24 - Doug Tallamy

In this episode, we’re joined by renowned entomologist, ecologist, and author Doug Tallamy to explore how everyday landscapes—from backyards to balconies—can become powerful tools for conservation. Doug shares his career journey, explains why native plants are essential to healthy ecosystems, and introduces the concept of Homegrown National Park, a grassroots effort to restore biodiversity on private land. We discuss the critical role insects play in supporting food webs, practical actions anyone can take to help reverse biodiversity loss, and why empowering individuals is key to the future of conservation. The conversation leaves listeners with both urgency and optimism, showing that meaningful environmental impact can begin right at home. 

Books

• Caterpillars of Western North America by David Wagner
• Princeton Field Guide Moths of Western North America by Seabrooke Leckie

Books by Doug Tallamy

• Bringing Nature Home
• The Living Landscape
• Nature’s Best Hope 
• The Nature of Oaks 
• How Can I Help?

Organizations & Websites

• Homegrown National Park  - Including the Biodiversity Map / Firefly Map and Ecoregion finder and Native plant resources
• Mount Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware - Referenced as a premier example of native plant landscaping
• The Caterpillar Lab in Keene, New Hampshire - Run by Sam Jaffe

Documentaries

• The Incredible Caterpillar 

Concepts & Campaigns

• Leave the Leaves campaign
• Miyawaki Forests 
• Keystone Plants

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Kiersten: Happy New Year to all of our listeners. Welcome to the first episode of the year. We are here with an esteemed guest, Doug Tallamy. He is an entomologist, ecologist, conservationist, author, and professor. there. He teaches in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 118 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 45 years. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities. His books include Bringing Nature Home. Which is how I learned about him, the Living Landscape, which is co-authored with Rick Darke Nature's Best Hope, a New York Times bestseller, the Nature of Oak's, winner of the American Horticultural Society's 2022 Book Award, and his latest book, how Can I Help, which I'm currently reading now.

In 2021 he co-founded [00:01:00] Homegrown National Park with Michelle dairy which can be found@homegrownnationalpark.org. His awards include recognition from the Garden Writers Association, Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, Allegheny College Eco Foresters, the Garden Glove of America, the Herbs Society, and the American Horticultural Association, quite the laundry list of accolades.

Doug, welcome.

Doug Tallamy: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Kiersten: . Getting right to the thick of it. Let's see. Can you tell us about your career journey? And I'll let you take that however you wish since you do a lot of things. But we'd love to hear a little bit about where you started and what were the major influences that led you to where you are today.

Doug Tallamy: It's a fairly long story. I was born loving nature, so that put me on the track that I'm on right now. But also. Didn't have a lot of direction. I was a biology major in college but I was very poor at seeking advice and I didn't know what you did with a biology major. I didn't know anything about research. So I actually [00:02:00] ended up in dental school for two weeks. Not very long, long enough to lose all my money,

Aparna: As long as you didn't lose your teeth.

Doug Tallamy: Now later I went back to I got my undergraduate degree at Allegheny College and I went back and asked for advice. They said, what course did you like the best? I had a course in entomology from Dr. Bugby, which was very appropriate, but I like that. And they said, why don't you go to graduate school in entomology? So I did. That worked out well. Entomology is a fascinating subject. I really went into ecology and behavioral ecology using insects as research organisms. It wasn't until the year 2000 though, when my wife and I moved into our current property. It was part of a farm that was broken up into 10 acre lots. And we got one of those lots and built a house on it, but it had been mowed for hay before we moved in and, of course then it was taken out of mowing. And by the time we actually moved in, it was 10 acres of invasive species from Asia. I mean, you couldn't even walk anywhere. So that was my first real exposure to the invasive [00:03:00] plant problem. Of I'm always looking for insects and the first thing I noticed is, hey, they're not eating these plants. And I thought, this was not news to me because one of the things we studied in graduate school was plant-insect interactions and most of the insects that eat plants are what we call host plant specialists. They can only eat particular plants like monarchs can only eat milkweeds. They have the adaptations to get around milkweed defenses, but not anything else. And that's true for most insects. So of course, if we bring plants over from another continent, and around here it's mostly Asia. Our insects are not adapted to eat them. So this was not news to me, but apparently the scientific community had not been thinking much about that, the invasive species problem and the fact that they actually really destroy food webs. We brought in plants that have replaced our native plants, and those plants are not passing the energy they capture from the sun onto other organisms. So this became a research direction for me, changed my, my research direction totally. That was the year 2000, so I've been working [00:04:00] on that ever since. What, what does it mean when we replaced the native plants in our yards with non-native plants? What does it mean when they escape our yards and become serious invasive species? How do we fix things? That's really what we're focused on now. So that, that's how I got where I was going is a long circuitous route, but it's been fun.

Aparna: As a quick follow up, could you define for the listeners what a native plant is?

Doug Tallamy: A native plant is a plant that has co-evolved with the plants and animals around it. So in other words, it has been in a particular area, a particular community, 'cause communities do move around, through evolutionary time. Now can be, you know, thousands of years. It's often millions of years. But when you bring a plant or an insect, an animal over from another continent, they have not interacted with the local community before. Those are called novel ecosystems 'cause any of the interactions are evolutionarily novel. And since so much of nature is focused on specialized interactions gone through long periods of coevolution. [00:05:00] Novel communities don't have those specialized interactions. They haven't had a chance to evolve yet. And that's the problem with invasive species. They are here interacting without their natural enemies, without their diseases and predators and parasites. And so they go crazy. And they're destroying the specialized relationships that keep our local ecosystems in balance.

Aparna: Awesome. Thank you for defining that for everybody. And that's making me think too, I haven't done the Google search of what is native to my area, what is invasive to my area, and it seems like a great first step for, pretty much anyone to do. We all have access to the internet at this point, so maybe a takeaway for us on the podcast and also for the listeners tuning in, if that sounds like something you haven't done before and something that you're now curious about easy takeaway.

So back to you Doug. You're a professor and a researcher, and you're living this really beautiful life right now of trying to be the best steward to nature as you can.

Outside of that, in your professional life, what does your [00:06:00] day-to-day look like? If we followed you around, what would we see? What tasks do you do? Who do you chat with?

Doug Tallamy: Well, you know, I'm at the end of my career. I'm gonna retire next year, so my life's a little bit different now than it was first 45 years. Spent a lot of time each day doing email heavily involved in the nonprofit, homegrown national park. So there's a lot of emails associated with that. I give a lot of talks around the country and there's a ton of emails associated with that. And fortunately, my wife helps me set them up all the travel and, back and forth with the hosts. But a lot of time goes to that and then the actual travel to, to give those talks is time consuming. I, I am always writing another book and that usually happens early in the morning. We go to bed very early, but we get up early and that's when I get, get some writing done. If it's a nice day I, I really do like to get outside. We heat our house with wood and it's all wood that has grown up on our property since we, we moved in, but that wood has to be cut with the chainsaw and prepared for next [00:07:00] year.

And it's a fun hobby, but I enjoy doing that. I don't know, there's my day, it's gone.

Kiersten: It's an excellent answer and one of my favorites in that it's so relatable. That's why we ask the question to our guests, right? I think we've both had a lot of conversation with college students or younger professionals that think they wanna do a certain thing, but they haven't had the chance to witness that thing.

So it might sound glamorous oh, Doug does field studies. What's that like? But there's still a lot of emails! It's almost inescapable these days. No matter what you go into.

Doug Tallamy: Yeah. You know, the field work we do, because it is entomology is mostly during the summer. So summer days are different from winter days. Not stoking the woodburning stove in the summertime. And these days our field work is done mostly by my students. I've got a student working on Miyawaki forests, the tiny forest that people are installing in cities across the world. Do they house the biodiversity that everybody claims they do? Nobody's really measured that. So that's what she's doing in the up in Cambridge . Another student recently finished looking at what we [00:08:00] call soft landings. I've been talking about putting in the trees that create the most caterpillars in your yard so that the birds have something to feed their young. I've been talking about that for years, but we haven't thought about what happens when those caterpillars that are on the trees drop to the ground. They don't pupate in the tree. About 96% of them fall to the ground and they either. Crawl underground and pupate or the spin, a cocoon and the leaf litter that's under the tree. And if you look under trees, there is no leaf litter. We get grass right up to the tree and we mow and we walk. And so a student looking at the fate of those caterpillars under conditions like that. And of course it's predictably not good. you have grass, they get hung up in the thatch, so they're right there at the surface, and if you walk into the tree, you've squished them. You've got the oak tree, it's making, 500 species of caterpillars. They fall to the ground and then you squish them with your mower and your feet. So we wanna create landscapes where these all important caterpillars can complete their development. Turn into the moths that they will become and then lay eggs and do it all over again. the favorite [00:09:00] statistic we use all the time is what Carolina Chickadees do when they're rearing their young, it takes 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to make one nest of a Carolina chickadee. And that's one bird. It's a third of an ounce. I mean, it's, you want a whole community of birds in your yard. So think of the, really hundreds of thousands of caterpillars that are required to keep a bird population reproducing successfully. And if you don't have the plants that make those caterpillars, then you don't have the birds.

So these things that we expect to have them in our yard all the time, the birds. But if you don't landscape in the way that provides what they need that's not gonna happen. Those are the types of things that, that we've been studying, the statistics we've been gathering to convince the homeowner that they are the future of conservation because 78% of the country is privately owned and 85% east of the Mississippi is privately owned.

So if we don't do conservation on private property, we're going to fail. It's the private property who is going to make those decisions and landscape in a way that actually supports the biodiversity in this country.

Kiersten: [00:10:00] You've wonderfully, I think, summarized your own book, nature's Best Hope, which I really encourage all of our readers to read. I know a part of picked it up 'cause it's such a good book. And has almost finished it now and I think this is a perfect transition as well. So a core belief of our podcast is that every job can be a green job and having read nature's best hope.

Of course. You talked about maybe not having the most direction when you first got your degree in biology and then ended up studying entomology. But I'm curious. Your message you've written many books, published many papers, is certainly one of conservation. As you said, you just dropped some amazing stats and summarized as because of these facts, we really have to focus on private land conservation.

If we're to continue to have a natural world because. You also demonstrated perfectly with the caterpillars, the trees, and the birds. If you lose one piece, it all kind of crumbles. Right? So I guess my question for you is, did you start out with the intention of voicing a sustainable solution, or that's just you researched and that's the direction [00:11:00] because of the facts that you saw that you ended up going?

Doug Tallamy: Yeah, really good question. No, I didn't start out thinking that this is what I would end up doing. But before I got into conservation, I was studying insect behavior. How do cucumber beetles choose their mates? Things like that, which are, that's actually very interesting, which. But nobody cares about how cucumber beetles choose their mates. And the first thing I found out when I started studying conservation in our yards is that people do care about that. People are upset at the state of the planet, but they feel powerless. They say, what can one person do to change, change the entire planet?

My message is, don't think about the planet. Think about the piece of the earth that you can influence. If you own a piece of property, it's obvious that's where you start. And there are many things you can do to change the little micro ecosystem on your property. And if you do those things, you'll see the results. It will enhance the greater local ecosystem that your property lies in. But it empowers you to actually make a difference. And if everybody did that, [00:12:00] we'd be in very good shape. The big question I always get is, " well, why do we need to do this? What happens if biodiversity disappears?"

Humans depend on what we call ecosystem services. They're the life support that keep us alive on this planet. It's not Lowe's or Home Depot, it's not Acme. It is ecosystem services. And those ecosystems that provide those services are run by species. And the more species you have in those ecosystems, the more species of plants and animals, the more stable and productive they are. So as you lose species from an ecosystem, you lose ecosystem services.

So for example, if we were to lose insects on this planet and we've got global insect decline right now we humans would disappear in a matter of months. We totally depend on what EO Wilson called, the little things that run the world. So biodiversity, it's not optional. It's critically important. And the biggest challenge now is that most people don't know that. It's not that they don't care, they just don't know that. And once they do, then they, they do feel empowered and you know, they're on board. [00:13:00] So that's what I've been focusing on.

How do we get that message to the people that can make a difference?

Aparna: I love that it's one of empowerment and letting people know that they're not helpless there, they have so much agency and can enact the change that we talk about wanting to see all the time, but we just don't know how to get there. So thanks for that.

Listeners. We'll let you guys mull over Dog's thoughts while we take a very brief break.

Aparna: . [00:00:00] Alright, welcome back all of our listeners. Hopefully you guys did a couple cool Google searches, looked up some of Doug's books, thought about biodiversity and have picked out your favorite beetle. Maybe it is the cucumber beetle. Who knows?

So Doug, getting back into our interview here, we'd love to focus in a little bit more on your work and what you're doing right now. Could you explain the concept of Homegrown National Park to us and how it changes the way we think about conservation in our everyday spaces.

Doug Tallamy: It was a while ago that I had the idea of homegrown national Park and it all came from the statistic of how much area we have in lawn in the US. This was back in 2005, and I ran across the stat that we have 40 million acres of lawn, it hasn't gone down since then. So now it's around 44 million acres, I think, which is an area bigger than all of New England combined, dedicated to turf grass, to lawn.

There are four things, four ecological responsibilities that I think every property has. Every property has to support a food web. Every [00:01:00] property has to support pollinators. Every property has to manage the watershed in which it lies. And every property has to sequester carbon to help climate change. Lawn does none of those things, which is why I pick on it all the time. I saw this statistic and I said gee, what happens if we cut that area in half? So if you have 40 million acres, you cut that in half, that gives you 20 million acres that we could restore right at home. How big is that? And I started to look up the areas of our major national parks and it's bigger than all of them.

You can add up all those national parks and it's still less than 20 million acres. So I said, Hey, let's create a new national park. We're gonna do it at home. So we'll call it Homegrown National Park. And that's where the idea came from. And I started talking about it and my talks. And I, there's a chapter about Homegrown National Park in Nature's best hope. But it wasn't until I met a woman, Michelle Alfandari, who had just retired from a branding career, whatever that is. I never know. in Manhattan. And she moved with her husband up to Connecticut. But I mean, they were city folk and she was [00:02:00] not into nature at all, didn't know anything about it. But one of her neighbors dragged her to one of my talks and she came to me talking. She, and she saw it as an opportunity. We talk about educating the non-core, the people who are already informed about this, they don't need to hear what we have to say, but everybody who doesn't know about it doesn't need to hear it. she came up to me after the talking. She said, you're not reaching your target audience. I said, I know my target audience doesn't invite me. And she said you need to start a, a, a nonprofit. You need to have social media. You need to do all the things. That I really don't do. And I said, I agree with you, but I don't do those things.

And she said I do, let's start a nonprofit and we'll call it Homegrown National Park. And that's how it all got started. Just before COVID we got underway. So we're really at the five year mark now, although the last three years have been the real, real active years, got about 48,000 members. We don't charge 'cause we're not trying to pull people away from other conservation organizations. Our mission is to inform the [00:03:00] public a about their conservation responsibilities. What can they do? They have to put native plants in their yard. They have to remove the invasive plants. We're trying to build a community, that is sympathetic to the needs of conservation.

We want that goal to be prioritized in this country, and that is our entire mission. You what you do. We have a, what we call the biodiversity map on our website, homegrown national park.org, and you go there and you register your property and the amount of area that you're going to be or already are being a good steward of. So if you really are gonna reduce the area of lawn, you put that area in there. If you're gonna plant an oak tree, if you're gonna put an aster in a flower pot, it doesn't matter how small it is, it's really, we're changing attitudes here. But then your little piece of your property is going to light up with a firefly.

That's our emblem. And the object is, you can look at your county and see who else or how many other people have fireflies on their properties and the objects that get the whole country to light up with a firefly. That's the goal. So we're, we've got over a hundred thousand acres committed [00:04:00] at this point.

Now we need millions, so we're still the early stages, but it really is catching on and we're excited about it.

Kiersten: That's fantastic.

I have to say maybe we need to have Michelle on because our podcast is about illuminating careers, right? So maybe we can get you that answer on what her marketing career is and was. . I would like to acknowledge that Aparna and I live in DC and that is predominantly apartment dwellers, multifamily units.

So for your message, do you have any amendments for apartment dwellers or any, specific things that they can do as well?

Doug Tallamy: I do most apartments have balconies, and I think, I hope, one I used to live in that if you picture an apartment complex. It's a pile of bricks, but if everybody had container plants with native plants on their balcony then it's also it becomes a viable green space that can help mobile animals, particularly insects, particularly pollinators, particularly the migrating monarch. Those areas would be full of life, right in the middle of a city where [00:05:00] otherwise it's difficult. When the whole thing is concrete or pavement it's difficult to bring biodiversity back. But container gardening allows you to do that. And we have a site on our website telling you what the best plants are, what the best native plants are for containers in each of the eco regions of the country.

So you go to that site, and now you know what you can put in those pots. So even the city dweller can contribute.

Aparna: Excellent to know that we could go to your website. We can figure out what native plants to put in these pots on a balcony if you do have one.

Or maybe speaking to building management. You know, that could be a really doable action step for listeners to talk to your landlord, talk to the neighbors, and try to get some kind of organic movement. Similar to Homegrown National Park, we could have the apartment grown in National Park, if you will. So that seems like a great idea for every single person in a renter space or an apartment to do.

Doug, to challenge you a little bit, if you could only pick one thing for all of these homeowners to do, what would [00:06:00] that one recommendation be?

Doug Tallamy: One thing that unites everybody I would say is vote. You know how we vote? I don't wanna become political here, but how we vote has a major impact on conservation. if you have no property at all, if you're 95 years old and you're in the top floor of an apartment building, you're not gonna be out there claiming native plants.

You still can vote and you can change the priority of conservation in this country. Having said that, then it really depends on the amount of area that you have to work with. We have a concept called Keystone plants. What we did was we looked at the ability of every plant genus in the country to support those caterpillars that run the food web that I was talking about.

And it turns out that just 14% of our native plant genera are supporting 90% of the caterpillars that are out there. So if you're going to modify the landscape that you own, you wanna focus on those keystone plants. If you're gonna do one thing, I would plant the best keystone plant and in 84% of the counties in which they occur, that would be one of our oak trees.

In the fall you [00:07:00] get an acorn, you can plant that for free and they do grow, believe it or not, I planted acorns in our yard when we moved in. It was probably 2001 by the time I planted them. They're now over 60 feet tall. And every one of 'em was free. So you don't have to spend a zillion dollars to make a really productive landscape.

One other thing to do. That, that has nothing to do with planning, but is very important. And that is think about the outdoor lighting that you have. We have light pollution all over the world, but particularly in this country. And light pollution is one of the major causes of insect decline, particularly the nocturnal insects, which are the moths that create the caterpillars that run our food webs. you change your outdoor lighting from white lights to amber or yellow lights. Our nocturnal insects are not to those lights. So that simple change which you'll, you can buy an amber light at the hardware store. That simple change, will save millions of insects over, over time.

If you use LEDs, you can save millions of dollars too. And we put it all together. [00:08:00] There is one caveat to that. If you wanna help fireflies, you can't have any light at all. There's research that shows the male fireflies fly around at night and they blink. They flash their flash, the females are sitting in vegetation and they flash back, and that's how the males find the females.

But when there's ambient light around, the females don't flashback. So we're not sure whether they can't see the males or they're just. Not in the mating mood when there's lights on, but it ends reproduction in your yard. So having lights on, you know, it's mostly a habit that we have. If you're really concerned about security, put a motion sensor on it so it only turns on when the bad man comes, and then the fireflies can reproduce and the moths won't get killed.

It'll be great.

Kiersten: You're full of great suggestions. I love it. I've mentioned already a couple times how much I love your book. So I do have a quote and two questions to follow up, a bad and a good side. So first listeners, the quote. This is from chapter five of Nature's Best Hope, and the quote is, it's ironic that spreading good ideas should pose a [00:09:00] challenge in a world in which our ability to communicate is almost instantaneous global, cheap, and nearly constant. Skipping a little bit there for brevity's sake. Maybe we can but it would require more than 280 characters or a 10 minute video to change most adults' value systems. And that is truly the challenge to convince people that for their own good, they need to value something that they currently do not value.

That of course, being that biodiversity and all of the other things you've already talked about. So first, the kind of bad side of that, I'm curious, since you are so full of wisdom, how have you approached this challenge that you laid out in that quote?

Doug Tallamy: Every way we could possibly think of! I do give, in-person talks all the time. I do a lot of webinars and then you're communicating one-on-one with people for usually an hour and a half. And it's a powerful way to convince somebody.

Documentaries. Important because most people don't read. They watch. We just finished a documentary called The Incredible Caterpillar. You can go online and watch that. And [00:10:00] they did a really good job with it. But there are other people talking about other types of documentaries that we're trying to pursue.

I write the books and some people read them, but most people don't.

And then Homegrown National Park has its own social media section. So our our TikTok and Facebook guy is Grant Jensen. He does a wonderful job. He'll put something on there and get a million hits. And so that's important too. So really any possible thing we can think of to get these messages out.

Kiersten: Noted, and thanks for being such a great climate communicator. We certainly strive to follow and to spread the good sustainability word, which brings me to the positive side. Let's imagine in 20 years from now the world got your message. Everybody watched the Caterpillar documentary, everyone read all the books. What would that success look like to you? I wanna paint the kind of rosier side of we have a big challenge ahead of us, but if we did do this and homegrown Park got the committed acreage, what would we see? What would be different?

Doug Tallamy: You know, The big challenge today is that we do have parks and preserves, but they're [00:11:00] isolated little entities with no man's land in between. If everybody got the message there would be connectivity between those formal conservation areas. It would very simply be a world in which humans and nature are living together. It wouldn't be humans here in nature someplace else. That would be the big change.

And then we have a tremendous amount of biodiversity right in our yards, in our parks, along our roadsides. You can always eliminate this later on, but the real challenge on our planet is limiting human population growth. We have about three times as many people on the planet than it can sustainably support. We're using resources far faster than there being replaced. So how do we reach that happy equilibrium? We could all use less, but it's very tough to get anybody to give anything up. the real solution is to actually have fewer people and we're headed in that direction.

The economists are complaining about it all the time, or we're not having enough babies. We're not having enough babies. and for continuous growth, capitalism. That's probably true, but that's not a sustainable [00:12:00] model. So the future, 20 years from now, we've gotta recognize that there are limits on this planet and figure out how to deal with them. But again, I do see, I see a world where humans and biodiversity are living together, where we have ecosystem, productivity right in our yards. And we're not stressing our life support the way we are now.

Aparna: Yeah. Thank you for stressing that, you know, we can paint a future that we want for ourselves, and this is exactly what it would look like. Continuity being a key there. Thinking about this, have you seen any success stories like maybe individuals or communities.

That something like this has played out in or any that are giving you optimism that this is in fact possible and where we're headed.

Doug Tallamy: Yes. And it's what keeps me going. I see a great deal of success. There's enthusiasm. All over the place about doing this. People are sending me emails I've done this at home and look at the wonderful things that have happened. It as a general subject there's a lot of people working out, a lot of books coming out.

I get asked to write blurbs for these great books all the time. There's, there are a lot of people thinking [00:13:00] about this. The city of San Francisco has talked about becoming the first homegrown National Park City. We're talking about how we can make that happen and if we get a model for that, and it's not just having a few yards join Homegrown National Park, it's getting a commitment from the top down, from the mayor on down about how you can run your city in a sustainable way that actually supports biodiversity. They're interested, you know, if that spread around the country, that'd be just a wonderful thing.

There's a lot of great things happening. There are more and more big conservation restoration projects that are being successful. There's a place in uh, Ohio. Called Mentor Marsh. It was the largest phragmites stand, phragmites is the invasive weed from Europe. The largest phragmites stand in all of Ohio, 811 acres. Phragmites is very difficult to get rid of, but they did do it. And now it's a vibrant freshwater marsh that shows you really can restore an area that has been taken over by phragmites. And, and, and there, you know. Examples of [00:14:00] that type of restoration success are popping up all over the place. In terms of whether or not we actually can do this, I'm very encouraged. There's a lot of enthusiasm. We know what we need to know to actually pull it off.

Aparna: A quick follow up there. You mentioned conservation and restoration and one of my past lives, I was in the historic preservation world with a general contractor, and I know that preservation, conservation, and restoration mean quite different things to different groups of people. So would you mind defining what conservation and restoration mean for you in your field of work?

Doug Tallamy: Conservation is taking something that's not already destroyed and making sure it doesn't become destroyed. Restoration is putting it back together again after it has been diminished. It could be completely destroyed. I mean, some of these conservation areas are starting from absolute scratch. Like those Miyawaki Forest that we're talking about. It's often in a vacant lot that it was paved over. It can have very meager beginnings or not. If you're transferring, you're transforming your yard into something that will actually support breeding birds and [00:15:00] other things, that usually just involves putting a few plants in your yard that are gonna create the food that those birds need. You can put a bed under those plants so you're reducing the area of lawn that you have. These are fairly simple additions to your yard, but it restores ecosystem function right where you're, living. So it can be dramatic or it can be not very dramatic, but if everybody does it, then it, it adds up.

Kiersten: We spoke on a former episode with Natalie from Alveole about apiaries and beekeeping in urban spaces, but I believe it was her that mentioned Leave the Leaves campaign. And it's an amazing win-win for people that want a few less chores in their yard and wanna benefit the native insects.

So that kind of reminded me leave the Leaves a catchy campaign and one last chore that you have to worry about in the fall. With that in mind, you mentioned previously about summer being more the season of field studies, and you've mentioned a few of the cool studies with these small forests [00:16:00] and lightning bugs and mating habits of beetles. Do you have a favorite field study in your long career?

Doug Tallamy: Oh boy. I think the work that demonstrated that some plants are much better at supporting food webs than others is the most impactful thing that, that we've done that involved actually not as much field work. It was library work. It was looking up host plant records. The records of what caterpillars eat for the last hundred years in every county of the country. And actually my research assistant, Kimberly Shropshire, has now done it for every plant genus in the world. Big job, but it's important 'cuz i f we're going to do restoration, we wanna use the plants that are going to be the most impactful in as many ways as possible. There are huge efforts like the Trillion Tree campaign to put a trillion trees on the planet to help absorb carbon dioxide. great idea. But why not choose the right trees so you can support biodiversity at the same time? And when you get outside this [00:17:00] country, what are the right trees?

That's what this research is all about. So now we have lists for every country in the world about what the best plants are, if you're actually gonna restore. Now that, again, that was mostly library work, but we've done an awful lot of testing these things by going to areas that have a lot of keystone plants and areas that don't have a lot of keystone plants.

And then putting out light traps and catching moths, seeing what they are, identifying them and seeing whether you actually get more biodiversity where you have keystone plants versus where you don't. That was a fun project. Because got to collect moths. They're very interesting things. I don't know, drawing a blank on other fun projects.

But there's one thing we're gonna do this summer. There are now tiny little tags you can put on caterpillars. And when they burrow in the leaf litter, you don't you lose them. You don't know how far they went and, did they crawl 20 feet before they went down into the ground? This way you can trace them. It's almost like a metal detector. You have this piece of machinery that can pinpoint where those caterpillars go, and we'll know whether they're [00:18:00] crawling out beyond the bed that we've created underneath the tree. We'll know exactly where they go down to Pupate. It'll tell us a lot about how to create beds that, that improve caterpillar survivorship over the winter.

Aparna: That is really cool. Are you gonna like target a specific area for this Caterpillar study? I'm geeking out, trying to understand like how you tag, where you tag duration of study.

Doug Tallamy: We plan to do it at Mount Cuba Center in Hockessin in Delaware. It's a, it's a all native plant DuPont estate. If you want to see how to use native plants, attractively, go to Mount Cuba Center 'cause nobody does it better than them.

Kiersten: Podcast field trip.

Aparna: yeah. Meet up this time, this place. We already got the place. I love that. Thank you. You really do love your work. Like it's so fun to see you speak about this and the amount of enthusiasm that you have behind it. So I'm really happy that you found passion that lines up with your interests and natural inclinations.

Doug Tallamy: Me too.

Aparna: Yeah! You've had a beautiful career so far. You've had so much [00:19:00] impact. You've like really helped to grow a lot of budding ecologists and, you know, bug lovers out there. The like Kirsten definitely included myself. I'm, I'm getting there. I am very much getting there. Not to the point of petting bees, but maybe one day.

But in one or two sentences, I'd love to know what legacy you're hoping to leave behind through all of this good work you've done.

Doug Tallamy: Now, I don't think in terms of legacies, I don't think in terms of this is the Doug Tallamy show. I'm the messenger. I'm simply telling people this is the way we have to interact with nature if we're going to do it for long periods of time. So I don't think about this as anything about me really.

There's a lot of people doing this and my legacy really is in my children, and they're happy enough at this point. If people listen and we actually elevate the priority of conservation, not just in this country but around the world, I will be very happy.

Kiersten: Wonderfully humble approach. I can't say I'm surprised. With all the great things that you've done that you're still, [00:20:00] so humble, it comes across, I think, in the tone of your books. So just encouraging and great energy all around.

Maybe the next question will be something you'll like more, since it's not the Doug Tallamy show, but you do have a lot of wisdom to impart. So if someone was very encouraged by you, by your writings, by this episode, let's say, and wanted to start a similar career what advice would you give them? Are there organizations you recommend getting involved with or certifications? Just keeping in mind, the pod likes to help people find their niche within green jobs, and I can't say I know too many entomologists.

So what advice would you have in that regard?

Doug Tallamy: You do not have to be an entomologist to really help out in this regard, the biggest empty niche that we have out there. I would call them ecological gardeners or ecological landscapers. Most people do not garden themselves. Most people don't have the time to take care of their yard. They simply hire somebody.

They hire a lawn care service, they hire an arborist, and they go about their business. I don't think [00:21:00] that's gonna change. So what we need are the trained people for those people hire so that we have an ecological landscaping industry. There are a few people out there. Most of 'em don't even advertise because they've got more business than they can handle right now, but I'd love to see that industry explode.

I'd love to see the entire lawn care industry transform itself. So that they actually rather than creating a landscape which is totally dead, to create a landscape that is totally living, it wouldn't take very much, two or three weeks of courses would be all you need.

The mosquito control, the mosquito fogging industry, which is huge around this country. It kills everything that is out there, not just a few mosquitoes. So I would love to, to find more productive ways to control mosquitoes and we actually know what they are. You control them in the larval stage, not adult fogging or adult barrier sprays. That's another study we recently did even 30 days after a barrier spray, and this is the guy with the backpack that people hire, and it comes and sprays your yard 30 days after that [00:22:00] happens, it still kills everything that walks on those surfaces. And we, by everything we tested 26 different arthropods. But everything, from big to small was killed. So it's powerful stuff and I'd love to see that industry transformed.

There are lots of opportunities to do what we typically do today in a much greener way. So I'd love to see that taking off.

Aparna: Wow. Honestly, that's huge. I, I feel like I am the target of mosquitoes. I joke with my group of friends that if you keep me around, like you guys won't gonna get any bites 'cause I'm gonna be generous and just take them for the group. So if there is a way to target and actually, you know, work on the problem while still maintaining the rest of our ecosystem.

Fantastic!

So thanks for highlighting a couple niches that you see as areas for opportunity and listeners. If that sounds cool, by all means, please help us get less mosquito bites out here in the world. Another piece that we like to always touch on at this podcast is recommending books, documentaries, resources.

We [00:23:00] love to read, and just like you said, a lot of people like to watch as well. So outside of the books that you've authored, we'll definitely link those in our show notes. Are there any other resources, books, documentaries that you've enjoyed?

Doug Tallamy: You know, there's a place in Keene, New Hampshire called the Caterpillar Lab and actually that's featured in this Caterpillar documentary, but it's run by Sam Jaffe who's writing a book right now. If you have a chance to visit the Caterpillar lab or watch anything that Sam does, that is transformative, he will make you love Caterpillars.

And he does such a wonderful job of it. So I would attempt to track down anything that, that Sam is producing. Dave Wagner at the University of Connecticut is wrapping up a big study of caterpillars of Western North America. Where he is added, gonna have about 2000 descriptions of species that have not been described before.

We didn't know anything about their immature stages. That'll be coming out soon. A, field guide to the adults of Western Moths is coming out in January by Seabrooke [00:24:00] Leckie. That's a Peterson guide which will also be very, very effective. I like to focus on these field guides because it allows you to put a name on something you just found at in your front yard and that all of a sudden makes it, it becomes your friend. If you, if we can't name something, we forget about it, it's just it's a bug. But once you put a name on it, you know where it lived, you know what it was developing on, then it's a real real thing. It's becomes part of your life. And these field guys are very helpful in doing that.

But you know, you Google native plants, there's a lot of books out there about local native plants of the southeast, of the northeast, of the Midwest, and there are many really good butterfly guides out there as well. So with Google, w e have access to all kinds of information that I certainly didn't have when I was growing up. Finding this information now has never been easier and it really will help pique your interest in these things.

Kiersten: Well that brings us to a close. It has been an absolute treat, getting to speak with you. We [00:25:00] do like to sneak in a few puns. feel a buzz with all the tangible solutions that you've offered today. So I hope everyone listening also feels that way and is encouraged to actually take some action. But for our time today, thank you. It's so appreciated that you joined us and it was a fantastic conversation.

Doug Tallamy: I appreciate the opportunity.