Ginny Urch (2:28)

One of the things you'd said in Nature's Best Hope, which is a phenomenal book, it's very interesting. The pictures in all of your books are so cool too. I mean, they're gorgeous, gorgeous photos in all of the books. They're in all of them. But you are talking about how a lot of us, when we look out of our windows, I thought this was such a big statement. We don't see anything move. When you look out your window, nothing moves. And one of the things that you talk about is how we don't even really know any different. What should we be seeing out there?

Douglas Tallamy (2:57)

Yeah, that's called. What's it called? Having a senior mommy. We tend to think that shifting baseline. We tend to think that the way things were when we were kids is the way they've always been in the way they always should be. So if you're born into a world where nothing moves in your yard, you think that's normal. So you don't miss it at all. What should we be seeing? We should be seeing birds. We should be seeing squirrels. I see deer all the time. We should be seeing a functional ecosystem. The one thing that you're probably not going to see are all the insects that make that ecosystem function. They're the food that birds need to reproduce. You don't have the insects, you don't have the birds. If you don't have the right plants, you don't have the insects. We've got this war against insects. If somebody actually sees a caterpillar, they call the exterminator. Got to kill it. Make sure that there's nothing alive in our yard. That's a recipe for disaster in the future. And that's what we're trying to turn around here.

Ginny Urch (3:52)

One of my favorite paragraphs was when you wrote and I typed out part of it, but not the whole thing. You wrote. I for one am greedy when it comes to enjoying nature. I want Carolina chickadees in my yard, but I also want cardinals, titmice, blue jays and Carolina wrens. I want red bellied and downy woodpeckers, white breasted nuthatches, yellow warblers. It keeps going. That's where I stopped typing. I just put the page number. Kentucky warblers, robins, wood thrushes, ovenbirds and indigo buntings. And I'm so greedy that I also want bluebirds, catbirds Common yellowthroats, Great crested flycatchers, Yellow Billed Cuckoos, Mockingbirds, Eastern Kingbirds, Field Sparrows, Chipping Sparrows and Grasshopper sparrows. I love that dream. I thought that was such a wonderful, remarkable picture of what it could be.

Douglas Tallamy (4:41)

And I didn't just make up those things. Those are birds that actually occur in our yard because we put the plants back. When we moved in our yard, it was part of a farm, been mowed for hay. Almost nothing here. So it's an example of what will come to your yard. I mean, we have 10 acres, so most people aren't going to have that many species of birds. But you can have a lot if your neighbor does it too, and their neighbor does it too. All of a sudden you get 10 acres again and then all of those things are making a living right where you, you live and you get to enjoy nature.

Ginny Urch (5:13)

So talk to us then about the lawns, because you had a lot of information to hear about the lawns, a lot of information about how much time we're spending on our lawns and how much water our lawns are consuming and also the pesticides. There's three sort of big things. According to the EPA, we Americans spend more than 3 billion collective hours per year maintaining our lawns. What could we be doing instead?

Douglas Tallamy (5:36)

You know, not only that, it's the biggest irrigated crop in the country. We spend more water on lawns than any other crop. The fourth thing that you didn't mention is what the lawn is not doing. There are four ecological goals that every landscape has. Every landscape has to support a food web. In other words, you've got to. That's that living ecosystem we're talking about. It all starts with food created by plants. Every landscape has to sequester carbon. Those plants are built out of carbon dioxide that they pull out of the atmosphere out of harm's way. So the more plants you have, the more you're helping climate change. Every landscape has to manage the watershed in which it lies. And every landscape has to support a complex community of pollinators. Lawn does none of those things. So it's a failure in terms of ecological goals. You know, I mentioned we got 40 million acres of lawn where the latest figure I saw is 44 million acres of lawn. It keeps going up. And that's an area bigger than New England that is not performing the ecological roles we need it to perform.

Ginny Urch (6:37)

So it's taking our time. 3 billion collective hours per year maintaining our lawns. It's taking the water. The statistic says Lawn irrigation consumes an average more than 8 billion gallons of water daily. 30% of all water used during the summer in the east and 60% in the west. 32 gallons of water every day for every man, woman and child in the country. And then also there's the pesticide piece, which we've actually not talked about too much on this show. We've talked about pesticides in crops, but we haven't talked about pesticides in the lawn. Can we talk about that real quick? Like for people who are spraying for what, dandelions and things like that.

Douglas Tallamy (7:14)

There's that the lawn industry says you have to have. You can't have any, quote, weeds, so you can't have anything that blooms that actually would help pollinators. So there's herbicides in this. This typically, it's a fertilizer mix that contains herbicides. It's called weed and feed. So it weeds your lawn at the same time as putting in fertilizer. And typically, we put down more than it needs. So when it rains, most of that washes off into our watershed, and that's where pollution comes from. And then on top of that, we mow the lawn every week. And that puts pollution into the air. I mean, that's more carbon dioxide back into the air. So not only are we not pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, we're adding it.

Ginny Urch (7:54)

Yeah. So that the book really sheds light on what's going on with our lawns. You wrote 40% of the chemicals used by the lawn care industry are banned in other countries because they are carcinogens. 75 studies have documented the connection between lawn pesticides and lymphoma, where pets and children are at the most risk because they roll around in the grass and they're running in their bare feet and that type of thing. So these are a lot of parents listening in. Your solution is cut half of it.

Douglas Tallamy (8:23)

Before we leave that. If I can interrupt you. Yeah, after you put this, you know, Scott's Turf Builder and other products on your. Your property. It says stay off the lawn, don't walk on the lawn, or take your shoes off before you go inside. You know how long you're supposed to do that? The rest of the season. That's how long your lawn is toxic. It's not just for one day. And again, yeah. Our kids and our pets are rolling around on the lawn. It's not safe. And we're doing that because it's a status symbol. There's no good reason to be doing this. We've got to change our Status symbols. So, yes, we use the area. I say cut it in half. We're not going to eliminate it. We call it a cue for care. It's part of our culture. And if you don't manicure your lawn, you're not a good citizen. That's the culture. We're going to manicure our lawn. We're just going to have less of it. We'll have strips of lawn along the sidewalk or the driveway and surrounding our flower beds, you know, little swaths of grass that you can use to move through your property. But wall to wall carpeting of lawn is not necessary. And that's where you have all those harmful inputs.

Ginny Urch (9:32)

One of the things that you talked about, too, that I didn't know about at all was that there was actually, I learned a whole lot of things in this book, but. And these two kind of go hand in hand. One was there was this sort of misnomer that, let's say, and we're in Michigan, so especially, I mean, certainly here, there's a lot of times when you're driving, let's say, on the highway, and you're just passing trees, trees, trees. And so what you said is that. And I guess I would feel this way too, you have this impression that those trees go forever, that you're driving by these woods and you think, oh, but you say, no, sometimes it's just a couple yards or you just can't quite see, and it's not that much. And also, that is similarly in terms of, like, how far it goes. It matters this sort of connected nature, because what's happening is that the creatures, like maybe a turtle or something like that, it's called habitat fragmentation, where they can't go from spot to spot. So can you talk about why that's important?

Douglas Tallamy (10:32)

Well, if you have a little habitat that's isolated by lawns and agriculture and roads and cities and everything else, then all the things that live in that habitat have to stay there. And if it's small, they're going to be small populations. There won't be very many turtles, There won't be very many katydids or anything else. And that's the problem. Small populations are vulnerable to local extinction because all populations fluctuate. When times are good, they go up. When times are bad, they go down. And if you're a small population, often in those bad times, so for example, Baton Rouge just got seven inches of snow. That's a bad time for them. And small populations will crash. And then they blink out of their little habitat fragment. They're gone. And if they can't recolonize and that turtle can't get across a big major highway, then they're permanently gone. So small populations bleed species all the time. You get these little habitats, and over time, there's fewer and fewer and fewer species in between them. So the object is to connect those habitats with what we call biological corridors. Well, I want to go beyond biological corridors. I don't just want plants and animals to move back and forth between viable habitats. I want to create viable habitats everywhere so there won't be a no man's land outside of a little habitat. That means we do it in our yards, too.

Ginny Urch (11:56)

There's the homegrown national park, because all those yards are connecting and it's creating this really large habitat. You talk about the edge effects as something as well, which I never heard of, that the edge of the forest is windier, it's drier than the interior. So when we have all these fragmented pieces of land, there's a lot of issues there.

Douglas Tallamy (12:16)

That's right. If you're a species that requires an internal section of forest and this little habitat patch is maybe it's 100 yards across, seems like a big area. Well, 25 yards on every side of that hundred yards is edge. It's not really a forest. And if you put all that together, there's no interior. You know, when you go up in a plane and you look out the window, you get to see what fragmentation is all about. You get to see how much habitat there's there. All. You see those little strips of trees lining the roads, but it's just a farm field or something else beyond it. That's a really good exercise, by the way, to see how much we have dominated. The human footprint is just about everywhere, which means where we live, where we work, where we play, where we worship, those are the places where we have to make viable habitats. And we can do it just by reducing that lawn and choosing the right plants.

Ginny Urch (13:13)

Yes. And all the information is in these books. Nature's Best Hope. I have both copies, the Young readers edition, which would be a great one to read with your kids this year. Bringing Nature Home, how you can sustain wildlife with native plants. And then you have a new one coming out in April called How can I help saving nature with your yard. And there's other books too, so just. And they're wonderful. They're so interesting.

Annie F. Downs (13:36)

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Ginny Urch (17:30)

Here is a topic. So the goal here, Douglas, is very it's just whatever the word is. We're trying to get our kids outside for 1,000 hours in the course of a year. That's the goal in our family. We've been doing it since 2011 and we had toddlers at that time and now we have teenagers. And so our kids have been outside for 10,000 plus hours of their childhood and it's really good for them and it's really good for me and we all feel better and it's good for development. But one key piece is that by getting kids in nature, they know what it is and they know what's out there and they care. And you had had someone who had written in because you had these frequently asked questions at the end of Nature's Best Hope and someone says, why should I care if birds are disappearing? I don't even like birds. And the whole point is that nature has become irrelevant to so many people, to kids for sure, and also to many of their parents. Can you talk about the importance of getting kids outside for the sake of knowing that nature is something to value?

Douglas Tallamy (18:35)

Sure. A lot to say there. We think nature is irrelevant, but we are totally wrong. We are part of nature. We are totally dependent on the life support that nature provides. We call them ecosystem services, a whole slew of them, whole bunch of things that plants do every day that we depend on, like produce oxygen. That's pretty important. Clean our water, produce all kinds of things, manage the watershed, manage, reduce the severity of weather. And we certainly need a lot of that. You need functioning ecosystems to do that. And you need functioning ecosystems everywhere to do that, not just in Yellowstone National Park. That's what this rebuild ecosystem function is all about. There are real medical benefits associated with any type of exposure to nature. And we always talk about what the impacts are on adults, but I'm sure they're the same on kids. It reduces your stress level, it lowers your blood pressure. When your stress level is lower, you do everything better, you learn better, you're nicer, you're less aggressive. Everything is, you know, you have wonderful days. And that can happen just by going out and exposing yourself to what's happening in your yard. The problem with so many of our kids today is that we as parents are scaring them to death. Or if you go outside, something terrible is going to happen. We don't let them go out without hovering over them, which gives them the impression, without saying a word, this is dangerous stuff. I better go in and play with my iPad. We're scaring our kids about the natural world. And the media sure helps with that because all they do is report something bad that happened. They never tell you about the wonderful things that just happened outside. So we have to turn all that around. We've got to love the natural systems that allow us to live on this Earth. We have to not just love them, we've got to protect them. And kids can be enormously important in terms of helping to rebuild the ecosystem in their yard. Don't think about the entire planet's problems. Then you really will get depressed. Just worry about the piece of the Earth that you can influence. You can empower your kids. Plant an oak tree. Where are they going to get an oak tree? You're going to find an acorn, you're going to realize it's going to germinate and grow. If you have a child that's born one year, you plant an acorn that year. That can be that child's tree for the next hundred years. They can follow it. These are really fun activities. Then you can start to recall all the things that are associated with that oak tree. I'm talking about oaks, because they are the most important plant throughout most of the country in terms of supporting the ecosystem that we're talking about. So just simply planting an oak in your yard, if there's not one there now, is the simplest, easiest way to put wildlife back into your life.

Ginny Urch (21:20)

This is important. This is one of the things that I got out of the book. It's really important to know because you had done this thing where you were with your granddaughter and you're looking through Portland and you're like looking at all these different kinds of trees, and there's so many varieties that have been brought in from other places. And you said, well, some of them don't sustain life. And so how can something be sustainable, considered sustainable or green if it doesn't sustain life? And so then you talk about specific things like goldenrod and oak trees and different ideas, and then you have websites that you can go to to find for your particular area. But white oaks and their relatives are the very best trees you can plant in your yard for wildlife. In 84% of US counties, they make huge canopies. They help food webs better than other plants. What is the misconception? You know, why would a city like Portland be bringing in over 1,000 different types of trees instead of focusing on the ones that help sustain life?

Douglas Tallamy (22:17)

Well, it's. It's simply ignorance. They don't know. They think we have treated our plants as if they're decorations. So how do we use our plants? Which are the prettiest ones, which are the ones that are going to survive best in our cities? Surviving is important, of course, but what's missing there is how important native plants are. The plants that evolved right where we live in terms of running those ecosystems. When we can bring in a plant from. From Asia, from China, for example, Ginkgo people love our ginkgo trees. Nice yellow color in the fall. Well, none of those insects that feed the birds can eat ginkgos. That's the thing. Our insects are specialized on those native plants. And if we don't use the native plants, we don't have the insects, then you don't have the birds and you start to get ecosystem collapse. So where the plant comes from turns out to be really important. You mentioned that little study we did in Portland. 92% of the street trees in Portland are from someplace else. So they're there, but they're not supporting the life that could be in Portland if they had used native trees. And nothing special about Portland. If I measured this on any city all over the country, I get pretty much the same result.

Ginny Urch (23:25)

Well, and it's an interesting thing, though, because Portland in particular is considered a green city. So that's one of the things that it's like. Well, it's awful little bit or off a lot of it, really, because it's not possibly doing all that it could be doing. This is a great thing to study with your children or your grandchildren because it's all very interesting. You would learn so much from these Books. And in this particular case, for Nature's Best Hope, there is a young reader's edition. And it is fabulous. It is so cute. And it's just. It takes the. The books are so interesting, but it's got the pictures. This would be a wonderful thing to read this year with your family because you would learn all about the different. The oak trees and the caterpillars and what's an invasive plant and what's a native plant. There's a lot that kids would learn from reading that book with the family you wrote. Why can't we Tweet, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TED talk our way into the hearts and minds of the millions who do not have enough experience with the natural world to know that it is a wonderful place and, oh, yes, to know that we will not survive its demise, they need to value something they do not currently value value. So. And you say this. This stands out among the rest, that kids who are the future stewards of planet Earth are woefully unprepared for this awesome responsibility because they don't know that it needs stewardship and because they're just not connected to nature in general. So people should go outside for 1,000 hours every year, and it would help them quite a bit, or even just a portion of that. You have this thing in here. I've never heard this before. There are three categories of people. Those who like plants, those who like animals, and those who like neither. I was curious. Which one are you?

Douglas Tallamy (25:06)

Oh, I. I was definitely born liking animals. I didn't know anything about plants. I didn't care about plants, But I sure liked. I like those frogs and toads and snakes and turtles, and I had all of that when I was young. I'm an entomologist, but I didn't learn anything about insects until I was in college. I could have. I mean, it would have been great. But the ecological IQ of the. Of the American public is really low. We don't teach kids about how our ecosystems work in grade school. It ought to start at home before you even go to school, but if not, then it starts in kindergarten so that we have a basic understanding of how things work and what our role in keeping them working is. So we understand when we. When you build a house and what was a good habitat, what is lost there. There's a decision you have to make there. It's not. It's not an inconsequential event. So, yeah, we want to. One of the reasons I write these books is to raise that ecological iq Try to make up for the lack of education that. That has been part of our culture for forever last hundred years. Anyway, I talk to adults all the time and they say, I never knew this. Well, of course not. Nobody ever told you. Nobody ever taught you. So we're trying to make up for that.

Ginny Urch (26:18)

I did feel that way with reading the books. I didn't know that. And then it's like, it's so interesting. I. We're super into monarchs. We love the milkweed. We love looking for the caterpillars and all of those types of things. And I didn't know about the. What was it called? Leaf rib or leaf flag? The leaf flag.

Douglas Tallamy (26:33)

Oh, the flagging flag. Leaves. Yeah.

Ginny Urch (26:35)

I had no idea that the. It crawls up the rib. I mean, I had no idea. I learned so many cool things. We can talk about that in a minute because monarchs and other butterflies are part of this book. But I would love to just stay for just a second on being an entomologist because there's a lot of kids that listen in with their parents and definitely a lot of kids that like insects because they come up to me different places and they show me their stuff or they'll talk about what insects they have at home. How did you get interested in it in college? Two parts. How did you get interested in it in college? And then what advice would you give to a young child who is interested in insects?

Douglas Tallamy (27:09)

Well, I was a biology major in college, and when I was a junior, one of our professors, and his name was Dr. Bugbee, taught a course in entomology. So I, I took that and it, yeah, it opened my eyes. I knew nothing about insects. And when you learn, you. You learn that they are fascinating things. There's actually almost nothing that, that we do that insects don't also do. We think we're very special, but insects are good at doing a whole bunch of things. There are, I don't know, between 3 and 4 million species of insects out there. E.O. wilson tells us they are the little things that run the world. We depend on them. They pollinate 90% of our flowers. They recycle our waste. They maintain that food web that supports the vertebrate animals. So the amphibians, the reptiles, the birds and the mammals all depend on insects. If we lost our insects, all of that would disappear. So they become enormously important and everybody should appreciate that. You know, we've got this war against insects. We, we. Every time you see an insect, you call the exterminator. The guy will knock on your Door. He said, oh, I saw a spider outside. I'll kill him for you. First of all, spider's not an insect. But you know, this, this idea that if you see something moving, you have to spray it, you have to kill it is ridiculous. We spray for mosquitoes all the time. The mosquito foggers, in order to control mosquitoes. It doesn't control mosquitoes, but it does kill the Monarch and it does kill all of our, our pollinators. And people don't know that. The mosquito foggers say, well, it only kills mosquitoes. It's organic, it's natural. Why wouldn't you hire them? Well, cyanide is organic and natural too, so that's not a good excuse. And, and this, it only kills mosquitoes. It's just false advertising. It kills all the insects it comes in contact with. If people knew that, we would stop this war against insects. There are ways to control mosquitoes, but not in the adult stage. You control them in the larval stage.

Ginny Urch (29:04)

What do you do?

Douglas Tallamy (29:06)

It's called mosquito dunks. So you get a bucket and you fill it full of water and you put in a handful of straw or hay or leaves and put it out in the sun for a few days. And algae and diatoms will grow on that organic material in the water. And that is what mosquito larvae eat. So that becomes an irresistible brew to any female mosquito in your yard. She'll lay her eggs in your bucket. Then you go to the hardware store and you buy a sheet of what's called mosquito dunks. It's a natural bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis. And you put one of those little dunks in your bucket and that kills the larvae that come from that mosquito. So you're directing all the oviposition, all the reproduction into one bucket. And then you're putting something that only kills aquatic Diptera, and that's the only aquatic dipterin in your bucket is a mosquito larva. So rather than killing the monarch and everything else, by spraying the world, you're just killing the mosquito larvae. And if everybody did that, it really would help control mosquitoes.

Ginny Urch (30:05)

That's so interesting. I've noticed that where we live, if there's a lot of dragonflies in a certain year that there's less mosquitoes, we get less mosquito bites.

Douglas Tallamy (30:13)

Yeah. Dragonflies eat mosquitoes.

Ginny Urch (30:15)

Yeah, and the bats eat them too. So interesting. Yeah. Stop the war on insects. You say you don't even like the word bugs, but I was thinking of Dr. Bugby. Stop the war on insects. What about a kid who's interested in insects. What advice would you give them?

Douglas Tallamy (30:30)

I think that's great. You know, don't listen to all the people that are trying to scare you about insects. We've got a few insects that, that bite. We've got mosquitoes, we've got. We've got stable flies and a few, you know, those, some of those mosquitoes, most of which are introduced, by the way, Aedes aegypti and the Asian tiger mosquito, they're brought. They're from another country, they're an invasive species. Well, some of them can transmit diseases, but 99.9999% of the insects that are out there are. We'll just call them good insects. They are a vital part of our ecosystem. So if you're interested in insects, learn about it. There's a lot of books on insects these days. We've got social media, we've got videos. There are a lot of wonderful things to watch about insects. As a matter of fact, we are completing a documentary on caterpillars. It'll be out next year. And you can learn an awful lot by watching. I don't want to discourage you from reading because we don't read enough, but watching is really powerful too. And there's wonderful resources now that when I was a child, they didn't exist. You know, you couldn't go see anything about insects. So they're fascinating. And think about it as a career. Most entomology programs in the past were focused on how we can kill insects in agriculture, and there's still certainly a lot of that. But now it's more and more about insect conservation. We've got global insect decline. Those little things that are running the world are disappearing and that's not something we can tolerate. So how are we going to put them back? That'd be a wonderful career for somebody thinking about what to do in the future. It's enormously fun.

Ginny Urch (32:13)

Does the documentary have a name?

Douglas Tallamy (32:15)

Not yet.

Ginny Urch (32:16)

Not yet.

Douglas Tallamy (32:16)

Okay, very good question. We just talked about it yesterday. It's got a trailer at this point, but.

Ginny Urch (32:22)

Okay. Working on the name still.

Annie F. Downs (32:23)

I don't even know what the name is.

Ginny Urch (32:25)

We'll be on the look out for that. You've got the new book coming out in April, a documentary in 2026.

Douglas Tallamy (32:30)

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Annie F. Downs (33:57)

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Ginny Urch (36:35)

I loved the part about caterpillars in Nature's Best Hope. Loved it. I had no idea. So like you said, you talk to all these people and they say, I had no idea. There's the idiom that the early bird gets the worm, but it really should be the caterpillar. And I was floored, Douglas, by how many caterpillars, especially when they're nesting and they have their young, how many caterpillars they are bringing back to the nest every single day? So can you talk about the misconception caterpillars really are the food of choice for most of these birds.

Douglas Tallamy (37:09)

Right. There are a lot of insects out there, but the best food for baby birds is a caterpillar. They're soft, so you can stuff them down the throat of your baby and it doesn't hurt them. If you did that with a beetle, it might tear up the esophagus. And they're the most nutritious, too. They're very high in carotenoids, the beneficial compounds we get from carrots and, and things like that. Well, caterpillars give birds more carotenoids than any other type of food. They're also plentiful. So to raise a single clutch of chickadees, for example, and chickadee is a small bird. It's, you know, a third of an ounce. It takes 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to get the babies in the nest to the point where they leave the nest. And after they leave the nest, the parents continue to feed them caterpillars another 21 days. So it's really tens of thousands of caterpillars required to make one nest of a bird. That's a third of an ounce. That's four pennies worth of bird. So here's the key. If you want chickadees breeding in your yard, and who wouldn't? You got to have all those caterpillars in your yard. Because the parent chickadees only forage for food about 50 meters from the nest, they are not flying five miles down the road to the nearest wood lot. And that's true for most of the birds out there. They forage very close to the nest because they're so many trips, they don't have time to do that. And if we design landscapes that don't make all those caterpillars, then the chickadee can't breed there. That's called insect decline. That, that starts to collapse the food web. And it's one of the reasons I talk about oak so much, because they support more species of caterpillars than any other plant. 950 species in this country of caterpillars supported by our oak trees.

Ginny Urch (38:46)

Wow. I mean, this is fascinating. And it's like right next to all these wonderful, wonderful pictures of different kinds of birds. And it shows them feeding the baby birds. A kid would love this. This is on page 135. A typical nestling eats a full 30 to 40 times a day. That means a parent or a couple raising five chicks must bring food to the nest about 150 times a day. It couldn't fly two miles because that, it just wouldn't work. It's gotta be so close to the nest. The male and the female are doing it. The male carrying to the nest 241 times in a single day and the female 571 times in a single day. Feeding was rapid. Often the parent carried more than one caterpillar in its beak at a time. Even if they only brought one at a time, it would be 812 caterpillars per day. This is like incredible. I had no idea. You know, you see the birds pecking around, you think, I had no idea that it's going 800 times a day to feed these, these nestlings, these little chicks to feed the chicks. And then of course, and this is part of the greater food web. And so if you don't have the caterpillars, then you don't have the birds. What are some things that support caterpillars besides oaks?

Douglas Tallamy (40:00)

Native cherries. So things in the genus Prunus. Black cherry is a really good one. Native willows. If you have a wet area near you, those willow trees are really important. It's birches and hickories. The things that typically grow in our, our forest are really good. The herbaceous plants. The top one would be goldenrod. They're about 110 species of caterpillars that depend on goldenrod. Native asters like New England aster, New York aster that bloom in the fall. Not only are they good for the monarch as it's migrating because it gives them nectar, but they also support a lot of caterpillars, things like evening primrose. It's our native plants that are, are making those, all of those caterpillars.

Ginny Urch (40:44)

I mean, I guess I didn't even know that there was that many caterpillars to begin with, like thousands in one area. Caterpillars are the mainstay of most bird diets in North America, particularly when birds are rearing their young. Very few bird species, including the American robins, regularly feed their babies earthworms. Here's a question and this is going to be. It's like, you know how people say there's no such thing as a dumb question? But I do think that this is kind of a dumb question. But I've had this question for a long, long, long time. And you're going to be the one who knows the answer. I grew up in like a suburb and we've gotten more interested in hobby farming over the years. It's very recent for me. And we started to plant and we don't do it every single year, but we're trying to like just sunflowers. And I know you talk a lot about, I was sort of like, is this the right thing to be planting? But we've planted a lot of flowers and, and we try to plant. And I know you talk about gardening versus native planting, but what I've noticed is that in the garden things come. So that's something that I wasn't expecting. You plant this garden and all of a sudden you have hornworms and all of a sudden there's grasshoppers and all of a sudden you see frogs and there's praying mantis. And I wasn't I guess expecting that Douglas, I'm like, go. Trying to grow food for the kids or have this experience of gardening, getting our hands in the dirt. And that was something that sort of shocked me. And I guess that's probably. People are gonna be like, that's dumb, too. But I was really shocked and thrilled. Thrilled. It's fascinating. You go out to your little plot of garden, you never know what you're gonna find. There's all these different kind of bugs and things just show up. And at the end of the season, the first year that we planted these sunflowers, and I was trying to make this sunflower house, and it was supposed to be in the shape and the kids could play, and it just didn't really work. But I would go out there and you would walk to the little garden area, and all these finches would fly away. Here's my question. Where would those finches be if I wouldn't have planted the sunflowers? Would they be somewhere else or would they not exist?

Douglas Tallamy (42:44)

It depends on what is around you. Finches. So 96% of our terrestrial birds rear their young on insects, but 4% don't. And finches is one of the ones that don't. They rear their young on seeds. They make a little milk out of the seeds they eat. So they're in your sunflower patch because they want those sunflowers. If you didn't have sunflowers, they'd be looking for them someplace else. And if there were no sunflowers or thistles or other seeds around, then they wouldn't exist. They would starve to death, and that'd be the end of them. So it's not a dumb question at all. Before you put your garden in what was there lawn. Nothing's going to be on your lawn. So of course you put other plants there, then you get life happening. And you can have a lot of life depending on the plants you choose, or less life. But, you know, if you choose the wrong plants that don't actually support things. So we have this idea called keystone species. Those are the plants that support the most caterpillars. And that's why I talk about oaks. They're the best keystone species across the country, but there are others. And it turns out that just 14% of our native plants are making 90% of the caterpillars that are out there. So if you focus on the plants that make the most caterpillars, you're going to have the most birds and the most other types of life forms in your yard.

Ginny Urch (43:59)

It really is an exciting thing. And you had even talked about that in this book where there was someone who had. They were sort of just experiencing monarchs for the first time and you just become fascinated by it. And I, I do think that there was really something special about attracting life to your life. And you talk about how it's like, well, this isn't like Yellowstone or this isn't like the Grand Canyon, but it certainly can be very, very fascinating and especially for kids. Like, you had a picture of one of your granddaughters and you're like, there's not even that much space here, but she's gonna lay down there and she's looking for different lizards, you know, she's trying to find. And nature is like that. Where, I mean, the, the praying mantis or the, the walking stick. I mean, these things are beyond fascinating. And so I just love that, that woven throughout the book, the fascinating part of it and that, you know, you want to look out your window and see things that are moving and you're going to bring life to your area. The pollinators, native bees was one of the things that you're talking about. If pollinators were to disappear, 87 to 90% of the plants on earth would also disappear. So you had this idea of having a blooming phenology and thinking about. So this makes a lot of sense, thinking about that things are constantly blooming because for some plants and flowers, it's only a season and then they're done.

Douglas Tallamy (45:24)

Right. Most plants bloom for a short period of time. So you need a sequence of plants that will bloom from early spring all the way into fall. Because we have between 3,600 and 4,000 species of native bees. There's one species of honeybee which is introduced, but we got all those native bees and they need to have pollen and nectar all season long. And those species occur sequentially through the season. So you've got to have things blooming right away. Willows are one of the earliest things to bloom. Red buds, very important for early season bloomers so that you can support those populations of native bees all summer long and then right into the fall.

Ginny Urch (46:05)

And some of the things that we consider weeds, right, like a dandelion. And we're trying to get rid of. I mean, I see our bees all the time. They're out right the very beginning of the season and they're on the dandelions. So what's the misconception there about weeds? You say is that there's a marketing issue here.

Douglas Tallamy (46:22)

Yeah, well, you know, a weed is A plant out of place. A milkweed is not a plant out of place. It's a native plant, belongs right here. We have named most of our native plants weed, New York ironweed, Joe Pye weed, sneezeweed. These are native plants that were always here. And the reason we called them weeds is because when the Europeans came over and they tried to grow monocultures of crops and any plant grew up in that crop, they'd label a weed. None of these plants had been identified before. So they called it a weed and gave it a fancy name, Joe Pye weed, whatever. But that's, that's a pejorative term. People think, oh, it's a weed, we gotta. We gotta kill it. Well, no, the plants out of place are the ginkgos and the crepe myrtles and all the things we brought in from Asia because they're not supporting anything. They're pretty decorations. So that's okay. We can have some pretty decorations. But when it's all pretty decorations, then you don't have any life around you.

Ginny Urch (47:15)

Yeah. So. Oh, you learn all about that in the book as well. And even talking about. There's all sorts of simple things. That's the thing. There's all sorts of simple things that you can do. Like you talk about getting a bubbler and you talk about not clearing things in the fall so that there's places for insects to make it over the winter.

Douglas Tallamy (47:32)

Yeah, over winter.

Ginny Urch (47:33)

Yeah, to overwinter. Right. So there's all of these different small things that you could do to make a big difference. And also, obviously, learning about weeds is really important because like you said, it's just a naming problem. Can you talk to us about the book that's coming out in April?

Douglas Tallamy (47:47)

Yeah, it's called How Can I Help? So I've written this book. The first I wrote, Nature's Best Hope in, came out in 2007. Or was it 2017? 2007. I don't even remember. A long time ago, 20 years ago. And then, and then I wrote, you know, I had chapters in the Living Landscape and. And Nature's Best Hope and the Nature of Oaks. People have read these books. I give talks all the time and they still have really good questions. And they send me these questions on email. So I spent a lot of time answering those questions. I said, well, you know, these are. These are good questions. These are good answers. I'm going to put it together in a book. So. So how can I help? Is really 499 questions that people have asked me that continue the discussion, you know, okay, I get it now. How do I do this? So for common misconceptions and wanting to know more than what I put in these other books, that's what's going to be in and how can I help?

Ginny Urch (48:49)

Is it similar to these where there's a lot of pictures?

Douglas Tallamy (48:52)

There are a lot of pictures, yes.

Ginny Urch (48:53)

The pictures are phenomenal. I just think, you know, some books it's like you grab from the library. But I think these ones in particular, because the pictures are so good and especially if your kid was interested in insects, like in Bringing Nature Home, which came out in 2007. The pictures of the beetles, I mean, this one, this click beetle, it looks like it's got a face, it looks like it has eyes on it. And the photos that you got for these are just remarkable.

Douglas Tallamy (49:20)

You know why they're remarkable? It's because nature is remarkable. Yeah, anybody can take these pictures. Digital photography is really easy these days. But finding these remarkable creatures, that's what's really fun. It's special when it happens. You can record it. It's a great way to get kids outside, give them a camera. Their cell phone now is an excellent camera and it really connects them to nature. When you take a picture of something and then you blow it up and look at it, you often see something you didn't even see when you took the pict. Share. It's like a microscope that allows you into nature in a really, really magnified way. It's great.

Ginny Urch (49:55)

Yeah, almost every single page in Bringing Nature Home. I mean, these are phenomenal photos. And you have this one of your daughter and she's covered in cicadas.

Douglas Tallamy (50:03)

Right.

Ginny Urch (50:04)

I mean, you're getting the kids outside when you were parenting and now your granddaughters are doing it. And there's pictures of the different chrysalises and different trees. I mean, these are wonderful. I've actually not seen a set of books like this. I have so many pictures woven through that are so enticing. So I'm really excited about the new one. Or this one right here. Like just a bunch of white tailed deer. It was a whole pack of them. And you do talk about how they can tramp things down. So let's just wrap up with one last topic. The invasive species is something to be aware of. There are more than 3,300 in the US alone. Are they bad? The preponderance of evidence says yes. What can we do if we find that we have invasive species in our yards?

Douglas Tallamy (50:48)

You have to take them out. So unfortunately, many of the ornamental plants that we have planted for decorations over the last century have turned out to be invasive. What does that mean? It means that they don't stay where we plant them. That plant does. But its offspring, a bird, eats a berry and goes out into the natural area and poops it out, and then the plant grows. So things like burning bush and. And autumn olive privet. There are, As I said, 3,300 species of kudzu, porcelainberry, callery pear. Bread for pear. Terrible one. These things take over. What they do is they push out the native plants that are supporting all those caterpillars and supporting the animals and replace it with a plant that doesn't. And you just showed a picture of deer there. They're part of that picture because they only eat the native plants. They don't eat these invasive plants. So if you only eat the natives and you leave the invasives, that's all you end up with is invasives. And it's one of the reasons we have such a terrible invasive species problem. So controlling deer is part of the picture, but also removing the sources of those seeds from our yards is a really important part of it.

Ginny Urch (52:03)

And you had done this study. Well, one of your students had. You said, in the first study of its kind, my student Desiree measured what happens to the chickadee populations and the caterpillars that support them when native plants are replaced. In this case, it's by ornamentals. But it said it really makes a huge difference in the amount of birds that are there. And it starts to tip to a spot where maybe they can't even be supported in that area. So these are just important things to know. And back to the monarchs, it's like, you know, they talked about this guy. He's like, I can use my property to help save these monarchs or the migrating birds. When they're coming through you, they've got a place to stop and there's food for them. So is really, you write in a way that you learn a lot, but it's also very enticing. Like, you put the book down and you're like, I want to do all of it. I want to be a part of the homegrown national park. And so just wonderful. And the pictures, it just draws you in because it could be dry. You write, you know, a book about insects, and, I mean, it could be kind of like dry information, but it's just all of the books are like that. You know, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm doing this for sure. I want to make sure we always have these sunflowers for the finches. And I want to all of the things. So, Douglas, what an honor I have had bringing nature home for a long time. Was so, so thankful that you said that you would. Come on. You have your new book coming out in April. How can I help saving nature with your yard? An unnamed documentary coming out in 2026. But we will be paying attention. We always end our show with the same question, and that question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?

Douglas Tallamy (53:34)

I have a very powerful memory from my. My childhood. I'm not sure I would call it my favorite one. There was a little pond right next to my house, and they built a house on. On that area. And so the bulldozer came and filled in that pond, and it.

Ginny Urch (53:48)

And.

Douglas Tallamy (53:48)

And all the toads and all the things that were living there just got buried and that, you know, I was in third grade then, but that set me on the road for conservationist. We can't, you know, we just can't tolerate this. I can go to that same spot now. So what is it? 60 years later, there's still nothing there. There are no toads or anything else because they took away that little habitat. That was a powerful. What was interesting to me is I could have gone to my backyard and dug another pond, and it didn't occur to me. Never thought of it. So think of it now. Put the habitat back where you live, and it doesn't matter what happens outside of your property. Jeopardy.

Ginny Urch (54:26)

Wow. Is that powerful. Douglas, thank you so, so much for being here.

Douglas Tallamy (54:30)

Thanks for the opportunity.

Ginny Urch (54:40)

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Douglas Tallamy (54:56)

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Douglas Tallamy (54:58)

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Ginny Urch (55:07)

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Ginny Urch (55:18)

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E (55:25)

You know, over time, life can get you down. Discouragement starts to creep in, and eventually we just stop letting ourselves hope for more. We say things like I'll believe it when I see it. And don't get your hopes up. Sounds like good grown up advice, right? Actually, it's not. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, Number one national best selling author, speaker, business coach and mom of three. Oh, and I have a podcast called get yout Hopes up, which is what I want to tell you about. Romans 15:13 says, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by power of the Holy Spirit. And that is exactly what my show is about. Whether I'm telling one of my latest crazy God stories or giving you practical advice to live out your faith, I love hanging out with you every Monday to help you get to know God, get closer to him and get your hopes up again. Listen to get your hopes up wherever you get your podcasts and you can learn more@getyourhopes up.com that's get your hopes up.com.