Author: Michael Hawk

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[00:00:00] Griff Griffith: It’s hard to even imagine how many salmon there used to be to anybody who’s been born after, you know, 1950. We can’t even, we can’t even fathom how many there were. And. Back in the day, people say there’s so many, you can walk across their backs. There was so many, you could dance across, you could break dance across her back. 

[00:00:14] Michael Hawk: So what do parasitic plants, 600 year old oak trees, salmon, and hoverflies have in common? Well, there’s some of Griff’s, Michelle Fulner’s, and my favorite wild organisms. So today’s episode is a fun conversation with Michelle, Griff, and myself, Michael, where we advocate for our 10 favorite animals and plants.

[00:00:34] We each bring three species to the conversation. Well, not physically, but virtually. And if you do the math, there’s three of us times three species. And you might be wondering, well, how do we get to number 10? So we had a bit of a game to decide who got to pick the 10th species. And all I’m saying is I still think that aphids would be good at soccer, but you’ll have to listen to hear what that’s all about.

[00:00:56] This whole idea was Michelle Fulner’s. And if you don’t know Michelle, she’s the host and producer of Golden State Naturalist podcast, , it’s a fun and entertaining California centric nature podcast, but the lessons in it span way beyond California. Her fourth season is about to launch and she plans to cover topics that I know you’ll love wildlife crossings, coastal wetlands, red legged frogs, and so much more.

[00:01:20] So be sure to check out her podcast and follow her social media as well. And looking ahead, Jumpstart Nature is in the late stages of three new episodes for this fall. We’re going to be talking about invasive species, outdoor cats, and there’s an inspiring land conservation story that succeeded against all odds that you just have to hear about.

[00:01:39] If you’re listening to this on the Nature’s Archive feed, well, we have plenty of fun episodes coming too. We’re covering topics from wildlife forensics to ants and much more. So, all right, here we go.

[00:01:49]

[00:01:49] Michael Hawk: So from this moment forward, no mistakes.

[00:01:53] Griff Griffith: Yeah,

[00:01:53] Michelle Fullner: Perfection is what we demand here. Alright, how’s everybody this morning?

[00:01:58] Grand 

[00:01:59] Michael Hawk: Getting there.

[00:02:00] Michelle Fullner: You getting 

[00:02:00] there? 

[00:02:00] Michael Hawk: at the grand level, but but not bad either. Somewhere in between.

[00:02:03] Michelle Fullner: We’ll get you a crazy straw for your coffee. Put it in, in, you know, a helmet. To get gravity working in your favor.

[00:02:09] Michael Hawk: Like those beer helmets. You see people it’s sporting events

[00:02:12] Michelle Fullner: With a straw,

[00:02:13] Michael Hawk: Yeah.

[00:02:13] Michelle Fullner: you’re gonna be good to go, definitely. 

[00:02:15] Well, all of us, I think have some roots in California, we’ve spent a lot of time kind of learning about the space, learning about , the world around us here. And so I wanted to bring us together and talk about some of our favorite species.

[00:02:28] . So I was going to go ahead and just kick us off and then we’ll just take turns. And then because there’s three of us, we’re making a top 10 list. So let’s get our top 10 favorite species, native species. And then because there’s three of us, that only brings us to nine. So we have a problem.

[00:02:42] Michelle Fullner: So each of us have four favorites and to choose which one is our number one, they’re going to have to compete. And we’re going to have to figure out which one is going to win in a game. And that game is yet to be determined by being drawn out of a hat. So a sport, and we’ll see which of our species would win.

[00:02:59] Griff Griffith: not a video game.

[00:03:00] Michelle Fullner: Not a video, you know, I should have put professional gaming in there, but I didn’t. Video gaming.

[00:03:06] Griff Griffith: I’ve never even 

[00:03:06] really seen a video game.

[00:03:07] Michelle Fullner: Okay.

[00:03:08] Griff Griffith: have. That’s it.

[00:03:09] Michael Hawk: I was really hoping for some truly exotic sports like underwater polo or, you know,

[00:03:14] Michelle Fullner: Oh yeah. They didn’t get that exotic.

[00:03:16] Michael Hawk: Ah,

[00:03:17] Michelle Fullner: mean, not just the top most televised sports for sure, but not super exotic ones either. We’ll see. We’ll see what 

[00:03:23] Michael Hawk: my aquatic beetle, my aquatic beetle may have a difficult time. I was planning on that underwater polo.

[00:03:29] Michelle Fullner: It was going to take us, it was going to take the competition away. You’re going to win us. Okay. So I’ll kick us off and then we can just kind of go through. We’ll go me, Griff, Michael, until we get to our number one spot and figure out which one’s going to win.

[00:03:41] Michael Hawk: sounds good.

[00:03:42] Michelle Fullner: All right. So, so number 10. This is number 10.

[00:03:45] , my first one that I have here is , it’s a butterfly and it is native to an area where I live and maybe, actually, I don’t think Michael’s in the range of it. Michael might be just south of the range of this butterfly, but it’s a Northern California butterfly that I love very much. And it’s beautiful blue and it has on the underside of its wings it has these beautiful like orange and white sort of spots and the back is almost like this black and then iridescent blue and the males are like more blue than the females.

[00:04:15] And it’s the California Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly and it is gorgeous. Like they’re big, they’re beautiful, they’re very like to me charismatic. So I just really love seeing them in the forest. And I see them a lot of times in like riparian areas. I see them in Auburn all the time. And when I’m in Auburn, when I’m hiking there, the other thing I see is their host plant, which is the California pipe vine, sometimes known as the Dutchman’s pipe, which is the only place where the little caterpillars.

[00:04:44] Can grow up. So it’s their, it’s their food of choice and they love living on the Dutchman’s pipe. They eat it and they do something else that’s really cool. So I talked a little bit about their bright colors and maybe you guys can help me pronounce this word because I’m not actually sure how to pronounce it.

[00:04:58] Is it aposemitism? You guys know this word?

[00:05:01] Griff Griffith: I always say aposemitism,

[00:05:03] Michelle Fullner: Aposemitism?

[00:05:03] Griff Griffith: but that’s just me.

[00:05:04] Michelle Fullner: I, I heard somebody pronounce it the other way, but I don’t actually know.

[00:05:08] Griff Griffith: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody pronounce it besides me and a couple other podcasters. So,

[00:05:15] Michelle Fullner: Thank you. Okay, so my default was aposemitism, and then I heard an entomologist say aposemitism, and so

[00:05:21] Griff Griffith: oh, let’s go with that then. Let’s

[00:05:22] Michelle Fullner: I don’t know. Okay, 

[00:05:23] Michael Hawk: All right. We’ll, we’ll get our team of fact checkers to

[00:05:25] Michelle Fullner: yeah, the

[00:05:26] Griff Griffith: where’s the all bugs by the Kevin? We just need to ask him.

[00:05:29] Michelle Fullner: There we go. There we go. That’s a great idea. So if anybody doesn’t know what aposemitism, we’re going to go with that, is, is basically you ever see those like really bright like frogs in the rainforest with these vibrant colors?

[00:05:41] They’re like poison dart frogs. Well, the bright colors Here’s the thing. This, the animal has, has an issue, right? So this animal is super poisonous and it’s like, I’m protecting myself by being poisonous, but that’s not going to help if the bird or the snake or whatever animal comes and eats it and has no idea that it’s a poisonous animal.

[00:05:59] So , the creature has these bright colors to let everybody know, Hey, I’m poisonous, don’t eat me. And that’s called aposematism. 

[00:06:07] Michael Hawk: they’re teachers. 

[00:06:08] Michelle Fullner: So these 

[00:06:09] butterflies, 

[00:06:09] Griff Griffith: dogs? I thought they were colorblind. They don’t get the scoop on this or what?

[00:06:13] Michelle Fullner: that’s a great question. 

[00:06:15] Griff Griffith: how many other animals are colorblind

[00:06:16] Michelle Fullner: we have like amazing color vision, humans have like some of the best color vision, birds are better than us, but like humans have really great color vision, but also a lot of animals that we think of as colorblind, it’s not like grayscale black and white type colorblind, they have some colors. So I

[00:06:32] Griff Griffith: Maybe all the important colors, like the poison colors.

[00:06:35] Michelle Fullner: I wonder if it’s like, you know, dogs can see orange or whatever it is. I’m not sure. Had to look that up.

[00:06:41] Griff Griffith: Oh, what an interesting question.

[00:06:43] Michelle Fullner: Yeah. Yeah. So I love that these, these butterflies do this because they’re just letting everybody know, Hey, don’t mess with me. I have these bright colors. Don’t eat me. And it’s because they get the toxicity from their host plant. They get it from the California pipeline. It’s a super toxic plant. And , the caterpillars chow down on that.

[00:06:57] And then it’s like their body is imbued with this toxin.

[00:07:00] Griff Griffith: Puts a whole new spin on art you are what you eat, huh?

[00:07:05] Michelle Fullner: Absolutely. 

[00:07:06] Michael Hawk: Well, I think you hit, you hit an interesting point there too, because you said birds have really good vision and a lot of them can even see like into the UV spectrum and that would be the primary predator of a butterfly would be birds, so it works for them.

[00:07:18] Michelle Fullner: that’s a great point. And it makes me wonder if there’s even colors designed for birds to see on the butterfly that we don’t even see.

[00:07:24] Griff Griffith: Oh, and you know what? Dogs and wolves, if they can’t see those colors, the dose is probably, you know, dose makes a poison. Like they’d have to eat hundreds of butterflies before it made a difference. Maybe they don’t need that color vision.

[00:07:36] Michelle Fullner: That’s a great point. Maybe it’s just not even important to them. It, maybe it would like knock out a bird, but it would barely touch a dog.

[00:07:41] Griff Griffith: Size matters.

[00:07:42] Michelle Fullner: Yeah, for sure. Okay, that’s interesting. So how to help these animals? Okay, so if you live in the native range, you gotta look up a range map. It’s, it’s northern California, and I know it’s a lot of northern California.

[00:07:53] I don’t know the exact parameters of where these butterflies live.

[00:07:56] Michael Hawk: They’re in Arizona as well. I, there’s a different there’s a different pipe vine down there.

[00:08:00] Michelle Fullner: here’s the thing though, This, our subspecies is only here. 

[00:08:04] So I was like, I was, had to be extremely on brand for this and I chose only endemic species. So

[00:08:10] all of, all of mine are only endemic to California. But Michael, you’re right.

[00:08:14] Cause there is

[00:08:15] Griff Griffith: What does endemic mean for our listeners?

[00:08:17] Michelle Fullner: So endemic is it’s only within a certain range. And so in my case, I’m choosing only Organisms that are endemic to California. And this is even a little bit narrower than that because it’s just Northern California. So,

[00:08:29] Michael Hawk: stay, staying on brand for, for me anyway, I love to get into the nuance. So you’re talking about a subspecies.

[00:08:35] So there’s pipevine swallowtail as a species. And then there are certain subpopulations that are a little bit genetically different and have slightly different behaviors or preferences.

[00:08:44] And the one you’re focusing on is the Northern California specific subspecies.

[00:08:49] Michelle Fullner: exactly. So yeah, there’s a whole bunch. I know in like the, the Eastern United States, and I want to say that they’re more in the Southeast, but they also, I think they get up pretty far North too. I’m not sure their exact range over there, but they’re not obviously the California subspecies. So yeah, those are, those are the ones that we have here.

[00:09:05] And if you live In Northern California, where these butterflies also live, a way to help them is to plant their host plant, which is the Dutchman’s Pipe or the California Pipeline, however you want to call it. Both are common names for it. But one of the things that’s good to know about this plant is that everybody talks about how slow it grows.

[00:09:22] So it’s a very slow growing plant, but you can accelerate it a little bit by giving it a lot of water when it’s establishing. So it’ll grow a little faster if you give it a good amount of water. I’ve had mine for, this is the third year it’s been back there, I don’t give it a lot of water because it’s this weird spot in my side yard that I just never go over there. So it’s grown really slow, but this year it like exploded. It’s on this trellis, it’s a vine, so it, it, it’s really great for the side yard, things like that, where it’s like, they say, plant it where the, the bottom of it. Will not get direct sunlight, but the leaves, it will grow into sunlight. So that’s like the ideal conditions for this.

[00:09:57] It’s great for taking up, you know, a wall type of space, putting it on a trellis, if you’ve got like a small space for it. And then after a couple of years is when it really starts to flourish usually, but you can accelerate that by, you know, giving it a little extra water.

[00:10:11] Michael Hawk: It’s a cool looking plant too.

[00:10:12] Michelle Fullner: It is, and it’s got the craziest flowers.

[00:10:14] They, it’s called the pipevine because the flowers look like these pipes. And they’re pollinated by what are they? What are they pollinated by?

[00:10:21] Michael Hawk: No, sorry.

[00:10:22] Michelle Fullner: They’re like little gnats, right? They’re pollinated by gnats, I’m pretty sure. Super 

[00:10:25] Griff Griffith: That’s what I, that’s what I remember. Anyways, I’m not looking it up.

[00:10:28] Michelle Fullner: I think so. And then, if you open one of the flowers up, you see a bunch of dead gnats in there. So people actually thought these flowers were carnivorous for a while, but they’re not. The gnats just can’t always find their way out. It’s just unfortunate for them.

[00:10:39] Griff Griffith: Oh, it seems like someone’s got some more evolving to do.

[00:10:42] Michelle Fullner: I know, like, let’s take advantage of that situation. Alright, let’s kick it over to Griff. That was my first one. That was number 10.

[00:10:48]

[00:10:48] Griff Griffith: so I picked my animals based on my relationships with them, not those kinds of relationships, but like, how I’ve experienced them throughout my life. And so most of them stem from my childhood. So not necessarily my favorite species, but they are the species that led me into conservation.

[00:11:04] And the first one I want to talk about. Is turkey vultures. So I always grew up on the edge of suburbia in the Bay area. So I was one of those kids. You’ll hear a lot of older conservationists my age say this from California. I was one of those kids that pulled out the stakes when I knew they were going to build, because I knew what that meant.

[00:11:18] That meant that my Creek was going to get put underground. That meant my pond was going to get drained. That meant terrible things were going to happen to the animals I liked. And I had everybody in my neighborhood convinced that I could tell the turkey vultures apart, and then I had them all named. That was a lot, but everybody fell for it. And so the one I remember the most was Big Red and I’d watch Big Red. He was the biggest one to me. And or she, probably she, but big red would circle around and I just loved turkey vultures. And I always thought they were circling around because there was something dead in the field across the street.

[00:11:48] So I always went over there and looked. And then later I found out that’s not true. Turkey vultures have a great sense of smell, but they won’t give up a meal. So when they’re circling, they’re actually rising on a warm air current that is spiral like so many other things in nature. It’s a spiral, just so interesting.

[00:12:05] And then, so I’d watch these and they had that wobbly flight, like they’re hitting turbulence all the time, but they barely ever flapped. Super cool to watch. And so I’d make up stories about them, blah, blah, blah. And so I finally became, I finally got my wildlife career started when I was 12, like on my birthday.

[00:12:19] And I volunteered at the Suisun Wildlife Care Center. And one of the first animals that I had to go get to be weighed was a turkey vulture. So the uh, the older volunteer was like, send the, this is the 80s. This would never happen today. So 12, if there’s a 12 year old listening and getting excited, you won’t be able to do this nowadays.

[00:12:36] This is the 80s. So they’re like 12 year old, go get the turkey vulture out of the pen and bring it in here.

[00:12:41] Michelle Fullner: These are large

[00:12:42] Griff Griffith: I. They’re large birds. I’m 12. I knew to put a towel over its head. Cause when birds can’t see, they get less stressed. So if you ever have to rescue a bird, cover it with a cloth or something.

[00:12:52] So I went in there and I went to go throw the towel over it and I missed, and the turkey vulture vomited and moved its, moved its head and spread vomit everywhere. And at that moment, I knew that this was my very favorite bird because I was 12 and I loved gross, and that was the grossest thing I’d ever seen.

[00:13:12] So I ran back inside and I was like, Oh my God, it threw up all over me. And the volunteer was like, Oh, that’s right. They do that. So I went back out there. I got it. And been in love with with vultures and wildlife care volunteers ever since. So, that was one of the things that was really cool and gross.

[00:13:26] The other thing is they. Pee oop, depending on how you want to say it, on their legs when, when it gets really hot. So birds don’t really have poo and pee so much. Like, you know, when you see bird poop, you see the brown part, the white part and the white part is kind of like the pee. So they pee oop on their legs to keep cool, which I thought was amazing.

[00:13:43] But also because they have such strong stomach acids and might also kill the bacteria on their legs, which I also thought was super fascinating. So 

[00:13:50] I was super. 

[00:13:51] Michael Hawk: with like reflectivity on their legs too. So it cools it off in the moment and then it keeps it a little more reflect,

[00:13:57] Michelle Fullner: Nice little whitewash.

[00:13:58] Michael Hawk: Like the

[00:13:59] albedo is higher than,

[00:14:00] um, 

[00:14:01] Griff Griffith: interesting. I can see how that would be, especially with the white and the puke or whatever. And then also they’re bald. Who can’t love that? And they’re not bald just because that looks cool. That actually has like, scientists believe an evolutionary function. So they’re not getting all the dead stuff on their their head.

[00:14:18] And like there’s some really cool Native American stories about how Turkey vultures lost their feathers. So if you want to look that up at your local tribe’s website, they might have a story, especially if you live in Turkey, well, there’s Turkey vultures and black vultures, but I’m sure the stories are pretty similar. So. I love them. And they have a sense of smell, which is really unusual for birds to have a strong sense of smell. So their sense of smell is even better than ours. So when you see turkey vultures dive and kind of cruise close to the ground, they’re going and they’re smelling for dead things when they do that.

[00:14:49] And that is also super fascinating. So I just think that they’re the coolest, most disgusting birds. And so if you have like a 12 year old who likes gross things and you’re trying to hook them in conservation, turkey vultures, and turkey vultures also are really closely tied to the land. Like all animals are, but like tied to what we’re doing on the land, our management, like lots of animals, but we can fix the turkey, like how turkey vultures are affected way easier than we can fix some of the other unhealthy relationships.

[00:15:17] And one of the best things you can do for turkey vultures is if you’re a hunter, switch to copper bullets, stop using lead bullets altogether so getting the lead out of hunting should be priority for all hunters.

[00:15:27] And I really like what like the Yurok tribe has done here locally is they have a hunters of stewards program because gut piles can help California condors, which are turkey vultures. And so getting the lead out could actually assist condor reestablishment in California. It can actually help scavenging birds like turkey vultures.

[00:15:49] And I think these are super easy for hunters to do. And so if you have, if you know, a hunter is really poor and can’t afford anything, but lead bullets, maybe. And you can get some copper bullets and trade them and take their lead bullets away. And say here you can have these instead. So those are just some of the reasons why I love turkey vultures.

[00:16:05] Also, the other really cool thing about new world vultures is they’re not related to old world vultures, even though they look so similar. It’s another fascinating example of convergent evolution, where two things in different parts of the world So, vultures in the new world are more closely related to seabirds, and that’s why they have such a great sense of smell.

[00:16:26] And then the ones in the old world, quote unquote old world, are more closely related to raptors, which is how the Oftentimes when you, when you see like raptors in North America and you’ll see turkey vultures on there, and I’m always like, what are they doing on there? But that’s wise because it’s a carry over from that old world tradition and accuracy because they are raptors over there.

[00:16:46] Michelle Fullner: Okay. That’s super interesting. And when you were talking about the turkey vultures, super great sense of smell, it reminded me about something super crazy about turkey vultures, which is that they don’t have a septum. So like that, that little bit of, of nostril, you know, like between your nostrils, a little bit of flesh right there.

[00:17:03] Turkey vultures don’t have that. And the reason why is because of that great sense of smell. So when they fly around, they’re getting air. passively passing through their nose so that they don’t actually have to sniff all the time. They can actually just have the air pass through and they can pick up this insanely small, like, parts per million amount of an odor of something, which is how they find, yeah.

[00:17:24] And so when they’re, I would imagine, They’re passively smelling just all the time, right? Cause they don’t have the septum. So when they’re circling, they’re, they’re riding that air current and they’re not even thinking about it. Like the air is just passing through. So if something was around, they would pick it up.

[00:17:37] Oh,

[00:17:40] Griff Griffith: about them is they don’t have a song. They don’t have a call. They have a hiss. That’s all they do is hiss. So if you wanted to like occupy some children for a long time, tell them to give them a hundred dollars. They go and hear a turkey vulture call and they’ll be outside for hours.

[00:17:55] Oh, wait, this is the eighties. I guess we don’t do that anymore. Right?

[00:17:58] Michelle Fullner: we need to 

[00:17:58] bring 

[00:17:58] Griff Griffith: the 80s, like, Oh, kids stay outside for all day long. That’s what my parents do. Yeah. Turkey vultures are awesome.

[00:18:04] Michelle Fullner: they’re rad. They’re super rad. Okay. Michael, let’s hear yours. What’s your number eight, Michael? What?

[00:18:13] Michael Hawk: species like turkey vultures. You can see the pipeline is a swallowtail. It’s a big butterfly and it’s always flitting around and it’s colorful. I’m going to go in the other direction and pick something that’s kind of ubiquitous, but easily overlooked.

[00:18:25] And I think that when we think of pollinators, we often think of bees and they get all of the press when it comes to pollination or most of the press, but my species, it’s actually a group of species, and I’ll, I’ll talk about one in particular. It’s the hover fly. So, some people know them as syrphid flies or flower flies, and I think they’re overlooked because they’re small, but they’re really colorful and they look like bees or wasps, and a lot of people will even call them sweat bees.

[00:18:51] So they’ll be patterned yellow and black, and you’ll see them kind of hovering around your flowers. And everywhere I’ve gone in the United States, I’ve found hoverflies, and usually multiple species, even in your backyard garden. So they’re really efficient pollinators. They’re very important. And in fact they are not just pollinators, but the larval form when they’re little babies, they actually, a lot of them will eat aphids and they’ll eat other pests too, that at least what gardeners think of as pests.

[00:19:21] So they play a super important role in the ecosystem. And it’s not just that they eat the the aphids or thrips or other things. But some hoverflies actually aid in composting and decomposition and other things. In fact, a lot of sewage treatment plants use hoverfly larvae to help with the breakdown of sewage.

[00:19:43] Yeah, there are certain species that that’s that’s what they do. So yeah, I find them fascinating because I missed them my whole life, you know, until I don’t know, four or five years ago. And I finally started paying attention and looking closely. Most of these flies, they’re pretty small. You know, if you take your average European honeybee, they’re going to be maybe one third to one fifth the size of that or smaller in some cases.

[00:20:08] But the really cool thing is you can identify to species most of the hoverflies because they all have a unique pattern, even though they kind of mimic wasps and bees, they’ll be like this intricate little calligraphy on their abdomen. And that pattern can help you identify them. And I said I would tell you about a specific hoverfly that I, you know, like more than others.

[00:20:30] And there’s a genus that are actually called calligraphers.

[00:20:33] And it’s like some little artist was drawing this special calligraphy

[00:20:38] on the back. So, yeah.

[00:20:40] Michelle Fullner: And they’re yellow and black?

[00:20:41] Michael Hawk: Yellow and black,

[00:20:42] yeah. 

[00:20:43] Griff Griffith: I have some that are, if they’re yellow and black, I haven’t seen it yet. Like they’re really, really small and it’s often gray here. Cause I’m right on the coast, but that’s the main insect I see flying around are fringe cups, one of our native plants here, and I always tell people like, bees are cool because they pollinate bees.

[00:21:00] But hoverflies can pollinate and they’re predators. You know, they’re like twice as cool.

[00:21:06] Michelle Fullner: Pull in double duty.

[00:21:07] Michael Hawk: I mean, there are some that are not yellow and black. I’m thinking of one called a grass skimmer that’s black and red. You know, and, and sometimes they have this really shiny gold on this special part on their, on their back. , I have a photo I’ll have to include it in the show notes, maybe that I call it a self portrait.

[00:21:22] So even though it’s this tiny little hover fly, I had my macro lens and I got really close to it and you can actually see the reflection of me in this shiny gold part of the

[00:21:32] Griff Griffith: Ooh, cool. 

[00:21:33] Michelle Fullner: Oh, that’s a really great shot. That’s cool.

[00:21:35] Michael Hawk: So how can you help? How can you help these wonderful

[00:21:38] Michelle Fullner: Just leave untreated sewage 

[00:21:41] Michael Hawk: Yes, 

[00:21:41] that’s, that’s what I was going to say.

[00:21:43] It’ll save you on your water bill. But maybe something more practical than that is just, I, I like to say leave those aphids alone. So, aphids are, are also super cool, but a lot of gardeners when they see aphids at the first sight of an aphid, they will get out the pesticide or spray them off with water or whatever.

[00:22:00] But what I’ve found personally is It’s so much fun to leave them because usually, not all the time, but usually the aphids will get taken care of by other predators like hoverfly larva or lady beetles or some of the other ones that take care of it. So, 

[00:22:13] Griff Griffith: Inspires a song like, Hey, gardeners leave those if it’s a long Um, uh, 

[00:22:20] Michelle Fullner: Also way better than the raw sewage idea. So I’ll grant you 

[00:22:23] Michael Hawk: Yeah. And, and just to give a little more context, I mentioned some other garden pests, but the, you know, they’ll eat mealy bugs and scale insects and things like that that a lot of gardeners just like. Cringe when they hear so yeah, those natural services from the hoverflies,

[00:22:37] Michelle Fullner: All right. I love it. I love it. Okay. So next one. Is back to me. And this is number seven. And this is one of the most deadly animals in the world. This is my number seven. And I actually had one of these when I was a kid. My brother and I caught it and we kept it outside of our, our home until physics did it in.

[00:22:58] And so this animal’s name was Newton and it’s another California endemic. And this is an animal with an incredible sense of direction. And it can, if you, if you drop it just about anywhere, it’ll know exactly which direction it needs to go to reproduce, right? To find its natal waters, because they always go back to the same places to reproduce.

[00:23:19] And also, it’s a creature that lives a double life. So if you think about the word amphibian, ampha means double and bios means life. So amphibians lead a double life. And this animal is the California newt. And it is found in California only exclusively. There are a couple of other species that are really closely related.

[00:23:38] There’s like a rough skinned newt that looks super similar to California newts. There’s like

[00:23:43] Michael Hawk: that’s what we have in our area.

[00:23:44] Michelle Fullner: Yeah. You have those guys. So we had California newts growing up and I love and adore them. I had no idea how toxic they were when I was a kid, but their skin is, yeah, is like imbued with, it’s tetrodotoxin and it can kill you super quickly.

[00:24:00] So there’s this, This story, I don’t know if this is a true story, if this is an urban legend about these two guys that had gone out camping and one of them went out to the stream, scooped up some water, made some coffee, drank the coffee and, and died. they were trying to figure out what happened to this guy.

[00:24:17] Well, at the end, at the bottom of that pot of water, they found a dead California newt. And so they had cooked this newt and ingested the tetrodotoxin from the newt skin and it killed the guy, which. To me is the perfect alibi, right? You’re like, Oh, my friend scooped up the water. Like, I think it

[00:24:32] Griff Griffith: Oh yeah. Good idea. 

[00:24:35] Michelle Fullner: For sure. It seems extremely shady to me, but that is the legend and it would kill you. Like there’s definitely enough toxin in one of these newts to kill a full grown human being. So. I’ve touched them many, many times. Turns out that’s not actually great like for the newt because we can spread all kinds of little terrible things with our skin and they have super thin breathable, breathable skin as amphibians and so it’s not great for us to touch them.

[00:24:59] I actually now carry nitrile gloves everywhere I go just in case I find a newt and I want to pick it up. So that’s my kind of nerdy thing that I have with me at all times.

[00:25:07] Griff Griffith: And that’s another example of

[00:25:09] Michelle Fullner: Oh yeah, they’re another, yeah, aposemitism.

[00:25:12] Griff Griffith: Mm-Hmm

[00:25:13] Michelle Fullner: California News, thank you, I didn’t get in the description. So they’re like sort of brown on top, sort of a warm brown, and they have these bright orange bellies. Super bright. And they

[00:25:22] Griff Griffith: And I accidentally picked one, one time walking down a trail and I saw it tumble. And when it landed, it landed on all fours, but it arched its backup to make sure I saw all of its orange.

[00:25:32] Michelle Fullner: I did that behavior for you. I forget what that’s called. There’s a name for that behavior.

[00:25:36] Griff Griffith: It’s called You Better Nut.

[00:25:37] Michelle Fullner: Yeah, you

[00:25:39] know, 

[00:25:39] Griff Griffith: It’s

[00:25:39] called. 

[00:25:40] Michelle Fullner: It’s like all the stay, stay back ism. So another little fun fact about these guys, is that you know they, they have some interesting behaviors when it comes to reproduction. They do something called a mating ball.

[00:25:50] And so there’ll be like a female and like four males or more, just all trying to get in there and make the magic happen. So that is called a mating ball and I’ve seen it happen in ponds and things where there’s like just this, it’s a newt ball and you see a ball of newts and it’s like writhing around in the water and that’s what’s going on there.

[00:26:07] So if you ever see that, it’s called a newt ball.

[00:26:09] Griff Griffith: don’t break it up. Don’t be like relax,

[00:26:11] Michelle Fullner: Don’t break up the party. No, they’re, they’re doing fine in there, hopefully, but it’s not our business if they’re not. And then the way to help these creatures, because like I said earlier, they have an incredible sense of direction. And these are animals that can live like 20 years.

[00:26:25] Nobody thinks that newts live that long because they’re just small and you don’t think about that, but they live forever. And they have this amazing sense of direction and they just take their same routes that they’ve always taken. back to where they want to reproduce. But a lot of times humans have put roads in the way of where they want to go.

[00:26:41] And so newts will just plod across roads. They don’t stop and check for traffic. They just walk right across. And so there’s actually groups of people that are like newt brigades that will go out and they’ll actually pick up the newts from one side of the road and ferry them across in the same direction they’re going.

[00:26:56] Love them, right? So if you want to help newts, check in your area to see if there’s a newt brigade. Because there are, so there’s some in like Sonoma County. I know there’s different ones around the state. So check around and see if there’s a new brigade, because there’s probably a lot of different new species that need that kind of help too.

[00:27:11] Michael Hawk: Yeah, my friend Merav leads up this group called Newt Patrol over by Lexington Reservoir here in the Bay Area and it was an overlooked roadkill hotspot until they started documenting this on iNaturalist, by the way,

[00:27:25] and, As a result now several of the agencies that are responsible for the neighboring lands are actually working to create safe crossings for newts, which is a huge win.

[00:27:33] It’s not done yet, but it’s on the right path.

[00:27:36] Michelle Fullner: I love that.

[00:27:37] Michael Hawk: I have a question for you, though. You said that your newt was named Newton and it was done in by physics. So was it like an apple fell on its head or what

[00:27:46] Michelle Fullner: So kinda, I mean, so what happened 

[00:27:48] Michael Hawk: didn’t know if that was a pun or, you know, I’m thinking of

[00:27:50] Michelle Fullner: it was it, so we named it Newton. Unironically, like we just named it Newton because it was a newt and we didn’t know how to take care of a newt. So we just kept it in a five gallon bucket with water. And we had like a stack of rocks in there so that if Newton wanted to climb out and get on the rock, he or she could.

[00:28:08] And one day the, one of the rocks fell and pinned Newton down. Yeah. And so Newton died. Yeah, underwater. It was, it was bad. I was like seven or eight, you know. I was not taking good care of it. It was sad. It was really sad. Poor Newton. Yeah.

[00:28:23] Griff Griffith: It’s funny how all the naturalists brought home little animals to die when they were in their childhood. You know what I mean? I did, too. Things came to my house and died. It was awful. I feel so

[00:28:32] Michelle Fullner: There’s some fatalities.

[00:28:33] Griff Griffith: I’ve made my Are you going to talk about the way that they got so poisonous?

[00:28:38] Michelle Fullner: Oh, is this the, is this the garter snake arms race?

[00:28:41] Is that what you’re talking about? Okay. So I hadn’t, I

[00:28:44] Griff Griffith: I mean, it might be too long, but I mean, it’s so interesting.

[00:28:47] Michelle Fullner: talk about it. You talk about it. ’cause I only know, I have a guess about what’s going on there, but I think that It’s, it’s an example of one of the arms races that I’ve, I’ve learned. And I love researchers who dig up these stories because they are the most fascinating. So whoever dug up this one, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know who they are, but apparently the last time I read about it, it started in the Bay area and the, I think it’s the terrestrial or now the aquatic, one of the, one of the garter snakes eats the rough skin new or, you know, that group of newts.

[00:29:14] Griff Griffith: And so. As the newt, you know, became more and more poisonous with this tetrodotoxin, which is the same toxin as in pufferfish. And then the garter snake would get more and more resistant. And so the, and so over evolutionary time, then the new got more and more and more toxic, but the garter snake got more and more and more resistant.

[00:29:33] And so what’s happened is. In some places, the farther away from you get, you get away from the Bay Area. Sometimes the less toxic the rough skin newts get. And I found out this whole thing because I thought they were poisonous. I heard the coffee story years and years ago. And then I saw with my own eyes, a black crown knot heron eat a rough skin newt.

[00:29:53] And I was like, it’s going to die. Let’s watch. And I sat there for hours and it never died. And so I found out that there is a geography to this toxin 

[00:30:01] and this , yeah, it’s super interesting. And then the snakes that are the most resistant allegedly, and I read this once or twice, we might need to double check with another who’s that snake person you just interviewed, Michael?

[00:30:13] Michael Hawk: Oh Emily Taylor, Snakey

[00:30:14] Griff Griffith: Taylor. I mean, we didn’t ask Emily Taylor, but it’s like the garter snake keeps getting more and more bright. The more resistant it is against the talk, it’s bright. So I’ve seen some that look like slithering jewels. And I’ve been like, you are the selected, the special, the

[00:30:29] Michelle Fullner: well, do they become toxic too? Oh,

[00:30:33] Griff Griffith: hypothesis.

[00:30:34] So I don’t know if that’s been studied. I read about this years ago. Maybe there’s more on it now.

[00:30:38] Michelle Fullner: that’s amazing. I didn’t know that. Okay, cool. All right. Let’s jump to Griff. Let’s go back to you because now it’s number six. It’s your turn.

[00:30:45] Griff Griffith: Okay. So. I was a Ranger Rick kid, and whenever I saw something really cool in Ranger Rick, I had to have it or I had to go find it. So there was a article on box turtles. So my mom said, if I save 10 that I could go to and buy a box turtle to pet store. So I like did little work around the, you know, neighborhood, rake leaves or whatever, got my 10 bucks, went and bought my Myrtle the turtle and Myrtle the turtle became My best friend for a very long time.

[00:31:10] It was a Eastern box turtle. So there’s four species in North America, but the common box turtle has like four subspecies and I think Eastern box rules, one of them, if I’m remembering correctly. So I brought her home. She was the coolest box turtle. And I just let her hang out in the backyard and I would catch her eating all sorts of things.

[00:31:28] One time I caught her with a mouse leg in her mouth.

[00:31:32] Seriously. That was the cool. I was like. Nine or 10 at the time, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. So I so we moved a lot, but whenever we moved into a yard, there would be turtle habitat immediately built, which usually consisted of like a water source and some rocks, places for the hide and stuff.

[00:31:47] Everything I read about in Ranger Rick. But then as I got older I wanted a real pond and more turtles and more stuff. So I told all the kids in my neighborhood, if they helped me dig it in the small backyard, that they got to name something that went back there. And so next thing, you know, I had a waterfall and piles of rocks, great turtle habitat.

[00:32:01] And so people would donate. Turtles to me, box turtles. And and then I even stole one, one time from these people in my church. Sorry, Walls. Yeah. I’m the one that stole Quirky. I’m admitting it now, 40 years later, or 40 some years later, Quirky was kept in a box in a room. And. Her scales were coming off and her, her shell was malformed. And so I stole her and and I took her home and her shell hardened up after a year or two. And then she had babies with tank and another turtle that got donated to me. Cause I was like the box turtle rehab place now. So it was, I loved those turtles. They were so cool. They’re not native to California. They’re native to mostly the East coast, you know, depending on what species. And. When I went back East and saw them, the wild, I couldn’t believe that these were wild animals because to me, they were always 

[00:32:51] Michelle Fullner: mm-Hmm. 

[00:32:51] Griff Griffith: then they faced a lot of the same problems that the newts do. They’re being taken in the pet trade.

[00:32:56] And I know that’s a problem cause I used to take rough skin newts home all the time when I was a kid. And so they’re being taken. And the thing about it is, is they want to go home so bad. They have another homing. So they’re looking for their home. So if you take them far States away, when they get out, they’re going to be looking to go home.

[00:33:11] It’s just awful thing to do to anything, to take it away from its home. So the other thing that’s really happening to box turtles is the roadways. So same thing with the new, it’s, it’s the roadways that are killing them. And in some places where their numbers are starting to come back after the pet trade, they’re now being smashed on the roads.

[00:33:28] And so roadways are really something that we have to address. And Ben Goldfarb’s book Crossing has a whole section on roads, which is super amazing, hardcore and really open. Look, there it is. Oh,

[00:33:39] Michelle Fullner: I have it. . I just produced 

[00:33:41] Griff Griffith: cop. So that’s box turtles. I love them. Please don’t get them as pets.

[00:33:46] If you want a pet turtle in California or anywhere, go find an invasive species in your local lake or stream or, and take it home and make sure it can’t escape.

[00:33:55] Michelle Fullner: I just found one the other day. It was massive. It was a red ear. Red. Red. What’s it called? Readier slider

[00:34:00] Griff Griffith: Yeah. I think I’m, I’m getting, I have to go capture, capture some out of my local Creek and bring them home and make them pets. Because that’s what they were to begin with. They’re pets that people let go. Like around here, a lot of the bullfrogs and the turtles that are invasive are released pets.

[00:34:13] But anyways, box turtles. I love them. Leave them where they’re at. And please drive slow during the spring and fall. Cause during the winter, they’re hibernating. And during the hottest part of the summer, they’re like, kind of like estivating or summer hibernating. So it’s the spring and fall. You got to be careful on the road.

[00:34:27] Michelle Fullner: Okay. Great. All right. Let’s jump to Michael.

[00:34:30] Michael Hawk: Well, I’m going to have to change things up again a little bit because we’ve only been talking about animals so

[00:34:34] Michelle Fullner: Oh, okay.

[00:34:36] Michael Hawk: So I’m going to go in a different direction. And this this organism I saw for the first time in real life just a couple years ago. And this was after seeing these beautiful pictures of this weird looking bright red plant that peaks its way out of snow drifts.

[00:34:52] And yeah, you know what it is because it’s a snow plant. And if you’ve ever seen a picture of this, you can’t forget it really because it’s blood red. And it does grow where there’s still snow on the ground. And, you know, so how is this possible? What is this thing that can grow when there’s snow on the ground?

[00:35:10] Well, what it is, is it’s actually a parasitic plant. And the reason that it’s able to grow so early in the season is because it’s tapping in to a nutrient system underground that other plants have developed. In fact, it’s not just other plants, but the mycorrhizal fungi that connect those plants together.

[00:35:28] So this, this plant, it’s bright red because A, it doesn’t photosynthesize. It doesn’t need to because B, it’s a parasite. Um,

[00:35:39] Michelle Fullner: It was like, it’s not easy being green. I’m gonna be red.

[00:35:42] Michael Hawk: yeah,

[00:35:42] Griff Griffith: Right. And it actually flowers too! There are so many parasitic plants that I think get overlooked, but 

[00:35:55] Michael Hawk: pollen. , so they’re very cool from that standpoint. So the way it works, I just want to elaborate a little bit because As a parasite, I think a lot of us, when they hear that word, you kind of get this negative connotation.

[00:36:12] You think of things like ticks or fleas or roundworm or, you know, things like that, that we don’t like. But I would challenge people to maybe try to grow a different perspective on what it means to be a parasite. And it’s just a different lifestyle that has evolved or has occurred depending on how you look at the world it’s you know, or created, you know for that matter and if you were to adopt the perspective of the parasite And think about what would they think of us, you know, we we look at them and they’re like, oh, they’re freeloaders They’re you know, they’re you know doing these things without the work You know, they may look at us and be like you all are so frantic and wasteful You Yet, you know, we’ve learned to live a life that values patience and efficiency and you know The art of doing more with less so these plants do more with less by tapping into the mycorrhizal fungi that are there trading nutrients providing nutrients for the plants in the community that they’re that they’re in and they’ve developed this kind of Relationship with this other relationship.

[00:37:15] So it just shows me like all of this You Interconnectedness. I’m struggling to find the right word here because it just blows my mind every time because you have, you have the, the fungi that are connecting the plants together and helping get nutrients to the plants. And then you have this parasitic plant that’s coming in and tapping into that and providing its own services and its own beauty you know, out to the world.

[00:37:35] Griff Griffith: Have you guys ever seen a parasitic plant in anybody’s native plant garden?

[00:37:38] Michelle Fullner: Oh, no.

[00:37:39] Michael Hawk: That would be really hard. 

[00:37:41] Michelle Fullner: That would be hard. That would be like a multi year project, probably,

[00:37:45] Griff Griffith: Higher level

[00:37:46] Michelle Fullner: a really cool, 

[00:37:48] you’d have to get these really great mycorrhizal networks going on first for, for the micro heterotrophs, especially.

[00:37:53] Griff Griffith: not if you use dodder. Maybe if you use the that orange string looking plant that is that, that bites into things like a vampire, that’d be kind of cool plant to add to your native plant garden.

[00:38:02] Michelle Fullner: Yeah. Fathers be good to your daughters, as John Mayer would say.

[00:38:07] Michael Hawk: I, I’m so tempted to go off on data right now to be his dodder. So amazing. It’s recently been shown that it can kind of like see in a way when it first sprouts, it just has a day or two to find a host

[00:38:19] and 

[00:38:20] somehow I can 

[00:38:20] Griff Griffith: lapse videos of it. 

[00:38:22] Michael Hawk: Yes, it can evaluate what’s nearby and what the best choice is for it to go grow towards.

[00:38:27] And there’s so many amazing, you know, parasitic plants. Like mistletoe is, is a hemiparasitic plant. It’s

[00:38:32] partly it does photosynthesize, but it’s important for wax wings and bluebirds and so many other species

[00:38:39] Griff Griffith: And the kites nest in it.

[00:38:40] Michael Hawk: yeah, yeah. So anyway, that’s how to help, you know, don’t just assume that if something is parasitic, that it’s harmful or negative for the environment.

[00:38:49]  They’re part of the food web. They’re part of the ecosystem and. provide many other services to many other plants, animals, and insects.

[00:38:57] Griff Griffith: If you have an awesome parasitic plant growing in your native plant garden, it’s obvious that it’s in our garden, send it to us and we will post it on our Facebook pages

[00:39:05] Michelle Fullner: Yeah, that’s

[00:39:06] Griff Griffith: and give you a shout out.

[00:39:07] Michelle Fullner: That’s so cool. Well, and actually, also, it’s really funny that you chose that plant because just literally two or three days ago, I posted in my Instagram story, because I want to make a video about these, this family of plants. It’s called mycoheterotrophs, or maybe not family. I don’t know how related they are to each other, but mycoheterotrophs.

[00:39:23] So, so myco being mushrooms or the mycorrhizal networks, right? That are, we think of as mushrooms, although those are just the fruiting bodies. And then heterotroph, meaning that they have to eat other things, right? Like, autotrophs feed themselves, heterotrophs eat other things. We’re heterotrophs, sometimes I resent that because I want to just lay in the sun and like, then just have energy.

[00:39:43] And that’s not the way it works, but But anyways, , these cool plants that are plants and not fungi, even though they look like fungi a lot of times, because they have these weird colors and they pop out of the ground in these weird ways. I don’t have any pictures of them. So I’m actually crowdsourcing a reel right now because I want to make a video about them because I think they’re super interesting.

[00:40:00] And so I Instagram story, I’m like, Hey, plant nerds, like if anyone has any mycoheterotrophic photos, 

[00:40:05] send them 

[00:40:05] Griff Griffith: took a picture of one last week. I’ll send it to you.

[00:40:09] It was, it was interesting. Cause the Forester from Redwood Rising, Lathrop Leonard was like, Oh, and sometimes there’s ghost pipes and coral root up here, keep your eyes open. And I was like, there it is. And it was one just coming out of the ground.

[00:40:20] It’s all like pink, red, and it’s like just barely coming out of the ground, so I’ll send that one to you.

[00:40:25] Michelle Fullner: Sweet, cause most people sent snow plants, cause that’s what I talked about. But some people sent like some ghost pipes that were very cool 

[00:40:32] Michael Hawk: I have a few I could send you.

[00:40:33] Michelle Fullner: Ah, that’d be rad, thank you. Okay, who are we on? Is it my turn again? It’s my turn again,

[00:40:37] so number four. Also, not an animal. Not as mysterious or unknown as Michael’s not animal. But this one is a keystone species. So, it is not a parasite. Although I am acknowledging that parasites can be extremely ecologically beneficial.

[00:40:55] Lots of, lots of good that they’re doing in the world. But this one is actually a host species for just a myriad, a myriad of other species. And it plays a really crucial role. role where it is native. And so in particular, there’s a whole family of these beings, but the one that I particularly love is the Valley Oak. So I adore these plants. They are like, they can grow to be like a hundred feet tall. I think there are most majestic Oaks. They’re the biggest Oaks in California, maybe the biggest Oaks period. I’m not sure about that. They’re definitely the biggest Oaks in California, the tallest. And in some cases they can live like 600 years.

[00:41:32] So, these are ancient, majestic, like, wonderful trees. And they’re not as old as, you know, the redwoods or the sequoias, but they’re, they’re very old. And then there is that one community. It’s not valley oaks. But there’s some kind of like oak situation, Michael, or maybe Griff, maybe you guys know about this.

[00:41:48] What’s that ancient oak that is like re sprouting from the roots, I want to say? It’s not like a single stem that’s super old, but it’s thought to be like the oldest organism. It’s not a bristlecone pine. Like, it’s an oak. You guys know what I’m talking about? I’m 

[00:42:00] Michael Hawk: No. 

[00:42:01] Griff Griffith: California? Is it in Southern

[00:42:02] Michelle Fullner: I want to say it’s Central Coast somewhere, but

[00:42:04] Griff Griffith: I do remember reading about

[00:42:05] something that’s copper themed. Yeah, 

[00:42:07] it’s, it’s, it’s. It’s coppicing over and over

[00:42:09] Michelle Fullner: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. Okay. That’s an oak. This is a different oak, but valley oaks are the ones with the alligator skin bark. They’ve got very like furrowed bark, really rough looking. They’ve got the gnarly long limbs. And sometimes when they start to get older, they’ll send them down to like the ground and like have, you can just walk up a limb.

[00:42:27] They’re really beautiful. They have the really lobed leaves. And I think that they’re really mysterious and gorgeous and majestic trees. But in addition to that, they’re hosting hundreds of species of insects, which is super important because we’re having large insect die offs globally. We’re having a lot of problems with insect populations, not universally.

[00:42:47] Some insects are faring okay, but they’re not always the ones that we want to be faring okay. So oaks are really great because they bring in that Biodiversity, because they support so many different species of insects, and then there’s a lot of birds and things that use those to raise their young. So birds need tons of caterpillars to raise their baby birdies, and so they get those from the oak trees a lot of times, so.

[00:43:08] You get actually more bird diversity if you have the same kind of density of canopy. in an area. This was a study done in Sacramento, actually. You can have the same density of canopy in urban trees, and if there are oaks present, there are like seven more species of birds present. So regardless of like, how much tree cover there is, it’s the presence of oaks that’s making the difference.

[00:43:29] Griff Griffith: And if you live in an area that’s, that has set an oak death and it’s killing oaks, you can plant valley oaks because they don’t get set an oak death.

[00:43:37] Michelle Fullner: That is a great point. Yes, but one thing that they do have a problem with is the Mediterranean oak borer beetles. And so those were found in St. Helena in like 2017, something like that, and they’ve been spreading. So it’s a beetle species, yeah, where they’re, they’re boring and they kill the oaks. And that’s a really huge problem because the oaks are, you know, these food sources 

[00:43:59] Griff Griffith: keystone species.

[00:44:00] Michelle Fullner: Yeah, Keystone species. So, so anyways, it’s a huge problem. There’s also other species of beetles that affect other oaks, like the gold spotted oak borer. That’s more in SoCal, I think. That’s in the Black Oaks, the Coast Live Oaks, and the Canyon Live Oaks. But in the Valley Oaks, they’ve started to see these Mediterranean oak borer beetles.

[00:44:20] And one of the ways to help trees is to In general, specifically the valley oaks, because I love them with all my heart. They’re probably my favorite species, period, is to not move firewood around. Like if you were going camping, buy your firewood right there where you’re going camping. Don’t bring your firewood with you because these little beetles hitchhike on the logs and then they get into a new area.

[00:44:39] They escape from the logs. They don’t get burned up in the fire. Maybe some of them do, but some of them escape into the neighboring trees and they can cause massive infestations. So especially if a forest is stressed at all. It’s going to be extra susceptible, but also if it’s just this non native species that maybe the tree doesn’t have a natural defense to, I’m making that part up, but I’m guessing that that would also make it more susceptible.

[00:44:59] So those are, that’s one key thing that you can do that helps a lot of different tree species, not just oaks, not just valley oaks, is just don’t move firewood.

[00:45:06] Michael Hawk: What about the woodpecker brigade? An army of woodpeckers just everywhere, you know?

[00:45:11] Michelle Fullner: Bring them in.

[00:45:12] Griff Griffith: Bring them in.

[00:45:13] Michelle Fullner: I like it. So that was number four. We got Griff with number three.

[00:45:16] Griff Griffith: Number three. So of all animals, of all animals in California or animals period that I’ve had a relationship with it’s, it’s a genus, it’s the salmon Actually, it’s the coho salmon the most. So I grew up fishing for salmon with my grandfather, and then I started doing salmon habitat restoration when I was 18 in the California conservation core.

[00:45:37] And then went on to the forest service where I did fishery surveys, mostly for salmon, but all fish, but mostly it got to be mostly salmon. Cause those are the ones that were like the most in politics and. Important to indigenous folks, because a lot of the indigenous folks in my area, Wiyot and the Talawa and more Hoopa consider themselves like acorn salmon people.

[00:45:57] So salmon was like central to their culture. It’s a cultural keystone species for a lot of people. And which is cool is I’m Irish. And we also called ourselves in Southern Ireland acorn salmon people, because we were also eating acorn and salmon. 

[00:46:11] So my relationship hasn’t just been, you know, doing biological surveys on them and doing restoration. Also, I wanted to be a commercial fisherman for salmon because so many men in my family had done that. And it was important to me in my twenties to continue that. For some reason. So I went up to Alaska and I worked on a fishing boat and caught tons and tons of salmon and.

[00:46:32] I really understand the relationship between them as not just an important ecological species, an important cultural keystone species economic species. It’s, they’re really part of our identity in California, the Salmon are, and, and have been for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years since time immemorial.

[00:46:52] And we’ve had. Commercial fishery shutdowns here in California. And I think that that really speaks to how we’re doing stewarding. Like salmon are a good indicator of how we are doing as stewards. And the fact that we’re losing them is not a good sign. And so many people are trying to bring them back.

[00:47:10] So many folks are working on bringing the salmon back and there’s lots of ways you can do that. So we won’t get into all of them, but salmon have a lot of interesting. Like so many interesting stories. And I would highly recommend looking up the indigenous people’s stories about salmon and the communication networks they had about salmon.

[00:47:27] Like there would be several tribes along a river and they would wait till a shaman or elder at the most up river. The most uprooted destination of the salmon would, it would give a blessing. And then that’s how the tribes down river, they would all agree to then start fishing. And these were people of different languages and religions and different cultures.

[00:47:47] This wasn’t like, this wasn’t like a monolith or monoculture. All these people were different and they cooperated. Around the salmon. So there’s a lot of stories like that with salmon. And I think that the day that we bring back salmon and salmon are off the list and we have a salmon fisheries reestablished, and we have trees that are getting marine nutrients from the wildlife dragging these salmon carcasses.

[00:48:09] Cause salmon die after they spawn, you know what I mean? Life is a virgin and then you die. That’s, that’s what I think about with salmon. Like they, it’s, you know, they meet the love of their life, if you will. And then they die shortly after. But their bodies would get drug into the forest. And so we still see these marine markers from salmon up in these trees that are far away from the water.

[00:48:28] And that’s because there used to be so many salmon. It’s hard to even imagine how many salmon there used to be to anybody who’s been born after, you know, 1950. We can’t even, we can’t even fathom how many there were. And. Back in the day, people say there’s so many, you can walk across their backs. There was so many, you could dance across, you could break dance across her back.

[00:48:45] There was tons and tons. I’ve seen it in Alaska, the way it used to look down here. And I hope one day that we can bring that back. So one thing people can do right now is it’s going to sound counterintuitive, but it’s not buying farm raised salmon, making sure your salmon are wild caught. Not eating salmon right now.

[00:49:01] I mean, even at the Yurok Salmon Festival, this is going to be the second year in a row where they haven’t had salmon at the Yurok Salmon Festival. So maybe switching to another fish for a while. Also knowing that everything ends up in the water. So whatever toxins you’re using around your waterway are ending up in there and they’re affecting the fish. So there’s a bunch of little things you can do. There’s a lot of different websites and stuff like that, where you can learn how to help salmon. But coho salmon are different from a lot of the other salmon in California because their babies stay in the creeks all summer long, which is

[00:49:29] unusual. So when you see baby salmon with the black par marks, those like vertical marks down their bodies.

[00:49:34] When you see those in the summer, those are probably coho. And that’s why they’re the most endangered is because they’re Left with us during the summer and the droughts and the water diversions, especially all the water diversions has really led to a shortage near extinction, extinction in some watersheds of the coho salmon.

[00:49:50] Michael Hawk: Can you elaborate on that kind of counterintuitive thing that you said about, you know, it’s better to buy wild caught salmon rather than farm raised salmon?

[00:49:59] Griff Griffith: So a lot of the farm raised salmon, and I haven’t followed up on this in the last couple of years. So if someone wants to correct me, I’m way into it, but farm raised salmon. Their meat is dyed, first of all, so it can be pink, but there’s so many of them concentrated in small areas and usually at the mouth of rivers where adults are gathering and waiting for the rains to come so they can make their way up into their natal streams because salmon are anadromous, so they start in the fresh water, they go out to the salt water, live three or four years, and they come back and spawn and then die in the fresh water, which is really.

[00:50:30] Really interesting cycle and the indigenous people have great stories around how to explain that to their kids or to themselves. It’s super interesting, but when you have a gathering. You know, a not unnatural gathering of salmon doing their, almost their whole life cycle in the river. And then you have the native ones, the wild ones going past this.

[00:50:48] They’re catching those diseases, sea lice and those other diseases, and it’s killing them. And so we don’t want to support farm raised salmon. We don’t want farm raised salmon to happen. We want to fix our streams, when to restore our streams, because we don’t need to have pens of salmon. We need to have streams.

[00:51:05] Full of salmon

[00:51:06] Michelle Fullner: hmm. Better Pink from the food that they eat.

[00:51:08] Griff Griffith: that are pink from the food they eat, not from dye.

[00:51:11] Good hmm. So, we had salmon. That was number three. Michael, what you got for us for number two?

[00:51:16] Michael Hawk: For number two, I’m going to tie back into your valley oak story a little bit here. And I I also maybe gave a little bit of a preview as to what this species is. So these are large and gregarious species. Many different kinds across the world I think with the exception of Australia and Antarctica and it’s woodpeckers. woodpeckers are very often as, as kids, one of the first birds that we notice because they are maybe colorful and gregarious and maybe they were even pounding away on the side of your house at some point and you’re like, what’s going on out there? In particular, I want to talk about the acorn woodpecker, which is found in many parts of the Western U.

[00:51:57] S. And I think that the name actually gives a little bit of tip off as to how they relate to Valley Oaks, because as an acorn woodpecker, well, obviously they must like acorns, right? And they do, but like so many common names, there’s another layer to the story. So acorn woodpeckers, they live in these communal groups you know, family groups very often, and they will go out and they collect acorns, and they store them in specially drilled holes that they make, where they just will, will make the hole just big enough and then wedge that acorn in there.

[00:52:31] And you can have thousands of acorns stored together. in a, in holes on a tree or on a power pole. A wooden power pole is one of our favorite places, actually. And and each of these little holes will have acorns, like every few inches, scattered across. And that’s called a granary. And I’m going to go off on the granaries here for a little, little bit and then come back to why acorns are not where the story ends for these birds.

[00:52:55] But the granaries are really interesting because if you put a fresh acorn in a hole and you put it in there really tight, because you don’t want somebody else to come along and steal your acorn, right? So, so you’re a special bird. You’re this really metal bird that you can bang your head against solid wood at forces that, you know, we can barely even fathom.

[00:53:14] you can really wedge that thing in there, but that fresh acorn is going to dry out at some point, or maybe there’s an insect inside that acorn and it eats it and it shrivels up a little bit and it gets loose. So there are, you know, specific birds in these communal groups that manage the granary and they go around patrolling, looking for loose acorns.

[00:53:33] And they’ll take it out and find a better fitting hole and continually move these acorns around and sometimes discarding the old, you know, the really old ones. Now you might be wondering, well, why are they storing all these acorns and not eating them? You know, why are they, why are they letting them dry out in the first place?

[00:53:50] And that’s because like almost every woodpecker, they prefer insects. So despite their name, Any chance they get, they would rather eat an insect. It doesn’t matter on what time of year it is. If there’s an insect available, they’re going to go for the insect. And in fact, acorn woodpeckers can fly catch. So like there’s this whole category of birds called fly catchers that, you know, maybe if you’re lucky, you get to observe one sometime and it will sit on a perch and it will look for a bug flying by of some sort, and it will sally out and grab that bug in midair and come back and, and eat it.

[00:54:20] Well, acorn woodpeckers will do the same thing if the opportunity arises. So as the day warms up, if you have a chance to look at acorn woodpeckers, you’ll see them fly catching. Now, on top of that, they will also mimic, well, mimic is too strong of a word, but, but they’ll use similar strategies to what a sap sucker will use.

[00:54:38] Whereas, you know, sap sucker is another type of woodpecker will go and drill these little holes and let the sap leak out and then insects get caught in that sap and they’ll come back and, and they’ll eat those insects. Acorn woodpeckers will do the same thing. Sometimes their own. you know, sap.

[00:54:52] Sometimes they’re taking advantage of other sap as well. So it’s really cool. And the acorns are just kind of a backup plan for them. So these are the planners of the woodpecker world where they have this large store of backup food just in case they need it, which by the way, sometimes attract insects too.

[00:55:08] So they can look like they’re eating the acorn, but they’re really going for that insect.

[00:55:12] Griff Griffith: So some people are probably wondering why the acorn whippeckers want their acorns to be so tight in those trees. 

[00:55:19] Michael Hawk: Yeah, 

[00:55:20] Griff Griffith: are they, why don’t they like it? Loose ones.

[00:55:22] Michael Hawk: yeah, like, 

[00:55:23] so when I was talking about other animals stealing the acorns, and that’s why they want it to be so tight, like, I’ve seen this actually happen, in fact, where an acorn woodpecker had some fresh acorns, and it was going to put it in the granary, and it starts to tap it in, and then suddenly like a raven or a crow will come in and scare away the woodpecker, and it’s able to steal that acorn and have it for itself, and squirrels would want to do the same thing. So there are many other animals watching. These acorn woodpeckers, and if those acorn woodpeckers can’t get those acorns tightly fit, it’s an easy meal for some other animal.

[00:55:55] Griff Griffith: Yeah. Speaking of drama, that’s some of the, that’s some of my favorite bird watching is acorn woodpeckers at the granary. That’s some good drama. Cause they’ll chase off anything. They are brave up there. I love it.

[00:56:06] Michael Hawk: they are. So now, how can you help? Well, listen to Michelle and plant some valley oaks. Protect those valley oaks. If you don’t live in California and you don’t have valley oaks, really you know, oak trees are great for all woodpeckers. Thanks. Part of it is because most woodpeckers are cavity nesters.

[00:56:24] They need holes in big, old, mature trees. And oak trees, very often when they get mature, they lose a limb, a hole develops, maybe there’s some carpenter ants that help along or, you know, something like that. Woodpeckers don’t always excavate their own holes. Sometimes they use naturally occurring holes, but other times they will excavate their own.

[00:56:41] So big, old trees, keep those around. Support those insects. Like we’ve talked about in a couple of different ways, because most woodpeckers will eat insects, you know, as their primary source. And the other thing is if you have a big old tree that has cavities in it, don’t just cut it down as long as it’s not a safety concern, you know, if it’s a safety concern, you know, that’s, that’s

[00:57:01] Griff Griffith: Cut it to height, cut it to height. If it’s a 

[00:57:02] Michael Hawk: Cut it to height. Exactly. So if you can leave a good chunk of that trunk, like up to where there are some holes, you’re doing a couple of things. You’re leaving those cavities, but then you’re also supporting the habitat because dead trees, trunks, things like that are habitat for many other organisms, not just birds.

[00:57:22] So, it’s very overlooked. We want clean, pristine parks and lawns, and it’s so tempting just to go remove these things, but lots of cool stuff happens on you know, on these dead and dying trees, if you can keep them.

[00:57:34] Griff Griffith: I just moved into a new place and I’m talking my housemates or whatever they’re called neighbors um, into creating a Snag out of a Bradford pair. And so, cause I’m going to girdle it and then we’re going to cut it to height and then they’re artists types. So I said, it’d be great if you guys could do some art on it and drill some holes in it and some cool patterns for the native bees, and that was the deal.

[00:57:58] That was how I sold it was. Do art on it. So we’re going to have this snag that’s going to have tons of art on it. We won’t get acorn woodpeckers here because it’s too close to the coast, but we will get some coolness and I can’t wait to see it. So if people aren’t into having snags in their yards or standing dead trees, you can cut them to height so they don’t fall on your house or fall on anybody.

[00:58:17] And then you can make art on them. And that might be a way to get standing dead trees more welcomed into our spaces.

[00:58:24] Michelle Fullner: That’s a great idea. 

[00:58:25] I love it. I love it. And speaking people’s language too. I love that you didn’t just be like, you know, you, you specifically knew you were talking to artists. So you’re like, Hey, let’s do art here. So tailoring your message or finding out about people before tailoring your message to them so that, you know, you 

[00:58:40] Griff Griffith: That’s how I got them on board. I was like, what, what patterns we plant these yellow flowering tidy tips in? And they’re like, Oh, we know they didn’t give a crap about gardening before, but once they got to do their expression, all of a sudden they got interested. They painted pots, all kinds of stuff.

[00:58:56] Michelle Fullner: Brilliant. 

[00:58:56] Michael Hawk: That’s awesome. And, you know, connecting in that way is great. I wanted to go back real quick to cavity nesters because cavity nesting birds, like many, many, many birds, most birds are in decline with a few exceptions, but the cavity nesting birds are very often doing worse than than many other birds because We have so few old growth trees and when they do get old and they start to look like they might be a safety risk, they get cut down to the ground, even in parks, you know, because it’s a liability for them.

[00:59:27] So, I, I can’t really stress this enough. It’s one of those, you know, hiding in plain sight conservation issues that we have.

[00:59:33] Michelle Fullner: Also, to me, it’s like whoever goes and takes a picture of just like a very normy looking tree. You know what I mean? It’s like, it’s beautiful when a tree has character. I wanna go and take a picture of a, a crazy like gnarled old tree with holes in it and stuff like, that’s more interesting to look at and has more character.

[00:59:49] And I think that it, it lends some of that to the adjacent kind of surroundings.

[00:59:55] Michael Hawk: And what’s better than getting a picture of a baby bird sticking its little head out of a hole in the side

[01:00:00] Michelle Fullner: That’s the best. That’s the best. Okay. For our number one. We gotta be ready. Let me go grab my hat. Oh, okay. I have this hat, and I have some slips of paper in here. Get some of those noises on the mic. And on the strips of paper, I’ve written different sports. Okay? I don’t know a whole lot about sports.

[01:00:16] And, that’s okay. Good. We’re kind of in good company. But I know the general idea of how these sports are played. And so, there were three of us. We each had three different sports. favorite species. And that means that we had a list of nine, but we need a list of 10. So to figure out whose top pick gets to be number one on the list, we need a way to figure that out.

[01:00:36] So what we’re going to do is I’m going to draw out one of these sports and read what the sport is. And then we’re going to each make a case for which of our species would win against the others. Why would our species be good at that sport? Alright. Does everyone understand the rules? Is that good?

[01:00:51] Griff Griffith: we’re going to reveal the name and then tell why it would be the

[01:00:53] Michelle Fullner: Yes!

[01:00:54] Exactly. Okay. Okay, so, the sport is okay, somebody say when.

[01:00:58] Michael Hawk: Go. 

[01:00:59] Michelle Fullner: Okay, soccer. All right, so who wants to go first? Who’s going to win at soccer?

[01:01:04] Griff Griffith: my species will lose because it’s stuck in the ground,

[01:01:09] but if you, soccer in the ground. I a ball. It’s If you kick a ball at it, it might ricochet back into the goalpost. That’s the only way that we would score.

[01:01:18] Michelle Fullner: What’s your species?

[01:01:19] Griff Griffith: Coast Redwood.

[01:01:20] Michelle Fullner: Of course it is. You’re being on brand today, too. All right, Coast Redwood. I love it. Well, I mean, I think, though, that they’re pretty wide, so they could make a great goalie.

[01:01:30] Griff Griffith: And their roots are really shallow,

[01:01:32] Michelle Fullner: There you go.

[01:01:33] Griff Griffith: so if they got some X Men powers, it would be easy for them to unbury their roots and kick things in, you 

[01:01:37] Michael Hawk: Well, I have a question. How long is this game? If we’re talking about like a multi thousand year game,

[01:01:43] Michelle Fullner: They’re the Redwoods are Oh yeah, that’s true.

[01:01:46] Honestly, change the terms a little bit, right? We got to be on plant time.

[01:01:50] Griff Griffith: It takes 2000 years. Yeah.

[01:01:53] Michelle Fullner: Humans are too hasty.

[01:01:54] Griff Griffith: Okay. Well, in that case, we got it.

[01:01:55] Michelle Fullner: Yeah. Coast Redwood’s great. Awesome. Michael, Unless someone’s got a bristlecone pine.

[01:02:00] Yeah. Outlast everybody. 

[01:02:02] Michael Hawk: species is a bristlecone pine.

[01:02:05] no! no, no, no. So my species, I’ve already talked about a little bit today. It’s aphids. And I think aphids would win this without a doubt because they can reproduce so fast. They’re just going to win in numbers.

[01:02:20] And, you know, the reason they can reproduce so fast is because.

[01:02:24] They give live birth. I don’t want to get into my whole aphid story here, but but yeah, I think I think aphids, they’re super

[01:02:29] Griff Griffith: They’re born pregnant, even.

[01:02:31] Michael Hawk: Yeah. So 

[01:02:32] Michelle Fullner: I’m

[01:02:33] Michael Hawk: they

[01:02:34] Michelle Fullner: sorry. You just blew my mind. I’m sorry. I’ve been pregnant and I was not good at playing soccer when I was pregnant. So I will just go ahead and put that out there. All right. So mine. is the yellow billed magpie, another endemic species. It’s a California endemic bird and it’s got this striking yellow bird.

[01:02:53] It’s a corvid and it’s got this long beautiful tail. It’s got these white wing tips. They’re just very distinctive, very easy, even for somebody like me who doesn’t know anything about birds to identify. I can spot these birds. There’s a certain neighborhood in Sacramento. Every time I go there, I’m like, Oh, there’s a bird!

[01:03:07] I’m in Arden now. There’s yellow billed magpies. Like, they always greet me every single time that I go in there. And I think they would win at soccer because they’re incredibly smart and cooperative. And so they have these like groups, right? Like they are able to communicate with like different squawks and things.

[01:03:23] So they are able to communicate with their groups. They’re cooperative, like the parents raise the babies together. And sometimes even like the older sibling will come and help raise the baby. And they’re corvids. They’re super smart. They’re like one of the smartest birds that’s out there. So I think they would have the strategy down.

[01:03:38] So I think that’s why the yellow billed magpies would win.

[01:03:40] Michael Hawk: The aphids would just fly into their eyes. Reproduction

[01:03:43] rate. I 

[01:03:45] Griff Griffith: would fall and crush everybody.

[01:03:47] Michael Hawk: I but the mags are op, they’ll eat whatever’s available, so they’re just, they’re gonna take out the aphids. So we’re just gonna gobble them up.

[01:03:57] the aphids got it.

[01:03:58] Michelle Fullner: Alright, alright, what do we think? So, out of these three, this is the part that I didn’t actually think through. How do we decide, after we make our case, which one of these actually wins?

[01:04:08] Michael Hawk: I should have picked the dung beetle is,

[01:04:10] Michelle Fullner: Oh, that would have been perfect yeah, 

[01:04:13] You know what though? Maybe the, the Coast Redwood wins for goalie, for sure. And the, you know, the yellow billed magpie is a great, like, coach be able, because it’s going to be able to tell those aphids where to go, and the aphids could be the actual players. Although I don’t know if they could move the ball, so that’s kind of a

[01:04:29] Griff Griffith: Maybe 

[01:04:30] if enough of them got on one side, they could use like gravity.

[01:04:33] Michelle Fullner: All right, so do we have to draw these out of a hat? Like, how do we decide which one is the winner? 

[01:04:38] Michael Hawk: I don’t think the aphids would win if I was being honest. I think, I think probably the magpies would win if you could teach them what to 

[01:04:46] Michelle Fullner: have yellow billed magpies be the winners?

[01:04:50] Griff Griffith: I think so. Yeah.

[01:04:51] Michelle Fullner: All right, yellow billed magpies are the winner, so we’ll put them in our number one spot. And these are really interesting birds. because they’re mostly in the Central Valley of California.

[01:05:01] They’re super bright, like I said before, and so they eat just about everything, which can be good and bad because they can eat rodents, which can have problems with rodenticide ending up in the yellow billed magpies. They eat insects, which can end up having problems with neonicotinoids ending up in the yellow billed magpies. So there’s some issues that they face because of their diverse diet. But one of the other really big issues that they face is West Nile virus. So in the early 2000s, I want to say like 2003, four or five, somewhere in there, West Nile virus hit the scene in California and it massively spread. just decimated the population of yellow billed magpies.

[01:05:38] And that population has never fully recovered. And there’s even kind of a question of, can this species build a resistance even once they survive it? Like, are they even building a resistance to West Nile? Or can they just get reinfected and die because they haven’t totally that? And these are super charismatic birds.

[01:05:56] I love watching them. They are absolutely my favorite bird species. I,

[01:06:00] Griff Griffith: can even learn to talk.

[01:06:01] Michelle Fullner: can they?

[01:06:01] Griff Griffith: Yeah. Now I had a friend who back in the eighties, whose mom brought home a baby that fell out of a nest and they kept it and it could learn how to talk and it could talk on cues. So when you walked in the door, it would say, hello. And when you were getting your key, when his mom was getting the keys ready, it would go goodbye, like I had, like it took cues, but it could speak a lot of

[01:06:21] Michelle Fullner: Oh my gosh. So it would sit there in the soccer game and be like,

[01:06:24] Griff Griffith: Yeah, right.

[01:06:27] Michelle Fullner: right. And , so West Nile is a huge issue. I don’t know how much we can do to help with the West Nile issue. So the thing that I said should help this species is not using neonicotinoids. Which is a whole class of pesticides, which are systemic in plants. So they can be applied to roots or they can be applied to the leaves of plants.

[01:06:45] They’re taken up into all the tissues of the plant. 

[01:06:48] Griff Griffith: Including The nectar.

[01:06:49] Michelle Fullner: Including the nectar. Exactly. And so whatever comes along and feeds on that plant, maybe it’s a bee going to pollinate it. Maybe it’s a caterpillar going to munch on some leaves that gets taken up into that animal and then that gets eaten by a bird.

[01:07:01] Or whatever the case may be, and it can, it can move through these different layers or different levels of the food web. So it can affect a lot of different species. So,

[01:07:12] Michael Hawk: Thanks.

[01:07:12] Michelle Fullner: and they can get washed into watersheds. So like when it rains, they get washed into the water and they can end up in a lot of our waterways too. So yeah, they’re real hard to get rid of. They stick around and they kind of just spread all over the place. So they can be real ugly, real nasty stuff. So any way that you can avoid using them, I know that some of them are going to be banned in California for consumers to purchase at some point, but I’m pretty sure that like farms and stuff can still use them.

[01:07:39] And so if there’s ever anything up for a vote and you want to reach out to your representatives to let them know, like, Hey, vote for this, this bill, try to get them banned. That would be a really great move too. Alright, we got our, we got our list, guys. I’m proud of us. Thank you guys for humoring me and talking about your favorite California species with me. This was a lot of fun.