Jumpstart Nature’s next season is making great progress, but it’s still a few weeks away. So we decided to share one of our top episodes from our sister podcast, Nature’s Archive. It’s with Dr. Doug Tallamy, the world renowned author, entomologist, native plant advocate, and co-founder of Homegrown National Park (instagram).
This podcast episode was written and produced by Michael Hawk. Our host is Griff Griffith.
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Doug Tallamy for Jumpstart Nature
[00:00:00] Griff Griffith: It’s Griff, your host of the Jumpstart Nature Podcast. Did you love our Solutionary season one? Yes, you did. So did I. I learned so much from our podcast, and that’s one of the reasons why I love doing this, and you must have learned a lot too, because y’all had us ranking number three
[00:00:20] thank you. Thank you very much. This is a dream come true for us because we are solutionaries who wanna make the world a better place. , we love inspiring positive change for conservation, and we do this by bringing you well-researched subjects with cameos from experts and relevant and fun actions to take. If you listen to our podcast and or visit our website, read our newsletter, we will be able to level you up from feeling like a helpless witness of the biodiversity crisis to becoming an effective part, big or small of nature’s, and our own healing. And season two is gonna perpetuate this solutionary momentum. It’s in the works and we’re still a few weeks away from releasing it. So in the meantime, we thought we could share an episode from Jumpstart Nature’s, other podcast called Nature’s Archive.
[00:01:05] This episode is with Doug Tallamy, who is featured in our Yard of the Future episode. He is also the author of my most frequently recommended book titled Nature’s Best Hope.
[00:01:15] Our podcast, Nature’s Archive, is a different style than Jumpstart Nature. It’s more of a conversational interview performed by Jumpstart Nature’s founder Michael Hawk. Each episode is a deep dive into a specific topic. Michael also seeks to understand how his guest got into their field and finds lessons and inspiration to help listeners take their goals to the next step. This episode with Dr. Tallamy focuses on oak trees, and you don’t have to be Irish like me to appreciate oak trees. All right. Oaks support more bird food, aka insects than any other tree in North America. So planting a single oak tree or a few oak trees in a clump is like planting a whole ecosystem.
[00:01:56] This interview was recorded in July, 2021, but it’s still completely relevant today. Dr. Tallamy talks a bit about Homegrown National Park, an organization that he co-founded, and that was started during the time of this interview.
[00:02:10] We encourage you to check out HomegrownNationalPark.org for tons of resources to help you turn your property into a Homegrown National Park. And please check out other Nature’s Archive episodes as well. We’ve covered everything from wildfire to bird migration to fungi, and much more. Visit Naturesarchive.com to see all the episodes and transcripts. So here we go. Nature’s Archive. Interview with Doug Tallamy.
[00:02:37] Carla: Nature’s Archive Podcast, a Jumpstart Nature Production.
[00:02:44] Michael Hawk: My guest today is Dr. Doug Tallamy. Dr. Tallamy is the TA baker professor of agriculture in the department of entomology and wildlife ecology at the university of Delaware, where he’s authored over 100 research publications and taught insect related courses for over 40 years. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determined the diversity of animal communities.
[00:03:09] Among his well-read books is Bringing Nature Home published in 2007. And his 2020 book Nature’s Best Hope, which was in New York times, bestseller that expanded upon the topic of his latest book. The Nature of Oaks released in March of 2021 by timber press. Dr. Tallamy is also the recipient of numerous awards for his conservation and communication outreach. As you can probably tell from the introduction. Doug is widely known as a passionate advocate for treating personal properties as critical habitat.
[00:03:39] Today we discuss his most recent work on this theme, the aforementioned book, the nature of Oaks. It turns out the Oaks, aren’t just a little important, but they stand above others in terms of the number of insects they support. Why is this important
[00:03:52] as you’ll hear the majority of birds require insects to raise their young. And I mentioned birds because they’re very accessible and we see them all the time. But this is just scratching the surface of the food web impacts that Oaks. Have
[00:04:05] and we also got into a few basic ecological concepts in relation to Oaks, including Keystone species, trophic levels, energy transfer, and more. We also consider the role Oaks played back when our forest were much more diverse than they are now.
[00:04:18] Before the American Chestnut was wiped out before a Dutch Elm disease wiped out 75% of the mature Elms in the United States.
[00:04:26] And before the current die-off of Eastern Ash trees. Oak’s also have interesting random cycles of acorn production called masting. Doug reviews, the four fascinating hypothesis as to why Oaks are so important.
[00:04:39] He’s also started a nonprofit called homegrown national park. Homegrown national park helps people understand the critical connection they have with functional food webs and ecosystems.
[00:04:49] There was so much discussed and it was a lot of great fun. So without further delay. Doug Tallamy.
[00:04:54] Okay, Dr. Tamiami, thank you for joining me today.
[00:04:57] Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
[00:04:59] Yeah, I’m super excited about this. I was introduced to your books only this year.
[00:05:04] Somehow I had missed all of your work up until recently and earlier guest of mine, uh, Griff Griffith, told me about Nature’s Best Hope. And, uh, I’ve since also purchased The Nature of Oaks on, uh, audiobook actually, and listened to it, taking lots of notes along the way. Uh, so why don’t we get started with that latest book.
[00:05:25] Given all of your ecological interests and your background, what led you to that topic?
[00:05:31] Doug Tallamy: It’s kind of a long story. You know, I’ve been, I have been concerned about the biodiversity crisis for a long time, and it is very clear to me that our park system is not working. , you know, we’re in the sixth grade extinction.
[00:05:45] If it was working, that wouldn’t be a problem. We wouldn’t have 3 billion fewer birds. We wouldn’t have global insect decline. The UN wouldn’t be saying we’re gonna lose a million species in the next 20 years. The World Wildlife Fund wouldn’t be saying we’ve lost two thirds of, of, uh, the Earth’s wildlife.
[00:06:01] Um, so our parks aren’t, aren’t enough, which means we’re gonna have to do conservation outside of the parks. We’re gonna have to do conservation on private property, public spaces like, like roadsides, all the places that we’re not doing it right now. So how do we do that? That’s what I’ve been focusing on.
[00:06:17] It is a global biodiversity crisis, but it has a grassroots solution. I’m trying to give the individual landowner of any, any nature directions on how to, how to address this, this crisis. So I, I, long time ago wrote, uh, bringing nature home that I, you know, moved on to, uh, nature’s best hope, which is simply saying, you are nature’s best hope.
[00:06:41] We’ve gotta do this together. And then the, the latest book again, is The Nature of Oaks. I wrote that because our re research has shown us that oaks are the best keystone plant, uh, in, in the continental us. And remember, I. Keystone. If you, if you think of the Roman arch, the keystone is the stone in the middle of the arch.
[00:07:03] If you take that stone out, the arch collapses. Well, if you take keystone plants out of our food webs, the food web collapses. And it turns out that that out of our native plants, there’s just 5% that are making most of the food, 14% are making 90% of the food that fuels that food. Web and oaks do that better than any other plant.
[00:07:21] So when you have an oak in your. , it’s not a tree, it’s an entire community of living organisms. And there’s, there’s literally thousands of them, hundreds of species and thousands of individuals on that single tree in your yard. I wrote the book cuz nobody knows that this is a case where knowledge generates interest.
[00:07:40] And I hope that interest generates compassion so that people will interact with the nature on their oaks. But they’re not gonna do that if they don’t know it’s there. Uh, and maybe they’ll plant another oak and . So that’s, you know, we need compassion to solve this problem. And that’s, that’s where we’re headed.
[00:07:58] Michael Hawk: Following through on the book, you outline. Many of the different interactions that oak trees have with the environment and, and, and the environment on the oak trees themselves. Everything from soils and fungi to insects and birds and and so forth. And what I was thinking is, as I was in this case, listening to the book, was there’s this sort of basic, maybe overly generalized concept about, uh, primary producers and the amount of energy they create and how much of that is passed along up to the next trophic level.
[00:08:32] And I think the generalization is like 10% usually. And it got me thinking like, as productive as oaks are, does that mean they’re, they’re sort of punching above their weight class, so to speak? Like they’re doing better than 10%, you know, as compared to other primary. That’s
[00:08:47] Doug Tallamy: a great question. I’ve never gotten that question before.
[00:08:50] The 10% is a general estimate that has been challenged for about 50 years, . Um, it could be somewhere around there, but yeah, I, I would say definitely the oaks are punching above their, their weight class. You know, it’s about how much of the energy from the sun you are willing to share with other organisms.
[00:09:10] Oaks share a lot. People say, why, why do they support so much life? Uh, and that’s, you know, there’s about six hypotheses about why they might be doing that. Um, but there are other plants, even other native plants that share very little, like ferns, for example, ancient, ancient plants. But they, they’re really good at protecting themselves.
[00:09:28] They, they grab that energy and they don’t share it. So, uh, if you’re trying to support a food web in your local ecosystem, you’re not gonna do it with ferns. You are gonna do it with, with oaks. So, yeah, that’s a great question. I think they are passing on a lot more of their energy than, than most other plants.
[00:09:44] Michael Hawk: Can you tell me about a few of the most prominent ways I, I, I know one big area of focus is their larval food plants for, for a great variety of insects.
[00:09:54] Doug Tallamy: Right. And that is, that’s really, uh, one of the primary reasons, uh, I got interested in oaks. It’s not just insects, it turns out it’s caterpillars. Um, caterpillars transfer more energy from plants to other organisms than any other type of plant eater.
[00:10:09] So if you don’t have a lot of caterpillars in your ecosystem, you, you essentially have a failed food web. We’ve done. Actually since the, I guess it was the seventies, Dan Janssen pointed that out, but it’s been ignored. Um, so we’re trying to resurrect that statistics. You need caterpillars around and you know, the, the heavy use of non-native plants, and then they escape and become invasive plants in our ecosystems.
[00:10:32] Those plants make, create very few caterpillars. So they devastate the food web by hitting the most valuable insects that are out there. Why do we need so many caterpillars? Well, let’s just focus on birds. It takes thousands and thousands of caterpillars to make one clutch of breeding bird. You know, we, we got a lot of data for chickadee, but there’s data on a number of other things.
[00:10:50] 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to get one clutch of a bird that’s a third of an ounce through to independence, actually just to, to fledging. And then the parents continue to feed them caterpillars another 21 days. So you’re talking about tens of thousands of caterpillars required to make a nest of chickadees.
[00:11:07] Now, Chick and most birds forage very close to the nest about 50 meters from the nest. So if you want these birds breeding in your yard, you gotta have all those caterpillars in your yard. If you don’t landscape with the plants that make those caterpillars, you don’t have breeding birds. And we have looked at the data set from Rosenberg at all.
[00:11:24] That’s the group that said, we’ve lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years. And we divided the terrestrial birds species into two groups, the groups that require insects at some part of their life history, and the groups that don’t. So things like, uh, doves and fis can actually reproduce on seed. They don’t need insects.
[00:11:42] They didn’t lose any numbers in the last 50 years, but the birds that require insects lost on average 10 million individuals per species. So it doesn’t prove cause and effect, but it certainly is suggested that when you take away the bird food, you take away the birds. Uh, so you know if the, if the homeowner’s trying to help the things they like around ’em, and people love birds, you’ve got to give them bird food.
[00:12:04] What plants do that? . Most plants don’t. Most plants support very few caterpillars. So you’ve gotta pick those keystone plants that are the primary producers. Uh, and again, Oaks nine, nationwide Oaks support more than 950 species of caterpillars. So another good native plant around, around, uh, my house is the tulip tree.
[00:12:23] It only supports 21. You know, there’s a big difference here. So blank choice really matters when you’re trying to build that food.
[00:12:30] Michael Hawk: We, yeah. As a birder, when I’m out and about and where I live, coast live Oak is one of the more common oak species and compared to one of the other common ones, valley Oak Coast Live Oak kind of stands above it in terms of the number of insects that, that you find on.
[00:12:44] And, and thus the number of birds. So as a birder, if I find a, a nice mature coast, live oak, I’m gonna spend a few minutes there scanning it, uh, because you know, there will be
[00:12:53] Doug Tallamy: birds, birders have known forever that you go to the oaks to, to watch migration, cuz that’s where the warblers are gonna be. Mm-hmm.
[00:13:01] Michael Hawk: I actually was lucky enough to have a breeding pair of chestnut back chickadees in my yard and I’m in suburbia. You have to go. Uh, I think the nearest oak tree to my yard is probably about a hundred meters away, if not more. So when you mention these numbers of, of 6,000 plus caterpillars to raise a clutch.
[00:13:23] Yeah. It’s just like where are they getting these? Because this is sort of a desert right here where I live.
[00:13:30] Doug Tallamy: Yeah. What would’ve been interesting to put a camera on that nest and see exactly what they were bringing back, and we know a lot about what caterpillars actually. . We also don’t know a lot about what caterpillar there.
[00:13:42] There’s an estimated 14,000 species of, of Lepidoptera in North America, and we only have the host plant for about 7,000 of ’em. But it’s typically woody plants making them, and again, oaks lead the way. So my guess is they were, they weren’t bothering any place Alison, going straight for that, that oak.
[00:13:59] Yeah. . That could be, yeah.
[00:14:01] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I, that’s a great idea. Dexter, I’ll, uh, you know, I have a trail cam. I could just angle it right on the, uh, it’s a nesting box. The, the cavity nester. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. , you know, getting back to the oak trees themselves. I, I know there’s a lot of interesting statistics about the prevalence of oaks across the United States and across the world.
[00:14:20] Do they all have similar impacts or are there Certainly, like here I mentioned the Coast Live oak seems to kind of stand above the others, right?
[00:14:29] Doug Tallamy: Uh, yeah, I, I get that question a lot. And of course, it hasn’t been measured for most, most species. I just had a student compare 16 species in the east here, um, all in the red oak and, and white oak groups, so no live oaks.
[00:14:42] And within that comparison, they were very, very close. White oaks were number one in terms of insect use, but not by a lot. My gut feeling without having measured it is that, uh, deciduous oaks actually are supporting more than the, uh, the live oaks ones that do not drop their leaves. Those leaves get tough, pretty, pretty early on, and, and that’s a real, uh, inhibition to insect feeding.
[00:15:07] But all the oaks are, are good as far as we can tell. So everybody’s saying, which oak should I plant? I tell them to worry more about getting the oak that is most adapted to, to your soil type, your altitude, your rainfall. And don’t worry about the insects. They will, they will follow that, that oak at this point.
[00:15:25] That’s the best information we have. So when I say oaks are, are the number one keystone plant in this country, that’s at the genus level. We don’t have species level information because host records for the most part, say each oaks , you know, they don’t tell you witch oaks. So our natural history knowledge is not good enough to answer that question very well.
[00:15:47] But the assumption truly is that all oaks are good
[00:15:50] Michael Hawk: at the genus level. Then who’s number two and how big of a gap is there between number one and number two?
[00:15:57] Doug Tallamy: Okay. That depends on where you are. Uh, the farther north you go. You know, when you really get up north, the oaks actually drop out. Then willows take over.
[00:16:05] So it’s a toss up in most places between Salix and Cronus, between willows and native cherries. About who’s number two? Uh, so where I live, Oaks support 557 species of caterpillars. Um, willows and prunes and, and cherries both support 456. So there’s a gap of a hundred or so, but that’s still way up there.
[00:16:27] And then, then you go down to Birch’s and, uh, you know, there are many places in the west where cotton woods are, are way up there. They’re, they’re the only big tree. They’re doing well in the riparian areas and they support a lot of things. So oaks aren’t the only good tree. They’re just the best.
[00:16:43] Michael Hawk: The other thing that this always makes me wonder about is if we could rewind, you know, a hundred years, or, I don’t know, I guess a hundred years sort of works back when the chestnut was still prevalent and before Dutch Elm disease.
[00:16:59] And, you know, in more recent time, the, uh, problems with asht trees, do oaks still stand above, above the rest, even in that era or, um, like I, I just, I, I can’t really picture what the food web would’ve looked like back when we had this additional mixture in our forest. ,
[00:17:16] Doug Tallamy: right. You know, the host records, uh, that we use to make up these lists, many of them are quite old.
[00:17:23] They really do go back to those times more than a hundred, a hundred years old, uh, and un unless there were specialists that went extinct. And for the chestnut there, there were, there are at least seven species of caterpillars that disappeared with the, the chestnut. But seven’s, not very many chestnuts are related tos.
[00:17:41] They’re both in the fig ace E and they support it a lot. There are more records for oaks than for chestnuts. It’s probably not a fair comparison because. people weren’t looking that hard when there were a lot of chestnuts around, but you know, we still have chestnut sprouts all over the place, and, and there are, there are records.
[00:17:58] So, um, the best of our knowledge suggests that oaks were number one, even back then. Now, chestnuts were enormously important. in terms of producing the mast that supported many of the vertebrates, you know, or deer and Turkey and bears. And, and it was a good thing Oaks were around to, uh, produce acorns that kept those things hanging in there when the chestnuts disappeared.
[00:18:20] But it was a huge hit on, on the, the food web, not from the point of view of removing caterpillars, although it did. Uh, but from removing , you know, the, the nuts that those, those vertebrates depended on Elms support a lot as well, but, but not nearly as much. But their loss was, was also a hit. Ashes. There are 95 species that depend on ashes, so we lose the ashes.
[00:18:43] That’s 95 more species. The problem here is the cumulative effect of one after another. Uh, and now we’ve got sudden oak death syndrome. We’ve got oak wilt, we’ve got, uh, bacterial leaf scorch, all hitting oaks in different parts of the country. I don’t, it’s not the type of devastation that we saw with the chestnut light.
[00:19:02] At least not yet. Uh, and I hope it never is because boy, if we lose our oaks too, you know, , that will just. Talk about an ecological disaster. A lot of people say, well, you know, look, they’re getting sick. We’re not gonna plant oaks anymore. I, I say just the opposite plant more than ever because what we need to do is find resistance to these disease.
[00:19:23] And it does. The, the response of the oaks that are out there does suggest that there is resistance out there more than, than we saw with the chestnut blight. There’s even resistance to the emerald ash bore. Uh, there’s some, some resistant trees showing up in, in Michigan, uh, but it’s a very small percentage.
[00:19:39] And if you’ve never plant these things again, you’ve got, we gotta get as many genotypes out there in the, in nature as possible so that we can identify the resistant individuals and those are the ones that are gonna take over and it’s gonna be a whole lot easier if you do it before they all disappear than, uh, try to try to resurrect it like we’re doing with the, the chestnut.
[00:19:59] Michael Hawk: That’s a really interesting perspective because I think a lot of people probably look at the risk side of the equation more from a. Local optimization. Like, uh, I don’t want to plant a tree that’s gonna die. So they choose not to. Whereas the, the risk is probably actually greater to not plant the tree, the risk to the species as a whole.
[00:20:17] I, I, I hadn’t thought of it that way until just now. That’s for sure.
[00:20:21] Doug Tallamy: And you know, that tree’s gonna die. Maybe, maybe it’s gonna die in 50 years, 75 years. You can get a lot of, uh, good use outta that tree ecologically before it gets, it gets sick. So, yeah, we’re, I don’t like that
[00:20:35] Michael Hawk: approach. . Yeah. Yeah. And, and of course with the oaks, that’s, I mean, while there are cha, you know, diseases affecting oaks, it’s, it’s not the same.
[00:20:42] And, and I don’t think that’s even a, a consideration at this point, but what people tend to think about more with oaks is, uh, oh, they get too big, or they’re, they’re messy. We have to get over those considerations. I know you have great ways of framing that topic, uh, so I don’t wanna put words in your mouth.
[00:21:01] Uh, but, but how do you help people? See the bigger picture.
[00:21:04] Doug Tallamy: Well, first of all, we have a number of small oaks, particularly in the West. There are oaks that are ground covers. We need to get these into the, you know, the horticultural traits so the people can actually put them in their, their yards. So, uh, in the nature of oaks, I’ve got a list of small oaks, uh, in different parts of the country.
[00:21:22] So it is not a given that all oaks are going to take over your yard. It’s also not a given that all oaks grow so slowly. I hear people say, oh, I’m gonna, you know, I won’t live long enough to appreciate the oak. And they’re picturing these 400 years old oaks. And if you can only appreciate your oak when it’s 400 years old, you’re right, you’re not gonna live long enough.
[00:21:42] But, you know, I’ve got pictures of oaks that germinated that year, pin oaks that just popped their head above the leaves, and there’s caterpillar standing on the ground eating them. They start to contribute to your food wet immediately. So if I can, if we can. Get away from, or at least minimize people’s opinion of plants as being only decorations and realize that they are essential.
[00:22:06] You know, I talk about the keystone plants in, in this ecological house you’re building as being the two by four that hold up that house. They’re, you know, not optional. You gotta have ’em where the house falls down. You do not build a house out of wallpaper. But that’s the way we’ve been landscaping for a hundred years now.
[00:22:22] It’s gotta look nice. Oaks look nice. I mean, you know, a large oak is a wonderful thing to have, have in your yard. Are they messy? Holy moles. You know, life can be messy sometimes, but dead is not more attractive. We can pave over the the world. We can turn it all into lawn. We can wreck our ecosystems and go down the tubes.
[00:22:42] It’s just, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And I know where it comes from. It’s innate in us to beat back nature, to make it a safe place. Remember, for a long, long time, it was nature that killed us. The predators were hiding out there. The droughts wrecked our crops, you know, it was tough. And the people that beat back nature the best were the ones that spread their genes.
[00:23:03] Well, we’re beating it back real well now and forgetting that it’s nature that keeps us alive, you know, there’s gotta be a happy balance. Uh, so the messy argument, I understand where it comes from. There are cues for care that you can use in your, your yard that allow you to use a lot of native plants without it being all that messy and showing that you’re still a good citizen.
[00:23:26] You know, you’re, you’re, you’re meeting the neighborhood, uh, requirements for neatness, but it’s still a lot more productive. So we have to hit a happy balance. We are not balanced at this point, you know, we’re going, we’re, we’re headed in that direction. I, I do see good, good movement the last 10 years.
[00:23:42] Michael Hawk: It’s one of my best memories as a child.
[00:23:44] Were discovering acorns in the forest. So, you know, one of the things I think of when there’s a concern about messiness, of, uh, of an oak tree, it’s like, that is such a, a fun eye-opening, engaging experience to, to first look at an acorn and take it apart and see there’s a little hole in it, and wonder why is there this little hole?
[00:24:03] What did, where did that come from? And uh, and yeah, I guess it, it really just depends on how you value nature as a whole. Uh, I love the way you say it’s, you know, plants aren’t just decoration. And I think there’s a responsibility that goes along with plant choice. And yeah, you can have a few decorative plants, but, uh, I, I don’t want to turn my yard into an ecological trap where I’m attracting things and then there’s nothing for them to survive on.
[00:24:31] Doug Tallamy: You mentioned the word responsibility, and that’s such an important word. Every person on the planet requires healthy ecosystems. , not debatable. They all require healthy ecosystems. Why doesn’t everybody have the responsibility of keeping our ecosystems healthy? We’ve divided that up. We’ve got a few specialists, you know, a few ecologists, few conservation biologists.
[00:24:52] They’re supposed to take care of the earth. Everybody else has a green light to destroy it. It makes no sense at at all. Uh, because we depend on it. You know, we’re writing the hand that feeds us. So if you have the audacity to say, I own part of the earth, okay, long way that comes the responsibility of stewarding that part of the earth.
[00:25:11] And that means keeping a healthy food web that supports the other plants and animals that run the ecosystems that support us. Healthy ecosystems are not optional. They are essential. And everybody’s gotta make them. If we have them just in our parks and preserves, it’s not good enough. We gotta have them everywhere.
[00:25:30] So yeah, you’ve got a responsibility. And even if you don’t own part of the earth, you still have that responsibility. So help somebody who does help a park, help a preserve, help a a, a land conservancy. It is your responsibility as a member of this planet to keep it in working order. You know, when I was a child, I had hamsters and I had mice.
[00:25:53] You know, I’m raising things, and you observe how they live in their little cage, they had a little corner of the cage, and that’s where they went to the bathroom. They did not mess their nest. Well, if a mouse can figure it out, you don’t mess your nest. We ought to be able to figure that out. So far we’re, we’re not there.
[00:26:12] We’re messing our nest everywhere as if the nest is so big that it doesn’t matter. It does matter. , I’m sorry, I gotta just start ranting here when .
[00:26:22] Michael Hawk: No, I get it. Uh, and, and I do love the way you, you reframe some of these topics, especially because it seems so obvious the way you state it, and, and that’s a skill you have in your writing as well.
[00:26:33] You know, I mentioned the commentary on the use of non-native plants is decorations, which I, which, which, I just love that statement because it’s like, yeah, it really makes you think about what we’ve been optimizing for. And I’ve also heard you say that, you know, on this topic of responsibility, that doing the right thing isn’t a sacrifice.
[00:26:53] You can actually indulge. And there are so many beautiful, unique native plants, native oaks, that you just don’t see in other people’s yards because everybody, you know, again, I’m generalizing, but you know, so many of the same old roses and the same. Oleanders or, you know, whatever else are, are being grown.
[00:27:12] Uh, so I I, I think there’s, there’s a huge creative possibility here too when we start to actually look at the things that are sort of right outside our back door up in the hills or out on the prairie.
[00:27:23] Doug Tallamy: There definitely is, but keep in mind, most people do not garden at all. They hire somebody. So it’s our traditional horticulture trade, the mob blow and go guys who just put in the same plants everywhere.
[00:27:36] It’s cookie cutter and they do it because they’re hired to do it and they’ve always done it, and those plants are available and nobody’s thinking about ecological function. It’s this juggernaut that’s been going for decades. Uh, it doesn’t mean it has to be that way. The, the fancy gardeners are, are recognizing there’s a lot of possibility with native plants.
[00:27:55] But you know, most people are really busy, you know, doing their lies, but they’re not out gardening. Boy, when I first started this, somebody said, you know, you’re never, this is not gonna take off because it’s way too hard. People aren’t gonna do it. My first, first thing I thought of was, you know, what’s hard is figuring out your cell phone, all the apps and everything else, who can figure that out?
[00:28:16] Everybody apparently can, so it can’t be that that hard. Everybody except me, but I do get it, you know? Do you have to have all the natural history, knowledge and, and be a botanist and everything else to be able to use native plants? No, but most people don’t have that knowledge. For the non-natives too.
[00:28:30] They just hire somebody or they go to the nursery and they say, oh, here’s a pretty plant. I’ll buy it. If the productive plants were equally available in the nurseries, they, you know, they buy those too. It is a growing market right now, and nurseries are recognizing that. Mm-hmm. , they don’t have a a, a contract with Asia.
[00:28:47] It’s gotta be an Asian plant. They’re just selling what people have always bought. So when people start buying natives, they’ll sell them as well.
[00:28:54] Michael Hawk: Well, I guess a great thing that we could all do is when we visit the nursery is ask explicitly, where’s your native plant section? Uh, where do you keep your native plants?
[00:29:02] Doug Tallamy: And when they say, oh, we don’t have that, then you leave say, okay, bye. Don’t buy something else. You know, because you’ve gotta turn the mindset around. I understand that a nursery man does not want to carry plants that nobody’s gonna buy. So you have to convince them that they
[00:29:16] Michael Hawk: will. Mm-hmm. , there’s a branching point here.
[00:29:18] I love to hear more about your broader efforts to help property owners and homeowners. Uh, but I wanted to circle back on a couple more oak topics because you mentioned masking with respect to the chest. And I know that oaks have interesting masking behaviors. Can you tell me a bit about how that works?
[00:29:37] Why they work the way they do and what the importance is?
[00:29:41] Doug Tallamy: Uh, I will tell you how it works. Why it works is still a little bit up in, up in the air, but masking, of course, is, is the irregular production of, of acorns. Some years they make a whole bunch and they do it in a coordinated way, particularly within a group.
[00:29:56] So in 2019, in the east here, uh, the, all the members of the Red Oak group. had a mass from Massachusetts all the way down to Georgia. It’s a giant production of Acorns. Uh, so you know how they coordinate. Nobody knows.
[00:30:09] Michael Hawk: And that’s different species too, right? In the Red
[00:30:11] Doug Tallamy: Oak group? Within the Red Oak group.
[00:30:13] But they were different species, right? But then other years, they produce almost no acorns. So there’s four hypotheses about why they masked and, and the most popular one. And they’re not mutually exclusive either. Uh, they all could be happening at the same time. One is predator satiation. We’re gonna make all our egg corns at the same time and there simply won’t be enough egg corn, eight eaters out there so that there’ll be some leftover and would germinate new Blue Oaks.
[00:30:38] And along with that comes predator reduction. When you, when there is a mass year, the, the population of mice and acorn weevils and, and acorn moss, the things that depend on these acorns a lot, those populations explode. Well, if next year there’s almost no acorns, those populations crash and, and it’s usually several years.
[00:30:57] There’s very few egg corns before you have another mast year. And it keeps those egg corn eater populations much lower so that when there is a mass, it exceeds what those, those things can. Another hypothesis is oaks are wind pollinated and if they all produce, uh, a lot of pollen at the same time, which you need for a mask, it improves pollination.
[00:31:19] The wind pollinated plants, it’s all by chance does the wind blow the pollen to the right from the male part of the flower to the female part. That’s a hypothesis. Another one is energy allocation, that there’s not enough energy to go around. So some years oaks put the energy into growth and other years they put it into acorn production, but rarely do they have enough energy to do.
[00:31:39] all of those together have been offered as explanations for why they masked. And one question I get all the time is, when’s the next mask ? That’s the part that, that nobody is good at predicting. And it’s because it’s not just the amount of energy you might have all the energy you need to mask, but then the weather’s lassy.
[00:31:56] So if you have a late freeze or a really rainy period during when, when the male catkins are out, you won’t have a mass. It destroyed, uh, pollen, uh, spread at, at that point. I am intrigued by the size of the nine 2019 mast because the weather was not the same in Massachusetts all the way down to Georgia.
[00:32:15] So it wasn’t coordination with rain or cold or frost or any of the other things that could coordinate locally, but they masked it anyway. So that’s why I say people are still, they scratch their heads a little bit. We don’t know when the next mass is gonna be. I thought there’d be a white oak mass this year.
[00:32:31] Nope. Hardly anything out there. Everything was perfect, but there’s still not out there so. . Don’t ask me . Uh,
[00:32:38] Michael Hawk: it’s fascinating. And uh, I imagine there’s lots of people working on that, trying to devise studies, research, observation, to try to figure that out.
[00:32:49] Doug Tallamy: Well, you know, you’d be surprised what people are not working on, and it’s all because of funding.
[00:32:53] These are interesting questions, naturalistic questions, but it’s real tough to get, get natural history funded these days. People say, get your grad students to do it. Well, my grad students cost $30,000 a piece, you know, and somebody’s gotta fund that, and it’s got to be something that they care about. And natural history questions are not, you know, it’s all molecular these days.
[00:33:14] And, and that’s where the, the big money goes. So I actually would be surprised if anybody’s working on why, why Oaks?
[00:33:20] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Interesting. And a little bit disheartening , unfortunately. Uh, I, I maybe, you know, I was thinking as you were talking about that and the fact that there’s a synchrony across species within a group, across a large geographic range, sort of independent of weather.
[00:33:36] It was reminding me a little bit about the stories in the mainstream this year about the periodical cicadas. And, you know, they, you know, that’s a little different scenario because it’s, uh, you can time it pretty accurately to, uh, to the year and maybe, hopefully that has triggered a curiosity out there somewhere.
[00:33:54] And, uh, and someone’s gonna say, yeah, well what about those oaks? And, and go and, and do those studies.
[00:33:59] Doug Tallamy: Maybe, you know, the leading hypothesis is exactly the same. Why, why do cicadas spend 17 years underground? Because when they come out, there is no predator out there that’s numerous enough to be able to eat them all.
[00:34:12] So it’s predator, satiation, uh, you’re right, you can time it very well to the year. Um, we had a good, good cicada emergence at, at my house in, in, in Newark, Delaware, and this whole area this year. And, and I was impressed because 17 years ago there was an emergence and it wasn’t that good. And I, I said, oh boy, they’re, they’re decreasing.
[00:34:33] They’re gonna disappear. Everyone that came out in front of my building 17 years ago, the squirrel sat there and ate them. And I said, boy, this is gonna, this is the end of the cicadas. No . Somehow they, they laid enough eggs. There was a big emergence this year, and it was bigger than most people suspected.
[00:34:51] So, so they did well over the last 17 years. And that’s, you know, when anything’s doing well, uh, I That’s encouraging.
[00:34:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Great to hear. So one thing that’s really intrigued me about oaks is the fact that they support so many different gus or insect gulls, and I would be interested to hear your speculation, uh, onto why that would be the case.
[00:35:15] Doug Tallamy: That’s another, another tough question. There are about 5,000 species of CIP gus in the world. Most of them are associated with oaks. There’s, you know, it’s, it’s very fancy physiology to be able to produce, uh, a gall. People have likened gus to cancerous growths on plants, but I don’t like that analogy because cancers grow.
[00:35:35] I mean, tumors just keep growing in an uncontrolled way. Gus are, are extremely controlled and they grow in a very specific species specific way because of the hormones that the female wasp injects into the buds of the. The ma thematic tissue. The butt of an oak is like, like stem cells. You can make it into anything you want.
[00:35:57] And they inject, uh, hormones in different ways that create the shape and the size of this species specific gall. So it’s, it’s highly defined. You can identify what species of wasp it was that made the gall just by the shape of the gall. Why there are more gulls on oaks. I guess the ability to manipulate Gaul masto tissue is just easier than with other plants.
[00:36:20] I’m totally guessing at this point. Uh, but it was an, an evolutionary path that took off. There was an awful lot of speciation, and it’s not just the gallers that are on oaks. It’s the parasitoids associated with the gallers because cip GWAS support more species of natural enemies. Parasitoids, other species of was towas and a number of other families than any other type of insects.
[00:36:45] Why is that? I’m not sure about that either. They’re sitting ducks, you know, they don’t move. So they’re an easy target. Uh, and much of the morphology of the gall is designed to protect the galler within that gall from its natural enemies on the outside. Uh, so it’s some very clever things there. There’s a galler you can have a goal with, with 10 different chambers.
[00:37:07] And the galls, only guer is only in one of those chambers. The other nine are empty. So , the gall, the parasitoid has to figure out which one it is. It’s got a one in 10 chance of hitting it right. The distance. Most of the galls often hollow, so the galler is right in the center of the gall, and there’s a big space between where the galler is and the outside of the gall.
[00:37:28] And that space is designed to separate. The Parasitoids with their OPOs from the galler. It’s a bigger space than any parasitoid can reach with its opoter. So as the galls growing, which it grows very quickly in the beginning, that’s the only time it’s vulnerable to parasitoids because it’s the only time their opoter can actually reach the, the galler.
[00:37:49] So lots of interesting things there, and it does happen on other plants. Rose c uh, supports a number of gallers, but oaks more than anything else. And, and why that is? I, I don’t know, ,
[00:38:00] Michael Hawk: I think finding gulls is a ton of fun. I love to go out looking for ’em because some of them can be just really beautiful and ornately shaped.
[00:38:07] And then when you think about the life history that’s going on there in that little, I like to call it like a little castle for the larva, uh, that the plants created based on this injection. So you said something that, that I hadn’t really thought about before is when, when I find galls, sometimes the gulls are on a leaf.
[00:38:26] They may be like on the midrib of the leaf or, or something like that. Sometimes they may be at the junction on the stem. They’re, they’re stem gus as well. Uh, in every case. Is the hormonal injection occurring on the bud, or, or are they able to induce this growth on more mature tissues?
[00:38:44] Doug Tallamy: No, it always is an, an undifferentiated matic tissue.
[00:38:49] So this very brief period during, uh, the season of, uh, uh, you know, oak growth, that they’re vulnerable to gallers. It’s, you know, it’s, and it takes about five minutes for the female to lay an egg in the, in the gala. So it’s a very brief period of time, just as those buds are, are expanding. Uh, and I have felt very fortunate that it’s always been a goal to go out and find a, a guer when it’s laying its eggs.
[00:39:14] Uh, I’ve done it, I’ve done it twice just because I walk outside and look at my buds. frequently in, in April, but very easy to miss then. A lot of oaks have a second period of growth, and maybe early July, depends on where you live. And it’s not nearly as big, but there’s a second flush, and that’s another time that they’re vulnerable to galls.
[00:39:34] Uh, most gallers have two generations a year and, uh, it’s called alternation of generations. So the first generation is parthenogenetic, meaning there’s no males. All females produce they reproduce without, without mating. The second generation is sexual. So there are males and females, and what’s interesting is the gall produced by the first generation looks entirely different from the gall produced by the second generation.
[00:39:58] And the galler within the gall looks entirely different from the galler from the first generation. I’m still amazed that those early taxonomists ever figured out that they were, they were dealing with the same species because both the gall and the was look entirely different. But it is the same species.
[00:40:14] So it is really incredible. And they didn’t
[00:40:16] Michael Hawk: have DNA to help them . They didn’t have dna. That’s right. . Yeah. It, it really is fascinating and it’s one of those things that I like to use Gus as a hook for people that maybe are overlooking nature, just to kind of open their eyes about the complexity and the, uh, and the nuance that exists.
[00:40:33] And it’s a little counterintuitive to some, because yeah, a lot of people, when they think of insects, they, they kind of have like a, a gut adverse reaction to that. What I try to do is I, I try to find the prettiest reddest. Looking berry of a gu or a leaf just covered in these, and I don’t even tell them what it is and, and just ask like, what do you think this is?
[00:40:58] And take it that direction. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun to see the different reactions that people have when they see this.
[00:41:04] Doug Tallamy: Yeah. Another aside about gala is they played a very important part in our cultural written history because, uh, particularly in Europe, although we have the same gall here, there’s a gall that if you grind it up into powder and you add particular chemicals, it turns into a black ink.
[00:41:22] And that was the ink that recorded history was written on for, for, you know, more than a thousand years. The Bible was written with Ga ink. The Magna Carta was written with Ga ink. You know, all the scribes during the Middle Ages used GA ink. The Declaration of Independence used GA ink, so you know, it. We wouldn’t know what was happening with humans if we didn’t have those Gauls making that ink.
[00:41:45] Interesting. Yeah.
[00:41:46] Michael Hawk: Yeah. I had no idea. And, and if those goals didn’t exist, it would probably be some inferior ink that just, you know, went invisible over time and all those stuff gives me lost . Yeah. Fascinating stuff. And, and as I was telling you a little bit earlier, I am still attempting to get a gall person or have a gall centric show and I, I look forward to that in the future.
[00:42:09] So to the listeners, bear with me. I’m working on it. So, you know, the other thing when I think of you, aside from your latest book is just the advocacy you have for personal properties and treating them as habitat. And we started to get into that a little bit earlier, but you’ve coalesced a lot of this into this interesting project called Homegrown National Park.
[00:42:31] Can you tell me what that is? Right.
[00:42:34] Doug Tallamy: You can look at government websites to see how land use is, is, uh, distributed across the country. And between 46 and 48% of the country is in some form of agriculture. So that leaves 54%, which I call the urban suburban matrix. So it’s this matrix of cities and suburbs in all our developed area, all our hardscape and dotted in there, all those little parks of preservers, those little, you know, little patches of woods.
[00:42:58] And so it’s a huge part of the country that is not protected. It’s in this matrix of land use. In 2005, uh, there was a study that said we had 40 million acres of, of lawn in this country, which is bigger than the size of New England. That was 2005. That figure has not been updated. So you know, it’s more than 40 million acres now.
[00:43:20] And I remember sitting at my kitchen table and I read that and I said, well, what would happen if we cut that area in half? So if everybody took half the area of lawn they have and planted it, um, how big an area that would that be, would that be 20 million acres worth? And I started to add up the area of all the big national parks in the country.
[00:43:39] and even through in areas like the Adirondacks, not a national park, but it’s a big area. So Yellowstone, Yosemite, you know, the s Smokey Denali, all these things, you add ’em up. Still less than 20 million acres. So I said, well, gee, we’d have the biggest national park in the country. We could call it Homegrown National Park if everybody cuts their grass in half.
[00:43:59] And that’s how I came up with the idea. That was a long time ago, and I talked about it in my talks, but it wasn’t until I wrote Nature’s Best Hope that I actually made a chapter out of it. So, uh, it was a chapter called Homegrown National Park, how we need to, to work together in order to preserve this, this, you know, 20 million acres that right now is in an ecological dead scape.
[00:44:20] There are four things that every piece of property has to do. You’ve gotta manage the watershed, you’ve gotta support a food web, you’ve gotta support pollinators, and you’ve gotta sequester carbon. Long is the worst plant choice for all of those. Uh, so boy, we can do, we can do better. And that’s what motivated this idea of homegrown National Park.
[00:44:38] Before Covid, I gave talks all over the place and there was a woman, Michelle Berry, sitting in the audience who had just retired from some kind of marketing job in Manhattan. She’d lived 40 years in Manhattan. She was not the choir. So her friend had taken her to this talk. She came up to me afterwards.
[00:44:57] She said, you gotta talk to the non-core here. You gotta get beyond the people who are already on board if you’re gonna realize homegrown National Park. And I said, yeah, people have told me that in the past. I said, but I’m not a social media guy. You know, I, my plate is full. I just can’t do it. And she said, I’ll do it.
[00:45:15] So, so finally I said, okay, cuz other people have suggested that. And, and she has, she created this, you know, our website, homegrown national park.org, this idea of getting on the map. So there’s this map of the US and you can go to your county and your area put in where you know the information of where you are and the amount of area you’re going to plant in natives, or you already have and protected.
[00:45:38] And then we see this national effort to reach the 20 million acre, uh, goal of cutting the area of lawn in, in half. The idea is to raise awareness among people who don’t understand that their property is important piece of the future of conservation. Uh, it’s to motivate people, it’s to make it easy, give them, give them, uh, ways to get started and help them stay engaged.
[00:46:01] And so far we have, I guess we’re up to 9,000 people who are on the map. Not quite at 20 million acres yet, but we’re, we’re working on that. So, you know, I, she, she said, oh, this is gonna work great. And I had, I had lots of doubts. , but somewhere she’s, she’s more or less right. The biggest problem now is it’s too successful because it’s way more than she can handle and I can’t handle it.
[00:46:22] And you know, it, it’s this, it’s a nonprofit that needs the support of a real nonprofit, and that means generating money and everything else. But the concept is working people. When the, when people read these scary headlines about all the, you know, the biodiversity decline and I say, there’s something you can do about it.
[00:46:40] They get excited. It, it empowers them and it empowers them in doable ways. You know, what could one person do? One person can shrink their lawn. One person can get rid of their invasive plants. One person can, can turn out their lights. That’s a major cause of insect declines at night. One person can put in a pollinator garden.
[00:46:59] One person can do that on their property and really revitalize their little local ecosystem. Enhance their real local ecosystem rather than degrade it. Because right now the way we landscape degrades everything around us and that one person becomes an a really important part of the future of conservation.
[00:47:18] That’s the idea. Bet behind homegrown national part.
[00:47:22] Michael Hawk: I love the idea for a bunch of reasons and it reminds me of when I first read Nature’s Best Hope. You know, I didn’t know what to expect. I was actually afraid it was gonna be a doom and gloom sort of story and it was actually very inspirational. While, yeah, there’s some hard statistics and some hard facts in there.
[00:47:40] You do a wonderful job of weaving in. Now this is what we can do about it to that narrative and my own personal story I was telling you just a, a bit about it was, uh, you know, I’ve always been interested in. But I’ve like so many people, I would go somewhere else to experience nature. I’d go on a hike or, or go on a trip even and go out of state.
[00:48:00] But then when covid hit, okay, I still need to get outside, you know? So I would go in my backyard and started paying more attention to my birds. And then I noticed these little flies and I said, what are these things? Oh, they’re hover, fl. And wow, they’re really beautiful. They, they have these ornate patterns and they’re beneficial.
[00:48:19] And, you know, one thing led to another and pretty quickly I realized that all the action was centered around just a couple of native plants. Uh, and for me, California coffee berry is sort of the all-star of my backyard. Uh, I haven’t actually taken the time to tabulate the number of species I’ve seen associated with it, but it’s easily over a hundred.
[00:48:38] And, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. It, it turned the light bulb on for me personally, despite having heard messages about the importance. But I could see firsthand that I was helping establish connectivity for insects, food sources. I found Leaf miners, I found Gus, you know, all of these different things that I thought only existed out somewhere else right here in the yard.
[00:49:03] Doug Tallamy: Another common question I get. My yard’s so small, you know, it’s too small to do any of the things you’re talking about, and there’s no doubt that the bigger the area we address, the, the more effective it’s going to be. But your yard’s attached to another yard, which is attached to another yard, if you are the only person in the country that does this, you’re absolutely right, won’t work.
[00:49:24] But the goal is to actually get to a tipping point, a threshold where it becomes the normal approach to landscaping rather than the outlier approach. So that people who might be reluctant, uh, in the beginning will do it just because they wanna be like their neighbors. We want to fit in. And you see this in California, you know, with the long conversion programs just because of the lack of water.
[00:49:48] You know, now the guy with the big green lawn is the pariah because, you know, you don’t have the water for that lawn. Whereas the, the, you know, well-designed Zurich landscape is obviously the future. So you can tip it, you can tip it pretty, pretty quickly. That change was made simply because of the lack of water.
[00:50:05] But, uh, if we understand the lack of biodiversity is not helping us, we can do the same thing. You
[00:50:11] Michael Hawk: mentioned a few of the impediments that homeowners might have in reducing their lawns. In particular, it doesn’t match the traditional like 1950s, 1960s societal view of what a yard should be. And in fact, a lot of the times, yard and lawn are used interchangeably, which kind of shows how people think about it.
[00:50:28] Mm-hmm. . And there’s also the dependency on pesticides in most long care and the corresponding fear that insects might come along if you stop the pesticide use. So what do you think of that? Is that a real fear that people should have? .
[00:50:44] Doug Tallamy: Oh, it’s a real, it’s a, it’s a real fear. Uh, it’s unfounded, but, uh, homeowners use a tremendous amount of pesticides.
[00:50:52] Look at the pesticides available in the hardware store. Just walk down the aisles, you know, product after product, your product, how you can kill all the insects in your yard, in your house. We hire Mosquito Joe to, to drive down our street and fog everything, which kills everything, not just mosquitoes, uh, because we saw Spider , the Spider Eats, mosquitoes, you know,
[00:51:14] So, so the fear is, is real for the most part. It’s unfounded. There’s really only one insect that homeowners need to worry about, depending on where you live. And that’s termites. Termites really do eat your house, and you really do need to control them. Everything else is, it’s anthropophobia, you know, I saw an insect, or I saw a spider, so I have to kill it.
[00:51:36] why is that? You know, it’s not gonna hurt you. It’s our cultural perception of arthropods. Look what happens when the, the giant Asian Hornor Hornet comes to Washington state. It’s labeled the murder hornet. They don’t call it that in Asia. You know, it’s just sensationalism. It really hasn’t murdered anybody.
[00:51:54] Um, and that’s the perception that the media gives us about nature all the time. It’s gonna hurt you in some way. So we have to get past that. We have to stop demonizing it and realize that we can’t live without it. People. , you know, they, they don’t wanna use Roundup to control, uh, an an invasive plant, but they have no problem at all with hiring mosquito Joe or coating their house with insecticides because something might be in there.
[00:52:20] Um, they live in this envelope of poison. They fertilize their lawn, not realizing that there’s a blood leaf, uh, herbicide in that fertilizer that kills all, everything except grass. We live in, in an environment of poisons and don’t seem to mind that. And it’s mostly, it’s out of, out of ignorance. And that’s why I, I write the books trying to get past, uh, the, you know, the myths and, uh, all the, the social paranoia that’s out there with a few.
[00:52:48] A few facts. I think it’s, I think it’s working, you know, it’s real hard to change culture, but I do see, I see change. I’m gonna look at this. You’re doing a podcast with me. This wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago, . It really wouldn’t have.
[00:52:59] Michael Hawk: And I’m, I’m still just ecstatic that, uh, that I’m talking to you, to that point.
[00:53:03] So thank you again. I was just thinking as you were describing this, I was visiting some relatives just a few weeks ago and pointing out some of the interesting things in their property. And, uh, I don’t you to remember which plant it was, but, but I found the plant and I was like, oh, wow, cool. Look at this.
[00:53:18] There’s a leaf roller in here. And, and there were a bunch of ’em actually. And so I pointed it out and I won’t name the, the person that they’re like, oh yeah, it’s time for me to spray again. Like, what? , that wasn’t my point. .
[00:53:33] Doug Tallamy: Well, people, people ha have this idea that if anything touches a plant, plant’s gonna die.
[00:53:40] I have a part of an old talk actually, where I, I walked around the oak that I feature in, in the, uh, oak book, the white Oak company front yard. And I count the caterpillars on the lower branches. I think, I think it was 410. It was 410 caterpillars just on the lower branches, not climbing ladders or anything else like this.
[00:53:58] And then I stood back and took a picture of the tree and I said, can you see any of those caterpillars? Not one. Do you see any caterpillar damage? No. And that’s the distance that we view our trees from. We we’re not up inspecting every single leaf because you will see some holes in the leaves. But it’s, it is normal for these plants to pass on their energy to support all of this biodiversity.
[00:54:20] And if they don’t, you have a dead landscape. There’s a woman in, in, uh, new Orleans, TA Baumgart, who suggests that we practice the 10 step program. Everybody should take 10 steps back from their plants and all their insect problems disappear then. And I think it’s, it’s excellent advice because it’s in our minds that there’s a problem.
[00:54:39] There really isn’t.
[00:54:41] Michael Hawk: Some of my most interesting backyard observations have been, say, I’ll notice a small aphid outbreak somewhere. It doesn’t take long. You know, the aphid just suddenly are there. And then I’ll come back a couple days later and look and they’ll all be gone and, you know, what do I see?
[00:54:59] Maybe some aphid carcasses, some wash, some parasitoid wash found them. Uh, or in other cases, kind of in the intermediate step, I find lace wing eggs just all around the aphid outbreak. So when those eggs hatch, the larva are there with a few days of meal for them. So it’s sort of as, as self-correcting if you just let it.
[00:55:22] Doug Tallamy: and if you had sprayed, you would’ve killed all those predators first. Mm-hmm. , , nakeds are far more resistant to the spray than the predators are in the parasitoids. And then you have to keep spraying cuz you have no natural enemy. Yeah.
[00:55:34] Michael Hawk: So there’s a bit of a leap of faith to, to stop the spraying and let things normalize.
[00:55:40] And it might, it may take a couple cycles.
[00:55:42] Doug Tallamy: Well, it ties in with the perception that you have that, that plants are decorations. You don’t want anything to touch your decoration or it won’t be perfect, but that’s not real life, you know? And, and the object is to have a balanced ecosystem in your yard where you’ve got the plants that support the herbivores, but then those herbi wars support the natural enemies.
[00:56:01] And in the long run with a couple blips here and there, it will stay in, in balance. Your yard will not be defoliated and it will support life.
[00:56:10] Michael Hawk: So does Homegrown National Park, does the website offer any pointers for people to, who maybe are searching for native plants? Uh, or is it more of a tracking resource?
[00:56:20] Doug Tallamy: Well, it’s definitely a tracking, uh, resource. Problem with recommending where to get your plants is that changes mm-hmm. all around the country in, in, in a very fine scale manner. But I, I will say that the, uh, national Wildlife Federation is doing exactly that now. They’re working on a resource that will direct people to the closest source of, of native plants and make it a lot, lot easier.
[00:56:44] So that information is, is out there and will be more out there in the near future, certainly than it was in the past where it, it could be a, a bit of a challenge to find
[00:56:52] Michael Hawk: these plants here in California. The California Native Plant Society has, uh, a really nice website where you can find what grows locally and you can search based on a lot of parameters.
[00:57:03] And then they also link to native plant growers. I haven’t found such a good resource elsewhere, other than like, I think Audubon Society can help you identify some plants based on your zip code. Uh, but that doesn’t tell you where to buy ’em. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s extra effort. And I guess that’s the next.
[00:57:19] Frontier in this problem space is making it more of a seamless sort of, uh, endeavor to go find the plants and get the plants and also have some assurance that they aren’t pre-treated with pesticides. .
[00:57:31] Doug Tallamy: Yeah, that’s a challenge as well. I wanna second your, your shout out to the California Native Plant Society and their tool, which is called Cal.
[00:57:39] It is by far the best in the country in terms of, of identifying what plants you should be putting in your yard. They’ve got every single species of plant in California geo-located, so you can pull up the species and look at exactly where it grows. California has so many biomes, you know, it depends on, on where you are in the state, whether you’re on the right or the left side of the, of the mountain, how, how high you are because the plant-like changes totally, very quickly.
[00:58:06] So this is invaluable in helping people find out what they should be putting in their yard. And there’s no other state that has that research at that level. So, um, it’s a, it’s a great thing they have done.
[00:58:17] Michael Hawk: So to wrap things up, uh, I just have a couple of quick questions that I like to ask a lot of my guests and you know, one is in all of your outreach efforts over the years, through the, through your talks, presentations, what have you found?
[00:58:33] You know, maybe, maybe there’s one or two or three, I don’t know, but what have you found to be most effective in helping people sort of move up that ladder of ecological care? Like, it, it could be somebody who has been oblivious and now suddenly they’re engaged. Or it could be somebody who’s already highly engaged and now they’re, they’re volunteering their time and taking it to the next level.
[00:58:53] Like, have you found any tools or stories or, or anything else that’s,
[00:58:59] Doug Tallamy: I try to use, uh, every tool and story I can think of because people are different. Most people do not like insects. Uh, most people have never thought about caterpillars. I’ve had people sit in the unis. I could still remember a lady sitting in the front row and every time I showed a picture of a caterpillar, she covered her eyes and said, you know, I will not look at it.
[00:59:17] You know, so that’s a big barrier to, to overcome. So I don’t call them caterpillars, I call them bird food, and that changes everyth. because there’s like 70 million people in the country that feed the birds. They care about what the birds have to eat and they, everybody thinks birds eat seeds and berries, period.
[00:59:33] They said no. They actually eat insects when, particularly when they’re reproducing. And you can’t put the insect feeder out there except you can, you call it a plant. And it makes it, and all of a sudden they say, oh, like, okay, now I see that my plant actually is doing something, so I try to use hooks, bird.
[00:59:49] You know, birds are a definite hook lately, really, these terrible headlines that people are seeing are been, have been huge motivating factors. I have been surprised when the, the headline about insect apocalypses here, they’re, you know, we’ve lost 45% of the insects planet Earth. I didn’t think anybody would care.
[01:00:07] I really didn’t. But I got emails right away from around the country. This is terrible. What can we do? What can we do? I said, wow, okay. You care about this. There are things you can do. You know, major cause of insect decline is like pollution at night. Turn out your light. It’s pretty easy. Identifying what is bothering them is a motivating factor, but it, it differs.
[01:00:30] And, um, you know, I, it was easier when I was traveling around giving talks and I could watch the audience and see what they reacted to because it’s, I can’t do that on Zoom. I’m staring at myself, you know, and that’s the way it’s been for the last year and a half. And try to gauge, you know, what is it that’s, uh, getting their attention.
[01:00:48] But that’s the goal. Find, find a hook that, we’ll, we’ll bring them in. I do tell a story in, in the book about the woman I interacted with, and her father was definitely non-core. He had the perfect yard. His, his goal in life was to keep up with the Joneses. His yard had to be, his lawn had to be better and perfect.
[01:01:05] And every plant was non-native. And it was all about show. Uh, make a long story short, uh, she got involved in trying to save the monarch and she kept asking him to watch her kids as she went off and worked on Monarch, Monarch watch and all these projects. And finally he said, what are you doing with the Monarch?
[01:01:21] He said, you know, you know, they’re disappearing and planning milkweeds and everything else. So he said, well, why don’t you put some milkweeds in here along the back fence? She said, whoa. Okay. So she put in a whole row of milkweeds in the back fence, and he started to, to immediately the monarchs came and he called, there’s a monarch.
[01:01:38] It’s laying eggs. You know, I think we need more milkweeds here, . So simply knowing that what was supposed to happen with this plant and then watching it happen, All of a sudden he didn’t care about the Joneses anymore. He wanted more milkweeds, he wanted to help the monarch, and he, he was hooked in that case.
[01:01:52] So it depends on, on the person. But I love that story because he’s the last person I would’ve thought would be moved by the Monarch, but he was. So
[01:02:01] Michael Hawk: that’s a great story. And it just shows sort of the magic of larval food plants. We somehow, the insects find them, and then when it’s a charismatic one, like a monarch, you know, all the better.
[01:02:11] And, and it also, at the same time, I’m, I’m sitting here and it’s always bothered me that it’s called milkweed. Like that is just not an appealing name at all. But these are beautiful, intricate plants and they, they do a lot more than just support monarchs too. They’re, they’re good plants. ,
[01:02:27] Doug Tallamy: we call so many of our native plants weeds.
[01:02:29] And then we wonder why people don’t plant . Right. No pie, weed, New York, iron weed, uh, they’re all, they’re all weeds. And that’s because when the Europeans came over, we farmed very differently. Native Americans farmed, not with monocultures. They had everything growing together, including the, you know, the native plants.
[01:02:46] Everything was native back then. That would come up right in the middle of the corn and everything else. Well, the Europeans know we gotta get rid of all that. And anything that grew in your, your agricultural field was labeled a we, and that’s how they got those names. They were all good native plants. Um, so I don’t, I don’t talk about milkweeds, I talk about monarch’s delight.
[01:03:04] I’ve renamed it, you know, Alan and . Perfect. It’s, it’s a psychological game, but uh, all of a sudden it’s okay.
[01:03:11] Michael Hawk: That’s one of your superpowers is the reframing. I, I see it time and time again and I’m trying to learn how about other projects. Do you have anything else upcoming that you’d like to highlight?
[01:03:20] Anything to point people towards or, or your online presence? Like where can people follow what you’re
[01:03:25] Doug Tallamy: up to? , well, I’m getting old, but probably the biggest goal that we have in, in our lab at this point is one of the things that is, has taken us down the road we’ve gone is recognizing the difference between different native plants and their productivity, discovering this keystone plant concept.
[01:03:44] So we, we know at the Keystone plants are for North America, but that’s it. We don’t know what they’re for any other place in the world. I can’t go to England and say, here’s a list of plants that you really need to start favoring in your restorations. I can’t do that in Brazil. I can’t do that in Germany or Australia because we, you know, nobody’s put that list together, the information’s in the literature, but it’s, you know, it’s a big job.
[01:04:08] Anyway, that’s what I would like to tackle, that I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a helper who, who’s made the list so far. She knows how to do it quickly, but she needs support to be able to do that. But th you know this, this way, the entire planet will know. We cannot plant eucalyptus everywhere. , sorry to refer to that.
[01:04:23] You are in California. Mm-hmm. . But, um, you know, it’s a plant that does well, uh, it does well everywhere, but it supports things in Australia and only in Australia. So, you know, when you look at the statistics in Portugal, it’s something crazy. Like 70% of Portugal forests are eucalyptus. They’re not forests, you know, they’re tree farms that are, that are not supporting anything.
[01:04:47] And India is covered with eucalyptus and so on and on and on. You gotta give ’em the information. These are the most important plants. If you want to help biodiversity, we’ve got these trillion tree projects to, to help, uh, climate change. , that could be great if they plant the right plants. So they need that information.
[01:05:06] That’s a big goal. Learning how to landscape underneath the trees we put in our yards is another really important thing because the caterpillars that are run running, our food webs drop from the trees to complete their lifecycle. They’ve got a wiggle their way underneath the ground. If pupate or they spin a cocoon in the leaf litter that’s under the tree, and in most cases the ground is so compacted.
[01:05:26] There is no leaf litter in its mode and trample and everything else that we’ve created. Ecological traps. The caterpillars develop in the trees and they drop down and and die. That’s easily fixed if we just recognize, you know, we’ve gotta do this. So, you know, this is one of the things we know it’s happening, but nobody’s measured the extent to which it’s killing the caterpillars and what happens when you change landscaping.
[01:05:47] So that’s another project. I’d like to, got a bunch of papers where you’ve already done the, the projects. We’ve gotta write them up, but you know, Spending a lot of time doing this and not that. Mm-hmm. .
[01:05:58] Michael Hawk: Well, it’s a lot of great work and I’ll, I’ll definitely point in the show notes, links to the things that we’ve talked about.
[01:06:05] Anywhere else you want me to, for that matter, uh, so that people can find out what you’re, what you’re working on at, uh, at the university.
[01:06:11] Doug Tallamy: Our important papers are on homegrown national park.dot org. That’s the, uh, the center of activity right now. So you can get pretty much what you want there.
[01:06:20] Michael Hawk: All right.
[01:06:20] So I think with that we can wrap things up. It’s been really enjoyable. I hope you’ve had a good time as well. Yep.
[01:06:25] Doug Tallamy: These are fun. Thanks for the opportunity. Okay.
[01:06:28] Michael Hawk: Thank you.
