enough so the chickadees will be able to reproduce. So all I'm saying here is that diversity creates stability in this food web. Diversity creates stability in your ecosystem. That's why we want complex ecosystems that are filled with lots of species. Right, a guy by the name of Brewer back in 1961 for some reason. I don't know what it was. Decided he wanted to know how many caterpillars Carolina chickadees bring back to the nest every day and he found out it was between 390 and 570 depending on the number of chicks in the nest. And they're in the nest on average for 16 days. Now after they fledge, the parents bring caterpillars for another 30 days to the babies. But they're flying all over so nobody can count them. Nobody knows how many. But just until they fledge, it takes 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to make one clutch of chickadees. Again, depending on how many chicks are in the nest. And these are tiny birds. Oh, there it is after he's fledged. He's still a tiny bird eating caterpillars. Third of an ass, that's four pennies worth of bird. What if we wanted to make a red-bellied wood pecker? Eight times bigger than a chickadee. How many caterpillars does that take? And we don't want just chickadees and red-bellied wood peckers. We want titmice and we want blue jays and blue birds and tree swallows and common yellow throats and indigo bunnings and yellow warblers and wood threshes and cardinals and hummingbirds. These are all common birds that we expect to be in our neighborhoods. And we don't want one pair of each. We want breeding populations. Just imagine the tremendous number of caterpillars where we live has to produce. It's a different way of thinking about landscapes. And the fact that insects, that birds are rearing their young and insects, it is a fact. 96% of all the terrestrial birds in North America rear their young and insects. And the book will say other arthropods. Those other arthropods typically are spiders, but spiders needed insects to become spiders. And you know, this is news to a lot of people because we always think of birds as eating seeds and berries. If we read a landscape for birds book, it's about putting plants in your yard that make seeds and berries. And that's good. That's good. But you also have to put the plants in your yard that make the insects that allow these guys to reproduce. Because even the seed and berry eaters are eating insects when they're reproducing. And I forgot to tell you, that includes Mr. Hummingbird here. We all think of him as a nectar specialist because they do eat nectar all the time. But 80 to 90% of their diet is insects and spiders. Again, we don't think about that. So there you go. No insects, no baby birds. All right, how do we do that? What types of landscapes are capable of making the diversity and abundance of insects that we're talking about? Well, to answer that question, we have to consider the most common type of specialized relationship that occurs all over the planet. And that's the relationship between the insects that eat plants, things like this polyphemous caterpillar and the plants that they're eating, like the oak tree that he's eating. I'm not talking about pollinators here. I'm talking about insect herbivores. Plants don't want to be eaten. They want to capture the energy from the sun and use it for their own growth and reproduction. So they have loaded their tissues with nasty tasting chemicals, secondary metabolic compounds that are either bitter or downright toxic. And it's an amazingly effective defense that keeps most of the insects of the world from eating most of the plants. That's why I can look outside, look, it's green. It's not because there's no insects out there that want to eat those plants. It's because most of the insects that are out there cannot eat those particular plants. But we do know that insects eat plants. So how do they do that? How do they get around those chemical defenses? Well, they specialize. They become what we call host plant specialists. They develop the adaptations that are required to get around the chemical defenses of just a few types of plants, usually one or two lineages of plants that are sharing the same type of defense. They develop the enzymes and the behavioral adaptations and the life history adaptations that allow them to eat these compounds without dying. But it takes a long period of exposure to those plant lineages for all those adaptations to fall into place. Let's use a red cedar, eastern red cedar as an example. It's a conifer. It's been in our landscapes for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years actually, interacting with local insects for many, many millions of years. You would think that is plenty of time for all those insects to adapt to the defenses of red cedar. But they haven't. Very few have been able to adapt because it's found a really effective one, a toxic monoturping called beta-3 eplixin. It keeps almost all the insects off of it. But this is one that has adapted. This is the juniper hair streak. It is a specialist on red cedar. And all that means is it has figured out how to eat beta-3 eplixin without dying. That's the upside of specialization. The downside of specialization is that in figuring out how to get around beta-3 eplixin, it has not figured out how to get around anything else. So it can't eat oak trees because oaks have tannins and it doesn't know how to deal with them. It can't eat your squashes in your yard because they've got curbitations and they don't know how to deal with them and on and on and on. And that means if we don't include red cedar in our landscapes, we lose that butterfly. That's what specialization means. They have to have what they've specialized on. Now if you're going to specialize, you might as well look like what you're specializing on so the birds can't find you. There's the caterpillar right there. This is called cryptus and it turns out everything that eats red cedar is highly cryptic. This is the curved line angle. Caterpillar that would be very tough to find. Another specialist on red cedar and here's the juniper geometer which blends in with the dead parts of red cedar. So that is specialization at its best. Well in today's world, specialization has become a curse because we haven't thought about it in moving plants around our yards, our neighborhoods, around our continents. If you actually analyze most of the plants that you use in your yard, it turns out, at least from what we've measured, a little farther south, about 80 percent, 80 percent of the plants you have in your yard are from China. Well that doesn't include all of our specialists here from North America like Mr. Monarch Butterfly or maybe that's Mrs. Specialization has clobbered the monarch. It's a specialist on milkweed. That means if you don't have milkweed, you don't have monarchs. And of course we have taken away the milkweeds from an awful lot of places. And that is why the monarch as of two years ago was down to 3.6 percent of the population size that it was in 1976. Statistics like Iowa, the state of Iowa has lost 82 percent of its milkweeds in 10 years. Why? Because we have roundup ready corn and soybeans that have taken away where most of them on our, most of the milkweeds have co-existed with agriculture on the sides of the plantings. We've never shared our residential neighborhoods very well with milkweeds. But we've also, we've treated this as a learning experience. We figured out we can do that. It's really not hard to plant milkweeds, get them going. We've got some good milkweed patches right here on this property. And you can do that at home and give the monarch a fighting chance. Now that is half the story with the monarch. It requires milkweeds to grow and reproduce. This is a problem. And while we're dealing with that, the other half of the problem is that the monarchs then migrate. They're probably the most iconic insect in the world because they've got a migration, you know, what, 3,000 miles? They're going all the way to Mexico if you start up this far north. And on the way, they're done with milkweeds. They're not reproducing anymore. They don't need milkweeds anymore. They need plants that are making nectar that will power that migration. Things like goldenrod, things like fall asters, things like the fall blooming plants that we have to have in our landscapes. So there's an awful lot of press about putting the milkweeds back into the landscape absolutely. We have to do that. But that's half of the story. We also have to put all of those fall blooming plants back, back to. Yes. I have a question. Is there no bird here about specializes in Gypsy Monk Larvie or Winter Monk Larvie? It actually is. There are two birds. The Blackbilled and Yellowbill Cuckoo. Love, you know, it's not that they're, they're Larvie from someplace else. It's that they're hairy. And most birds can't deal with hairy Larvie because the hairs come off in their, in their gut. And the Cuckoos have figured out how to shed the lining of their esophagus and their stomach. And they do that periodically so that they can, they can, they specialize on these, these hairy caterpillars. And they actually will follow Gypsy Moth outbreaks. I, you know, I, I see no reason why they wouldn't be eating the, you know, the, the other invasives from Europe. But I don't have any direct experience with that either. So trouble is there are never enough Blackbilled and Yellowbill Cuckoos. When we bring insects in from someplace else, we bring them in without their natural enemies. And birds are a big natural enemy source, but it's mostly the diseases and the, the parasitoids, the little, little wasps that are stinging those guys all the time that are keeping them under control. So the best thing is to not bring them in at all. Does it matter if you have a hide red or do you have to have a species for these like asters and other things? All right. You're talking about cultivars? That's the most common question I get. Are cultivars as good as a straight species? Now a hybrid is a cross between two different species. So if you cross a native with a non-native, it's only half a native at that point. It typically messes up the genetics of the plant, the chemistry of the plant so much that the insects won't be able to, to deal with it. We're going to move right along here since we're back and I'll get to the end of that question later on. Okay, monarchs. Now, yes, so a lot of people say insects can adapt. They can adapt to anything because we have so many examples of insects forming resistance to pesticides. That is true, but when it comes to adopting a new host, not true. The monarch is going to disappear long before it starts eating corn or soybeans or oak trees or anything else. They've been locked into those lineages for millions of years. They're not going to change in 10 years. So these insects will disappear long before they actually form new host associations. And we have to be sensitive today. Knowledge of these specialized relationships will allow us to rebuild food webs wherever we want. Let's do it at home. If we understand what the food webs are comprised of. Let's look at the white eyed virio as an example. That's the nest that my wife found in our yard. And fortunately it was low. Those virios are building them nice and low and I could again set up my camera, take pictures of the caterpillars that the babies are the adults are bringing back to the young. And then we can identify those caterpillars. Then we'll know what those caterpillars ate. We've got very good knowledge of what plants create different species of caterpillars. Then we know what plants are going to drive the food web of the white eyed virio. So let's let's do this for a while. This caterpillar is the blind and sphinx moth. It is a specialist on black cherry. We have a lot of black cherry at home and it's making blind and sphinx moth so the babies get to eat. This guy's the chestnut chesura and despite its common name chestnut here it's a specialist on native viburnums. In our yard that's viburnum dintatum. Our yard's mowed for hay. It was mowed for hay before we moved in and we know what plants are there because we put most of them there. The viburnum that's there is the one we planted viburnum dintatum making chestnut chesuras and the babies get to get to eat again. This guy's a drab prominent specialist on sycamore. We've got sycamore because a wind blew in some sycamore seeds about 13 years ago. One landed in my cold frame germinated. It's about 40 feet tall now because I'm not very fast at waiting things out and it is making drab prominence so the babies get to eat again. There's a good side to every story. You can go on and on. This is the eight-spotted farstermoth a specialist on native grapes. We've got them. The lunate zalee another specialist on black cherry. The spice baswala tail. There's this little eye supposed to make the bird think it's a tree snake. And scare it away. Didn't work. It's a specialist on spice bush and its close relative sassafras. We have both of those plants. The tufted bird dropping moth another specialist on black cherry. So black cherries emerging as a really important component of this bird's food web. But these guys are hungry. They need a lot more than that so let's put some black walnut into the landscape. We get the walnut sphinx, the gray edged boma loca, the black blotch caesura, the bride. These are all specialist on black walnut where I come from. You have native maples. You can have plakotis inch worms, green striped maple worm, the retarded digger moth, native elms. This is the American elm. Give me the four horn sphinx, double tooth prominent and many others. Remember 90% of the insects that you might rebuild this food web with will not be or stay in your yard if you don't have the plants that support their larval development. So if you want the mustard sallow, you need witch hazel. If you want the hackberry empery, you need hackberry. If you want caculio asteroidies, you need native asters. If you want the showy emerald, you need roosh, you need sumac. That's what it specializes on. The arsidra flower moth, the brown hooded outlet, need goldenrod, the hog sphinx, the pandora sphinx, the abbots sphinx, all need Virginia creeper. The redbud leaf roller needs redbud, the gray ferculi needs native willows and the orange tufted onita, the spiny oak caterpillar, the two spotted oak punky, the variable oak leaf caterpillar, the red humped oak worm, the pig striped oak worm, the pleasant dagger moth, the delightful dagger moth, the lesser oak dagger moth, the greater oak dagger moth, the afflicted dagger moth, the streak dagger moth, the red, the white patched hetero-campa, the oblique hetero-campa, the red-lined panopoda, the laffer, and many, many more won't be there if you don't have oaks. Because where I come from, oaks is the most powerful plant you can put into the landscape. Where you come from, it's willows. Oaks are number two. Oaks are number two. By the way, you know where I took all those pictures? My front yard. I took them in my front yard. We're not going to talk about backyard habitat because that implies everything I'm saying is so ugly, we have to hide it in the backyard. What is wrong with front yard habitat? Put your oak in your front yard. Everybody will love it. It'll be good. Now, sometimes we already know what a bird eats. So we don't have to recreate the food web. Well, we have to build that food web, but we don't have to figure out what it is. And that is true for the nightjars. Things like whipper wills and chuck wills widows. These are birds that fly around at dusk and at night, and they eat large night-flying moths. Things like the saturn eons, the family saturn eons, the giant silk moths, any large moth that's flying around. But these are the guys that really fuel their diet. So let's take a habitat like this and purposely turn it into a saturn eon kingdom, heaven. We'll create everything saturn eons need here. And if we do that, we're going to help the whipper wills. So let's put some sweet gum into that landscape. If we do that, we get the luna moth. Now, you know, you have to do this in a biome appropriate way. So everybody doesn't have sweet gum. You guys are way up in the north here. You should move further south. You can have a lot more plants. The native prunus, the black cherry, pin cherry, Chickasaw plum, American plum, beach plums are all prunus. They give us a lot of things. They give us the IOMoth, the Promethia moth, the Sacropia moth. And you do have those up here. Oaks will give you the Buck moth and the Polyphemus moth. Pines. You certainly have pines. They'll give you the Imperial moth. Hickories and walnuts actually give you the Hickory horn devil or royal walnut moth depending on which name you like best. Tulip trees will give us the Tulip tree silk moth. Native maples will give us the rosy maple moth. The honey locust will give us the bisected honey locust moth. So those are the common Saturdays you would get in this area and you can really pack them into your landscape. But you have to turn off your security light. Or at least make it a motion sensor light so that it only turns on when the bad guy comes. I presume that's why it's on. I know we like to light up the world because I don't know why but we do. But these moths I'm talking about they don't have any mouth parts. They're not eating as adults. They emerge as adults with all the food they're ever going to use and they only live about a week and if they spend all their energy flying around your light they're done. That's it. And the bat comes and picks them off. So these are death traps for not just the big Saturday as before for most of the night flying moths. If you want to restore food webs you've got to minimize the use of these things. So really for security make it a motion sensor light and then you'll actually trap the bad guy because he won't be able to sneak around the shadows because he knows where they are. That's the hickory horn devil. That's the larva of the royal walnut moth. It is already extirpated for New England. So I'm sorry guys you've already lost him. But you might be able to put him back if you watch the security lights. All right now we can actually measure what happens to all those native plant communities that are supporting all these specialized relationships when we replace them with non-native plants that aren't supporting these specialized relationships and that's what we have been studying in my lab for the last 12 years now I guess. We have several papers published in scientific journals and you can read them. I know you're not going to read them but we always get the same answer so that's good and I thought it'd be better to tell about it and actually go out and test this for yourself. Don't believe me. Test this for yourself. This is the 12 by 12 experiment you can do at home or you can get your school kids to do it. That's what 12 feet by 12 feet looks like if you stake it out in your yard. Now you get to control the life that is in that space by controlling what plants you put in that space. You can keep it as lawn and you can get on your hands and knees on Wednesday and count all the biodiversity in the lawn. It won't take you lawn and then of course on Saturday you're going to mow it and kill it all. Or you can put an oak tree in your yard. So this is a white oak it's one I planted from an egg corn 14 years before I took this picture it's 25 feet tall and it actually proves two things first that oaks grow. You know I hear so many landscapes tell people do not plant an oak you won't live long enough to enjoy it. I'm enjoying it and I'm not dead yet. The other thing is it doesn't well it doesn't have to be 300 years before the oak is functioning like an oak and being something majestic that you can enjoy. You can enjoy it right now and I was enjoying it right from the minute that it germinated. The other thing is it was free and that's a big thing because if you were to put a tree like that in your yard you know four inch caliper what would it cost you? I don't know $1,500 $2,500 50% chance that it would die because it's so root pruned to move it all because we want instant gratification but then it's stalled it's got to rebuild those roots it takes at least a decade to do that. So plant young and small you will get a big tree one little side story here I planted somebody gave me a I think it was a 15 foot red oak because they couldn't sell it and it was going to die they had already dug it and they said if you want I said sure so we dug this giant hole you know big deal we got it in there the same day I planted an egg corn of a willow oak they're tiny and the guy asked me what are you doing that for I got these egg corns I'm going to plant it you know you say well that's a waste of time today those trees are the same size that was 13 years ago and the red oak is going to die it's got lesions all over it the willow oak is much healthier the red oak is just sat there for the most part you know it's a little bit taller but a little bit of patience and you get healthy trees okay back to our 12 by 12 experiment let's walk around the perimeter of that tree and count the caterpillars that are on the branches just at head height we're not climbing ladders or anything so we're talking about the caterpillars here we're not talking about everything it's up here who knows what's up there and let's do it on July 25th of 2014 we're going to find 410 caterpillars from 19 different species then let's step back and take that picture so that I can ask you how many caterpillars do you see how much caterpillar damage do you see and this is the distance that we view our trees there are caterpillars on there there are some holes in those leaves but we can't see it we don't care it's still just as pretty as if we didn't know there were any caterpillars but if I knocked on your door and say you got 410 caterpillars on your tree we'd all freak out we'd get our spray cans got to save the tree the oak is doing its job it's taking some of its energy that it's gotten from the sun and passed it on to those caterpillars so that they're now in the belly of a bird and you've got a functional food web in your yard okay let's go to a black cherry about the same size 12 by 12 walk around the edge count the caterpillars 239 caterpillars from 14 different species now let's go to my neighbor's house and count one of his calorie pairs first we have to decide which calorie pair because he's got 32 of them actually first we have to make sure he's not home he's not home so we can count this one let's walk around and well you know he could have been home he's never out walking on his grass you'd never know so count the caterpillars I did find a caterpillar from one inch worm one species on the calorie pair then I went to his burning bush he's got a giant row of burning bush by the way I spend the rest of my life weeding out his calorie pairs and burning bushes from my yard those are gifts 12 by 12 section count the caterpillars I have four caterpillars one species and these are little leaf skeletonizers that are really not participating in the local food web what if that was a fluke what if I just happened to pick a really productive red or white oak and black cherry in my yard and a really unproductive breadfruit pair or calorie pair and burning bush in his yard let's do it again the next day July 26 same species different plants and we get the same pattern different numbers we get 233 caterpillars on the white oak 53 in the black cherry two in the burning bush one on the calorie pair and that's the pattern you will get I don't care how many times you do it you're going to get a lot of food produced by the powerhouse genera of native plants that are driving the food webs in our landscapes and very few produced by the plants from outside of our local food webs these are not evil plants in Asia they're supporting food webs just fine but we've taken them out of their ecosystem and put them over here they don't know anybody so they don't have any friends Rick dark and I gave a talk in Williamsburg Virginia last spring and then we drove up across the bay bridge up the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland and Delaware as we were going home and we got to the sunset beach in and here are all the calorie pairs in bloom and it's obvious why people plant these every landscape designer I meet and say oh we don't use that anymore and every development I go to is filled with brand new breadfruit pair so somebody is using him it's probably the cheapest tree you can get but it's got a beautiful bloom it's got nice fall color until you get the ice storm and then it falls over and that's the end of that doesn't live very long but anyway the sunset beach in and grill has landscaped almost exclusively with calorie pairs we kept driving right past this building and we hit this this is I don't know how many acres owned by a land conservancy I have learned and it is thoroughly invaded with the offspring from those calorie pairs so that is the dilemma we have to think about now these guys have the right to put any plant on their property that they want but do they have the right to biologically pollute all of the land around and with a plant that's making one one caterpillar now if the calorie pair was the ecological equivalent of the native plants that's displacing this landscape would look like calorie pairs but it'd be just as productive the birds would still be able to breed here and ecologically we wouldn't know the difference but it's not it's not nearly as productive as the native plants that could be there and that is the problem okay which trees should we be sure to have in our landscapes we have made a lot of lists in my lab this is the first list we made this is a list of all of the plant genera that occur in the mid-atlantic states it doesn't include main but the the numbers in parentheses after each plant genus of the number of species of caterpillars recorded in the literature as being able to make a living on that particular plant so memorize that why why would we do this well this allows us to see which of the most productive plants and which ones aren't contributing that that much this was back in the days where we still were trying to demonstrate to people that natives are important and these other plants are not helping things very much I had a lot of non-believers out there but this has become really popular and every every state I go they say well where's our list where's our list and my yeah well Kimberly structure was my technician made this list it took her two years four thousand references and I used to tell people hire Kimberly and she will make you a list but the Forest Service said we will fund Kimberly for one year and we want a list for every state actually we want a list for every county in every state I have a lot of trouble funding Kimberly so I wasn't about to turn that down so I said to Kimberly can you do that and she said I think so well she couldn't do it it took her a year and a half but she did do it and the National Wildlife Federation actually brokered this deal so they're going to put this everything Kimberly created on their website they're going to call it native plant finder and they keep pushing the launch date back it was supposed to be January 1st and April 1st and May 1st then June 1st I don't need to think they've dared to tell me July 1st at this point but they found a major glitch they're trying to work that out but as soon as they do you can plant you can type in your zip code and the rank list for your county will come up the object is to be able to focus this in very close to where where you live both woody plants and herbaceous plants and I can tell you what your top top ones are your best one as I said is willow followed by oaks followed by prunus followed by poplars and they may not be the most widely used ornamental plants that you're used to having in your yard but they are what we're calling foraging hubs I'm finding out that there's just a few plant genera everywhere we go that are supporting most of the food if you want to picture what a foraging hub looks like go to your delta magazine next time you fly these are the hubs for delta but let's make them foraging hubs each line there could be a bird or something going in or could be a species of bird yes that's a little farther down the list they're important they're important so each dot here is another species of plant or another genus of plant and the birds are going there but not very much because there's not very much food there so imagine what would happen if we took these foraging hubs out of our landscape we would still have dozens of other species of plants in our landscape but it still would be a failed food web so what I'm saying is here we diversity is good we want diversity but we have to include the foraging hubs if it's going to be a functional landscape and the bottom line is it turns out about 5% of the available genera in your area support about 75% of the food there you go 73% depending on which biome you're in you can reverse that that means 95% of the available plants if you don't pick the foraging hubs would only support 27% of the food so in other words it's really easy to go wrong if we don't plant these foraging hubs and they exist everywhere these are the different bioregions of the country and we found that the foraging hubs here and here and here and here the pattern is the same they're all supporting 5% and supporting about 73-75% of the food it doesn't matter what latitude you're in whether it's north or south and it doesn't matter how diverse how many plant species they have so this is a very consistent biological pattern and we're not sure why but there it is so it doesn't matter where we go we have to use those foraging hubs now the species of foraging hubs are going to change as you move across these bioregions so all you have to do is find out the ones in your area now we're I think this is New Orleans actually New Orleans Oaks are less important they only support 367 species where I come from they support 557 so their importance changes as you move around the country but let's compare that to one of the favorite landscape plants Sydney and I actually walked around Portland today and we were looking at the street trees you have some you've got some Ginko's Ginko biloba from Asia four species recorded on Ginko and you know they're all mistakes those are mistaken records how do you get a mistaken record Ginko by the way is from Asia you wouldn't expect anything to be able to eat it and they really can't that's what the leaves look like you get mistaken records because caterpillars don't often stay on the plant that they developed on like your monarchs you get your monarchs eating your milk weed but when it comes time for them to form their little chrysalis they almost always crawl off the milk weed and make it someplace else so when your monarchs disappear it doesn't mean they've been eating it means they've gone to make a chrysalis someplace Sacropia moth is one of these records and just to show you how confident I am that Sacropia moths cannot eat Ginko's I will give you $10,000 for every Sacropia moth you raise on Ginko and if you knew me you'd know that's impossible so how does you get a record like that well the Ginko's the Sacropia moths grow on their favorite food and where I live that's black cherry when they're finished developing they've gotten to the size they need to be they crawl off the plant and they walk for a given time period maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes then they stop and they spend their cocoon wherever they are I've got a Sacropia cocoon on my back porch right now it wasn't eating my back porch it just ended up and spun it and I bet you one crawled up a Ginko someplace somebody saw the cocoon and said oh they're eating Ginko and recorded it in the literature and that's how we get mistakes but even if those are good records four versus 557 or 300 and something which would you put in your landscape if you're trying to rebuild those food webs number two in the list now down in New Orleans it's really low only 74 but in my house 456 so it's still a very productive plant compare that to Zelkova I saw some Zelkova in Portland here you are using them we use a ton of them down in the mid-Atlantic states I guess because it looks like the elm trees that we lost to Dutch elm disease zero caterpillars on Zelkova zero native caterpillars on Zelkova so this is what it always looks like which means you could put in a plastic Zelkova or a silk Zelkova and it would contribute just as much to local food webs and you wouldn't have to water it for everybody who doesn't want any life in their yard I don't know why they don't do that why have a living thing if you want it to be dead this is Pierce Japanica probably the most common foundation plant that we have in North America we have a native PRS there's two species recorded on and this is to illustrate that all natives are not not equally productive some don't support anything they're native but they don't support anything so the argument is not really native versus non-native it is productive versus not productive I don't think anything's on Pierce Japanica itself it could be a native viburnum and you get 100 and three species so so these are the decisions that we make every time we put a plant in our landscapes at home in our corporate landscapes even here on the Audubon property we need to think of our trees our plants as if they are bird feeders because that's what they are they are bird feeders there you go now you get to decide how well you're going to feed the birds you can feed them a lot you can feed them a little it's easy to find landscapes like this giant lawns with almost no plants in them at all you can put seed in your bird feeders the birds are not actually eating your feeders they're eating the seed in your feeders or you can keep them empty there's a ginkgo there it's a big tree but it's not making any food and we're not fully the birds if we don't landscape in ways that include those foraging hubs here's some data from my Ph.D. student Desiree Narango is working in the suburbs of Washington D.C. on Carolina chickadees she's following 92 pairs of breeding chickadees and comparing their breeding success with the landscape in which they have bred she needs to see what types of landscapes are required for chickadees to successfully breed this is the the stars where the nest is the red line represents the foraging territory so again they're foraging about 50 meters from the nest and the blue areas represent 95% of the foraging effort so those are the plants on which they are getting the food when they're raising they're getting young let's see what those plants are well those are all of the natives in this neighborhood basswood and sweetcomb American Elm there's our friend the black cherry and two species of oaks but there are a lot of other plants here they're not going to what are they well those are all the plants from Asia Japanese maples silk tree there's our friend the ginkgo black poplar crepe myrtles saucer magnolia and it's very easy to picture a landscape where those are the dominant trees so we counted 177 trees today we walked randomly and about 75 percent were from Asia which actually is a whole lot better than Portland Oregon where 92 percent are non-native so I don't know you're doing okay again but but not good enough for the chickadee and then this is this is what happens to to the chickadee that's a failed nest so Desiree took the three dead chicks out of that nest and noticed a bunch of sunflower seeds so they tried to feed the baby sunflower seeds they can't eat them so the baby's starved and that's what happens when we don't landscape with these other creatures in mind she's also looking at the migrating birds that come down I remember a year black third of green you come down to eat 51 species have used her residential neighborhoods in the United States and the United States and the United States and the United States and the neighborhoods in Washington D.C. the U.S. you as a migrator not flying around the cities you're going to right through him you come down and if you come down in the Land of Ginkgos you're out of luck if that's all you could find that's the end of your migration you can sc daddy we'll say I do not have enough practice to worry about breeding birds because not enough space for them to breed and that that could be true but if you have space for one jury you are contributing to the success migrating birds. You want to make that tree a productive contributor to what those migrants need. Another student of mine looked at where the migrants are actually foraging. These are plant families. I know you can't read them, but this is the Fagaceae, the oaks, and the beaches. And in her study, there were no beaches. These are trees from graveyards. So these are managed plantings, but these are all the different families. And this is the number of minutes that migrants spent foraging in those trees. So these are the oaks, and that's where they're going. Why are they going there? That's where the food is. If you're a bird, let's say you're a person, and you're going shopping for food, and you go to shop right, and there's no food on the shelves, how many times would you go back? It's the same thing with these birds. They're not born knowing where the food is. They go into these different trees. If there's no food there, they're out of there. Because they cannot survive if they spend more energy looking for food than the energy they get in return. It's called optimal foraging. They have to forage where there's the most food that's easiest to get. So oaks are extremely important in this particular landscape. Let's talk for a second about berries, because it gets a little confusing here. We have a lot of non-native plants, and we have them, because we brought them here as ornamentals. But the ones that are the most invasive make berries, and the birds eat those berries, and then they fly and they poop them out someplace. So that's Oriental bittersweet, and buckthorn, and autumn olive, and bush honeysuckle. They're all making berries, and the birds are eating them. So wildlife specialists throughout the east have planted these things. They say, hey, they're making a lot of good bird food, so we're going to plant them. All right. Is that true? Are they making good bird food? Well, what's going on here is a relationship between the plant and the seed disperser. The plant wants the bird to come and take its seed someplace far away from the parent plant. So it's wrapped the seed in a tasty morsel that we call a berry. And it wants this to be a long-term relationship. So in a healthy seed dispersal relationship, the berry supplies the nutrition that the seed disperser, the bird, needs at the time of year that the berry is going to be dispersed. So if you're making a berry that needs to be dispersed in the summertime, like blueberry, you make it high in sugar, high in carbohydrates. Because the birds have just come off their reproduction period where they're eating a lot of fat and a lot of protein, and now they have to get some carbohydrates. So blueberries, elderberry, great for summer dispersing bird activity. If you're making a berry that wants to be dispersed in the fall, you want it to be high fat because birds are either migrating and they need that fat to complete their migration or they're not migrating and they need that fat to make it through the winter. So plants like Poison Ivy are great. They make very high-fat berries and the birds all love them. But that's what you want to make if you're a plant in the fall and you want your berry dispersed. If you want your berry dispersed in late winter, things like the native hollies, Ilex verticillator or American holly, you want your berry to spike in carbohydrates late in the winter. It's frozen in thought a number of times and then the carbohydrate, the sugar content rises because that's what birds want just before they start reproducing. They want that dose of carbohydrates. That's the sequence of nutrition that birds are looking for. Well, a woman by the name of Susan Smith who has gotten married, I've got to learn her last name, but she's a Cornell at this point, has been studying the nutritional value of native berries and non-native berries to see how they fit into this pattern. Here are native berries. Wax, wax myrtle, 50% fat, exactly what the birds need. Native viburnums, 48.7, almost 49% fat. Spice bush, 48% fat. Native dogwoods, 35%. Even Virginia creeper, 24% fat. That's what our birds need in the fall because they're migrating or they're going to overwinter. Now here are berries from some of our worst invasives. Multi-flora rose, 0.9%, less than 1% fat. Bush honeysuckle, Japanese honeysuckle, 0.7% fat. Buckthorn, 0.5% fat. Ugly agnus, 2% fat. Oriental bittersweet, 2.6. These guys are making high sugar berries in the fall and that's not what the birds need in the fall. So there are two reasons people say, well, why, why would a bird eat a high sugar berry in the fall if it needs high fat? There's two reasons. First of all, when you get invasions by these plants, often it's the only berry that's there. So you get a buckthorn invasion, go to Michigan and look at their buckthorn invasions or go to Vermont. That's all it's there. So you're going to eat the buckthorn for that reason. But they will eat it even if there's a choice because it's high sugar. They eat high sugar berries for the same reason we do. It doesn't mean it's good for us. Tastes good, I guess. So the problem is that the pattern that's emerging is the berries primarily from Asia are phenologically out of sync with the nutritional needs of our birds. They're producing high sugar berries in the fall instead of the summer. And buckthorns, particularly a particular problem, this is Ramnus cathartica. It produces these dark berries and when the birds eat them, they throw up about a half hour later. That's the dispersal mechanism for that plant because the bird has moved in that half hour. But if you have a buckthorn invasion that's the only berry there, the birds are throwing up all day long. This is not good, not good for the birds. So be suspicious when somebody says, our birds need plants from China. What were they doing before we brought over those plants? I think they were doing better than they're doing right now. Okay, you're still a chickadee. It's fall. And now we're done with insects. I mean, you've raised your young, you've fed all those extra caterpillars to the babies. They have learned to eat seeds. You have to get ready for the winter. So you have to find a good seed source. Now in the past, we had lots of patchy meadows around, even in the east. This notion that the squirrel could go from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Mississippi without touching the ground is probably incorrect. Because back before we wiped out all the grazing mammals, there were a lot of open spaces. We had birds like the Heath hen in the east. It was a prairie chicken that disappeared because we plowed up all the prairies. So these meadows were common in the east. And they were producing all the seeds that these overwintering birds needed. But this is a hard landscape to get into suburbia. It really is. It's a challenge. This is the time you really might want to put it in your backyard. But there's still a number of plants we put commonly in our gardens that supply a lot of seeds for overwintering birds. Things like black-eyed susans and Joe Pie weed, New York iron weed. These are all making thistle, your pasture thistles, making a wonderful seed for the overwintering birds. So think about it before you dead head or clean up your yard in the fall. Most of those ugly-looking seed heads are going to sustain the birds all winter long. But of course you also have the option of putting up a bird feeder. And the chickadees will use that. And studies have shown that bird feeders done responsibly where you're cleaning them out and you're not, they don't have too many of them where all the birds are giving each other diseases actually do help the birds. They enter the breeding season heavier, they lay more eggs. So it's a good idea to feed your birds in the wintertime. Have you ever watched what a chickadee does at the bird feeder? Now a house bench goes and sits at the feeder and eats seed after seed after seed. Not a chickadee. It's very cautious. It's looking around, takes a seed, but it doesn't eat it. It says, what am I going to do with this seed? I am going to hide it. What they do, they know that there's a flush of seeds in the fall and then that's it. They're not produced the rest of the winter. So they've got to take them and cash them in places that they can find them then later on in the winter. So they're hiding them all over your your property as long as you give them places to hide them. So they're looking for nooks and crannies where they're going to sneak that seed under the the bark or in the the tree hole. There they go. Hiding it in there. But they have to be careful because Mr. Bluejay is watching. Bluejay's can be lazy devils and they watch those chickadees they say, I think there's a seed in this hole. Yes, there is. And now Mr. Chickadee's got to go do it again. So he's going to he's going to do it again. But this time he's going to be more careful. This is a different hole. He's going to look around. I don't see any Bluejay so I'll stick it in there. Yeah. But the real question is how do the chickadees remember where their seeds are? Well, it turns out they they get smart. They grow their brains. They grow the hippocampus of their brain. That's the part of your brain that is in charge of memory. And in the fall the hippocampus increases by 30% so that they can remember where they cast all these these seeds. And then after they find them in the spring it shrinks. They get stupid again. The important point here is that your chickadee is not going to be able to make through the winter even if you put out your seeds if you don't give it a place to successfully stash those those seeds. So we are we humans are into neatness. We think if if the landscape isn't completely controlled and neat that that I don't know what something terrible is going to happen shows we've lost this battle with nature. Leave a little roughness and then you can do this in the backyard again. Some of those you know a log pile or something so the chickadees can actually store their their foods. Don't worry about Mr. Blue Jay. He's going to live off the egg corns that that you're providing with your your various oak trees. It turns out that that Blue Jay's have a mutualistic relationship with oak trees. They they eat the egg corns in the wintertime and they they don't cash them in piles like the chickadee. They store them individually and they can carry several at a time. They'll pick one up. They store it but then they'll fly up to two miles away and then they pound it down into the ground. What they're doing is planting that egg corn and if they don't remember where it is it's going to germinate. And then in the wintertime they've got to go remember where they are and and pull them up. Well a single Jay can bury 4,500 egg corns each fall. That's a single a single Jay. Here's when he's got them all in his crop and everything else flying away but he's not as smart as a chickadee. He only remembers where one in four of them are so he's actually planted 3,360 oak trees every year. And we saw we learned this at home because we pull out a multi-flower rose bush and here's a big disturbed area and all of a sudden an oak tree's growing up the next spring. Where'd that come from? Well the blue jays are coming and planting them. All right it is wintertime and again you could say I don't have to worry about my chickadees because I'm putting out the seed. But then I go to grandma's house or I go visit the kids for two weeks in December where I don't put the seeds out. What's the chickadee going to do then? He's got to do what he used to do in the old days and that is live off the land. So he's got his cash seeds but on those really cold nights he needs a real shot of fat and he needs to go back to those insects. So things like the larva that is in the goldenrod gall. That swelling there in your goldenrod stem is the goldenrod gall. It's made by the goldenrod gall fly and it's extremely high in protein and fat. That little shot of protein in fact gets the chickadee through those those cold nights. So they find these things and they peck at them and it's very hard to find a goldenrod gall in the spring that hasn't been eaten by a chickadee or a titmouse or a downy woodpecker. These are really important components of your winter landscape but only if you leave them there. So again if you level any natural area you're really hurting those those birds. Bagworms. Nobody likes bagworms and I understand why. But look who does. Another really important food source for for these chickadees during the winter time. So leave a few bagworms out there for the chickadees. Okay can landscapes like this support our chickadees? Well of course not. You know we've measured our landscapes in northeast Maryland and southeast Pennsylvania and Delaware. 92% of the area that could be landscaped is lawn. It looks just like that. There's only 10% of the tree biomass that could be there and look what the trees are. They're bred from pears. They're calorie pears. And 80% of the plants that that we have in our managed landscapes like this are plants from from Asia. And we are celebrating this. This guy sent me, Bill Rupert sent me this slide yesterday and if you can read that this is lawn of the week or no it's lawn of the month. Yeah there the organizations go around and celebrate the fact that we've we've created dead ecosystems. So we've we've got a little way with little ways to go here in cultural change. This is habitat loss. This is not lawn of the month. It's habitat loss. And it explains why we've wrecked our watersheds, why we're not sequestering carbon, why our food webs are collapsing, why we are losing our pollinators. None of that is happening here on this this property. So we've got to raise the bar about what we're asking our landscapes to do. You know in the past we've asked them to be pretty. We think plants are decorations because they are beautiful decorations but they're also critical ecological components. Everything starts from plants because everything starts from the sun and they're the only things that can harness that that energy. So our landscapes can be pretty but they also need to support life. They also need to sequester carbon. They've got to manage our watersheds. Every one of you lives in a watershed. Nobody has the ethical right to opt out of watershed management like he's done. He says I'm not going to play that game. How can he get away with that? Enrich our soils, support our pollinators. All those things have to happen at home because we don't have enough nature out there anymore. And up here in Maine that's that's a hard argument to convince people of. But come down where I live and you'll see what I'm talking about. So you don't have to save biodiversity for for a living but please consider saving it where you live. Not just here on the on the Audubon property. If we plant for chickadees we really can save an awful lot of our fellow earthlings and we can do it right at home. Now who's going to do this? Who's going to do that? Everybody says it's going to be Oscar my grandson. Now he is studying his guide to wildlife sounds and and he's into that. He likes that better than his his peanut butter sandwich. And they're right you know we have to teach Oscar but we can't wait for Oscar. And we're going to kind of wait another whole generation. We're over the carrying capacity folks of the planet and we need to act right now. We've got to we've got to stop destroying things where we live. We've got to toss the idea that humans are here in nature someplace else. We're going to be together. Thank you. You had a question. It's wonderful that people for example in this room voluntarily went about and did this in their own yard but doesn't this ultimately have to become a part of public policy? Yes it does. Yes it does. And it is actually. Reston, Virginia several years ago made it a policy that every planning on public land will be will be native. The problem today of course is is again our culture. Top-down regulation is not real real popular. If the government says you have to do it people fight against it just because the government said you had to do it. Forget how much sense it makes. So I think bottom-up change is is certainly going to be more popular and might happen faster but there there are a number of states that are starting to ban the sale of some of these invasive plants. Of course the you know the horse is out of the barn and we're going to close the door now but it's a step. It's a step. So in Massachusetts I think they can't sell a burning bush anymore. In Oregon they can't sell English ivy. So you know it's makes no sense. The state is covered with English ivy. It doesn't matter anymore and nobody's buying it but but at least you know they're thinking in the right direction. We could turn it around on a dime if we paid people for producing ecosystem services at home by reducing taxes. Oh you have this much lawn or oh you've cut your lawn in half. Here's the benefit of doing that. You've sequestered this much carbon. You've helped manage the watershed. All the things we all need to be doing and it doesn't have to be much. It's just a recognition that those are important things. They're not valueless. That would turn it around on on a dime. Yes. Can you speak to your consideration of the benefits versus the disadvantages of treating non-natives primarily invasive non-natives with herbicide? The old herbicide question. Primarily Yeah. Right. What do I think about treating non-native plants with herbicides primarily Roundup or glyphosate? I can tell you stories. You know we bought our property 10 acres completely covered with invasives and it became the family goal we're going to get rid of these and we're not going to use herbicide. So I had bittersweet this thick growing up a tree and I ran out the day we signed the papers. I cut it off. I didn't treat it with anything and the next year I had 80,000 bittersweet coming up from the rootstock because I did not kill the rootstock. I pulled out my multi-flora rose with chains around the base of them with the tractor and it was great fun and out they came but they left the roots all around a circle then up each each one came. I cut my my automolive off and I was going to make I had big deer problems I had these cages around my my all my plants that I want to save. I had these automolive stakes laid out all summer just laying there drying up in the fall I pounded them in they all they all germinated. I decided I am not going to live long enough to have to go back and do it again and again and again and again so what I do is I do use herbicide but I use as little as possible. I don't spray because there's always some non-target around that that I don't want to hit so what I do is I cut them off at the base and I and I paint it. It's using just a tiny little bit and people say oh you know you're going to poison the world. I can't even kill what I'm painting so I haven't been convinced of that but I'd really like to do some actual soil studies to see whether anything right next to any of the soil ecosystem right next to where I paint it has been contaminated but I have found that if you don't kill a rootstock you don't kill it and then you're going at it forever and then people get discouraged and it doesn't happen and they take over the world so there are some for small-scale controls excuse me you can put black plastic on for a couple years and try to try to starve them of sunlight you can repeatedly cut something I ran into a group in New York who's controlling nightways Japanese knotweed it's not a big band it's a band from about the chair here to the wall that goes along a stream and they have a whole team that goes out and every two weeks with scissors they cut it cut it down every two weeks they're in their third year and now it's much smaller than it used to be they're exhausting the root system they're exhausting the root system so in theory they will win but it's a lot of labor so put it in that same regard in a bigger picture is it possible that the disadvantage of pesticide use is greater than the disadvantage of being overrun by permanently by these non-natives which eventually people say will leave them all to our predators okay let's talk about that all right how when does a non-native become a native you know frag mites to come and eat non-native all right you know the definition of an invasive plant is a non-native plant that's aggressively displacing native plants okay so they'll stop being aggressive when they get enough things eating them like all the other natives frag mites has been here 400 years and europe 170 species eat it here five after 400 years so will things eventually adapt yes but we're talking about tens of thousands of years and in the meantime ecosystem havoc in the meantime you know tremendous loss of species richness there's a lot of things i didn't get to tell you tonight but the number of species in your ecosystem are then is is what determines how well that ecosystem functions when we move things around the world we create what what ecologists call novel ecosystems all of the specialized relationships that our nature drop out of those novel ecosystems because they don't they don't know each other so then you've got a species poor environment and they're gone so yeah eventually the diversity will build up but you're talking about you know so many thousands of years and if this happens all over the world which it is you're talking about the sixth x extinction so is that better than using herbicide responsibly i would say no it's not but that's my personal opinion yes so one of the problems is finding a place to buy some of the plants that you listed as desirable there are a couple of very good nurseries around here and they will put out a cultivar and it's a native it's bigger taller prettier so how do you other than planting our own oak trees and trying to find spice bush seeds to plant how do you get nurseries to be more responsive to carrying the kinds of plants that we should be putting in our yard okay you got a couple questions there where do you get these plants first of all and i didn't mention on that website the the national wildlife federation website that's going to have the native plant finder they're also listing local sources of these plants so that's going to be very very useful how do you get nurseries to carry more of these plants they will carry plants that sell they're not in the business of of um well they don't care whether it's a plant from asia or a plant from africa or a plant from north america if it sells so this is all going to be determined by the marketplace if you go to the nursery and you say i want a spice bush that is not a cultivar oh you don't have one goodbye i will go someplace else that that does and if enough people do that there's the guy will say i better get spice bush that's not a not a cultivar so they just want to sell a plant again they're not evil people they're in business they've got to stay in business by selling plants you guys can buy those plants and the biggest problem is that they're as this this native plant movement grows they're not enough nurseries around making these there's a guy in the midwest merb wallace who's been in the native plant business since the 80s and i've asked him how business is and he gave me a chart the last time i saw him it goes like this he says i can't keep up every year it you know he's doubling his his sales and he's in his 80s at this point we need more people growing native plants to meet the growing demand because there's an awful lot of people that are seeing seeing the wisdom in it um the cultivar issue is is uh you know a lot of people studying that now including us we've got a project uh being funded by mount cuba center trying to answer the question are cultivars as good as the straight species so first of all most cultivars whether their genetic variants found in nature or whether they're actively selected are propagated clonally which means there's zero genetic variability and we know putting zero genetic variability in the landscape is not a good idea but if we get past that it depends on what the genetic trait is that has changed compared to the straight species whether or not it's going to be ecologically as good so uh aser rubrum october glory is a genetic variant that somebody found a really red red maple in the fall uh and they put a name on it nature created it it is propagated clonally but does that support as many insects yes it does um does a tall plant that's made into a short plant support as many insects our research says it does does a plant that you you take a green leaf and you make it a purple leaf no it doesn't because then you've changed the leaf chemistry you've added anthocyanins to to that leaf so we were very fond of purple leaf cultivars including your norway maple which is all over portland i see um but that really reduces what what insects might eat it most of our cultivars focus on flowers but when you change the flower shape um you make petals bigger typically where you change the color you're you're often fooling with the energy budget of the flower uh so the flower has this much energy you can put it into petals and nectar and pollen if you make the petals huge there's usually less nectar and and pollen that will impact the the pollinators um but you could make a cultivar with twice as much nectar you could make echinacea nectar plenty and and say this is going to attract butterflies you know what people would buy it i don't care how ugly it is people would buy it because they love those those butterflies so thinking of cultivars in terms of function instead of just what it looks like would be a new way to do it but the other thing i don't like about the cultivar issue is that it promotes the idea that plants are just decorations they're the foundation of all our life we we can have pretty plants but we've got to think about function first not promote this idea that we're it's just how pretty they are yes how could i tell if willows in my yard are the good willows or non-native willows um so what non-native willows do you have up here you've got weeping willow right he said not weeping I think up here most of the willows are going to be native who's going to help me out with that there's a there's a there's a very common variegated willow around there called the machine keep willow and then can you see it oh Japanese willow yeah yeah i've never heard of you know we have looked at at the issue of congeneric non-native plants so when you take a plant from Europe that's in the same genus as a plant from north america like norway maple compared to red maple they're in the same genus so the prediction is the chemistry they're using ought to be pretty similar so if we have native insects that are adapted to to um maple chemistry here they ought to be able to use those European maples um at least somewhat because they're so similar that's that's the prediction and we we did 18 comparisons congeneric comparisons that way uh and the answer was that the insect use was reduced 50 percent on the non-natives it was more than we thought but it's better than than if it's not closely related where it's reduced 75 percent those were averages there were some plant genera where it didn't seem to make a difference and willow was one of them so now i don't know about the japanese one um but i do know we compared weeping willow with black willow there was no difference so but if you know if you can identify the the japanese willow put in the native we got plenty of native willows don't take a chance anything else just to come back to the woman's question about nurseries and where yet many plants um i know it's an issue but um in maine there's the soil of water conservation districts all have plant sales in the spring and most of them are really going towards emerald towards maines there's smaller plants but they're healthy they're great they're inexpensive you can go online and look it up and you know good you know a lot of people uh have have been discouraged because for a long time the source of these native plants have been these plant sales uh and a lot of of conservation organizations and nature centers or something are using native plant sales as fundraisers so they jack the price way up and people say i can't afford these native plants it's in the economy of scale when we when we get the demand up and we start producing them in much greater numbers that those prices they have great prices good good yes when i've read about herbicides on pesticides is it in a bio diverse system they're not needed oh yeah diversity takes care of things it wants the good bugs it right so you're you know there's herbicides to to fight these non-native plants which are not in control they're not part of the ecosystems because nothing's eating them versus insecticides to keep your pests in control we've actually looked at at pest damage on primarily native properties versus primarily uh well we call them typical properties usually the canopies native and all the understory is is non-native and looked at damage levels to see whether the native properties are being eaten eaten to death they're not the damage levels statistically the same it's a little bit lower on the native properties but statistically it's it's the same why is that you've got all those caterpillars out there because you've got all the birds eating those caterpillars you've got all the natural enemies keeping them control so you've got a lot of life based on keeping that that trophic level the caterpillars under control so you're absolutely right you don't need the the pesticides the insecticides generally to keep things in in balance now that's not true for all these insects from some place else which are the just as bad as the plants from some place else they're here without their natural enemies but yeah they're in most cases people a lot of people say you don't talk about insecticides i'm trying to make insects here folks we're not trying to to kill them so there's usually no need for them yes if we have sort of limits on you know how many new plants we're going to put in or what we want to focus on as far north as we are should we be focused more on the bird what the birds need during their breeding period than during their migrating period or do we still have a lot of migrators oh you yeah i don't know my birds very well now you have a lot of migrates particularly here on the coast most of our warblers move north now you are north and a lot of them stay and breed here but they certainly moved through my property and they'll breed in the boreal forest you have a number of species that go farther north and they follow the coastline so you are in a very important migrating zone should you worry about the the breeding birds as well absolutely because you got a lot of a lot of birds that stop and breed here too but you know what you can do both things at the same time with the same plants so it's not like the migrants want one set of plants and the breeders want another set of plants just put in those foraging hubs and you've got both of them covered have you had enough to see whether you have used that do other things come up there and oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah there's no big dead zone around it no and as i say i typically have to go back and paint it more than once depending on the size of the of the rootstock i am not going like this i am painting it's very little material and it gets down into the roots but like oriental bittersweet its roots go forever and usually you can't get enough material in one place to kill the whole root system so it'll come up in another another place but i have not seen any collateral damage from painting and we've been doing it for 15 years i was wondering if you know if there any kind of regulations and the TPP put forth by the corporate controlled international companies that would limit the growth of our ability to to to bring into to foster local policies and make sure that we're getting able to get the local things yeah good question i have i have no idea i had never thought that that could be a possibility but it maybe it is i don't i don't know yeah i don't for the plant issue i never never entered my mind the horticultural lobbies is a powerful one but again all they want to do is is sell plants early on i had a nurseryman sitting in the front row his arms are crossed he said you're trying to put us out of business and i wasn't smart enough to think of what to say until i was driving home all right we have we have what is it now i forget my 210 million homes something like that in the country if they all relandscape that's a business opportunity we're not talking about putting you out of business here so yes i can comment on the regulations in that even though i'm from michigan one of the suddenly lost for us a little bit or yeah yeah because all natives are considered to be weeds and that isn't any big business or corporate influence that's decades old influence from when this was farmland farmers didn't want people that needs a good property that game can't be in their fields so if you want to do something on a local level get in there and defeat the local weed organs get any race from the books and then you can convert to a front yard in prairie or your backyard whatever and now it's now it's not about you know keeping the weeds out of the farmers field it's about making sure you don't reduce your property value because a lot of people think if you grow native plants it's you're giving up landscaping you're you know you're banning the place and it's just going to be this jungle and it'll be low-clash and you can't sell and the whole neighborhood will go downhill and and that's that's the feeling so they've got these rules the grass has to be cut you know you've got to act like you're not a communist and you're a good citizen um so when you do things be sensitive to to the culture at this point and and make it ecologically powerful landscape but make it pretty at the same time it's you can do that you can do that yes i just wondered if you had any insight on how to be looking to be some bird species i i like the landscape for years trying to get a bird and i seem to just always have two dominant species and that's i think it's the field sparrow and the start of it you mean the house sparrow that house yeah yeah yeah of course we brought house sparrow and starling over in the late 1800s because we wanted it to look like england who was the guy he he wanted to see how many species from shakespeare he could introduce into the us most of them failed but not the house sparrow and not the starling and um uh they both rely heavily on agricultural settings uh where they're so so the house sparrow is really a finch i said 96 of our birds feed their young insects well finches feed them seeds so they're usually very numerous where you've got somebody producing grain uh and there's a lot of a lot of seeds around so when we actually moved into our our property we had a house sparrow problem um it's disappeared because i'm not making any any grain anymore and i have no house sparrows at all so it depends on where you live where they're coming from a lot of times they're very common in cities because we've got people with red crumbs and everything keeping them going starlings are real omnivores too but they're always associated you get these huge blackbird flocks most of which are starlings again with the production of corn and and a lot of seeds so um that's where they're coming from you don't again i don't have a starling issue either even though i've got a lot of bluebird boxes up in the the type of hole that they're usually competing for no starlings at all and it's not very far away where there's a lot of starlings so i think if you control your local surroundings you can reduce those those birds yeah you know the only time well house sparrows for i never have house sparrows at at feeders do people get house sparrows at their feeders maybe i would use how about how about it's sunflower say i think i think they come to the millet and that's smaller stuff try sunflowers and and see if that works but in the later the late winter there's that's when the blackbird flocks come the redwing blackbirds and the and the grackles and the starlings and they'll hit your feeder and empty it in two minutes um when that happens repeatedly and it's usually late winter uh i i take the the feeders in until they go away it yeah that is an issue surely you people want to go home you got all night uh okay