Douglas Tallamy

No, I'm very pleased to see this.

I love that Doug Tallamy has said, you know, just to homeowners, you know, put in one species, put in two, convert a little of your lawn.

I'm very happy about that.

The one thing is labeling and mislabeling and calling things native or calling things pollinator friendly.

How do we work with people who've got small spaces?

Basically, it's pretty much following along what Bill said.

Doug Tallamy pretty much has spelled it out.

Small spaces you have, if you install anything that promotes... pollinators, that promotes wildlife, that promotes anything that has to do with the environment, it's a step in the right direction.

And so if we lose them, then all of the environments that you know will be different, and many of us would say would be much worse.

And some people predict, like, there's a, a colleague of mine, Doug Tallamy, who says in the absence of insects, humans wouldn't last more than three months, so-

Wow, and why is that? Is it, it's the, it's the pollination? Is that the m- most immediate thing? 'Cause I guess people most associate bees with pollinators, but what are the other insects that help out with that?

I mean, for pollinators, there's lots of...

We kind of move animals around all the time with transoceanic cons- commerce, and often an invasive species, they don't have their natural enemies, and they can go into really large numbers, and they can outcompete native species.

That's a stressor.

So it's, my colleague David Wagner calls it death by a thousand cuts, you know? There's not one stressor that you could just, the panacea, you fix that, and insect decline's over.

There's all of these little pieces that together are just too much.

But I have a lot of non-native things.

The way I'm thinking about this is I'm so far away from that goal of the Doug Tallamy sort of, if we could get to 70% native, I'm so far away from that.

But my thing is, is when I add new plants, they're native.

And when I, you know, when I get tired of something, like I had a lot of Erosa Sharon, I'm just slowly moving those along, slowly getting rid of different hydrangeas.

You care about like maybe doing something more about the environmental issues.

I think that Doug Tallamy, he wrote my foreword in this book and he had a really good quote in here.

Would you like me to read it? Yes.

OK.

Because oak trees are real wildlife habitat powerhouses.

So we know from the research of a guy named Dr. Doug Tallamy, he's an entomologist who, who specifically has studied the impacts of native plants in sort of our landscapes on sort insect population, but then, you know, broadly in the ecosystem.

And the thing that shocks most people when you talk about, say, butterfly gardening is that, you know, we think of the blooming plants that provide nectar to the adult butterflies.

But the reality is, you know, going back to the whole host plant thing, butterflies and moths, you know, their caterpillars can only eat the leaves of certain plants that they have co-evolved with, that they have adapted to To be able to survive the toxins that plants produce because they don't want things eating their leaves.

And so there's many more moth species just because they've been around on this planet longer.

and have diversified longer, which makes them arguably actually more important as pollinators, but also as that protein part of the food web for the birds.

And so those birds, those 96% of our backyard birds, another stat that comes from Dr. Doug Tallamy's work, that are feeding their babies, they're primarily feeding them caterpillars and primarily moth caterpillars.

So think about it.

The ecological data on goldenrod is staggering, honestly.

The source cites research from the renowned entomologist Doug Tallamy.

He does incredible work.

He really does.

Sure

... um, in reference to the New York Times article, uh, where the author was getting into ecological landscaping and had spent some time with Doug Tallamy.

And Tom and I talked about it on a previous podcast for a good 20 minutes or so-

Mm-hmm

Yeah, they become aware of something that they weren't before.

Yeah.

Well, to loop back to the article again, you know, one of the things that the article said that was kinda mildly offensive is, uh, you know, it, it was talking about Doug Tallamy after having this like apparently really charming visit to his home-

Yes