In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• Why "plant natives" is just the beginning, and which keystone plants actually move the needle for birds

• The surprising reason a beautiful all-native garden can still function like a food desert

• What Homegrown National Park is, and how your yard fits into a continent-wide conservation strategy

• 00:06 - The Impact of Residential Landscapes

• 01:37 - Understanding Yards as Habitat

• 10:17 - Transforming Your Yard into a Wildlife Habitat

• 15:40 - The Importance of Native Plants in Landscaping

• 20:00 - The Importance of Native Plants in Urban Ecosystems

• 21:30 - Transitioning to Functional Wildlife Gardens

Timestamp Disclosure
These timestamps were generated using AI and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided for accessibility and reference purposes only and may not perfectly reflect the original audio.

Dr. Doug Tallamy (Excerpt)

The default landscape is lawn. We've got 44 million acres of lawn. That's an area bigger than New England. That 135 million acres of residential landscape is five times the area that we are managing in our national parks.

Dr. Scott Taylor

You and hopefully the birds in your yard are in for a treat. So right off the bat, be prepared to leave a comment like and subscribe.

Most people have a mental image of a bird friendly yard. And basically it's a feeder, a bird bath, and maybe one decorative little birdhouse that looks like it has a mortgage.

And sure, feeders are great. They're fun. They're like the slot machines of nature.

But if we're being honest, a feeder can also give you the illusion of helping birds without actually creating the thing that birds need. Habitat.

Because birds don't just need snacks. They need a yard that functions like a real place to live, especially if they're going to breed there. Which is the dream.

And the moment that really hit me wasn't in some pristine forest. It was on a university campus, late at night, walking past a garden that had been planted with native plants. And it was loud. Not traffic loud.

Loud like life deafening with calling insects, orthopterans, and all the little night soundtrack creatures you don't even notice until they're suddenly everywhere. Okay, but what makes a yard a bird paradise? Today, we're talking design principles that actually matter for birds.

To help answer today's question, we're joined by Dr. Doug Tallamy, professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, and one of the people most responsible for changing how North America thinks about yards not as decoration, but as conservation infrastructure. If you're worried your neighbors or HOA will revolt, how do you make a habitat first yard look intentional, designed and cared for?

And if you're the kind of person who needs a quick win, how fast can wildlife actually respond when you put the right pieces back?

By the end of this episode, the goal is simple. You'll understand what a bird paradise yard actually is in functional terms.

And you'll have a mental checklist that goes way beyond feeders and vibes. After the break, Dr. Doug Tallamy helps us design yards the way birds experience them as food webs, shelter maps and survival map. Stick around. So welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm really excited to have Doug Tallamy here today with us. Thanks for joining us, Doug.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Happy for the opportunity. Thanks.

Dr. Scott Taylor

I wanted to start off by hearing how you came to understand the value of yards as habitat. And then we can get into like how you actually make your yard into good habitat. But how did you come to that realization? What was the journey for you?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Well, I was born loving nature. So anytime it was destroyed, it bothered me. I had a traumatic experience when I was in third grade.

There was a little pond next to our house and they were building houses everywhere. Well, that was my favorite pond. It's where the toads and everything were.

And the day that the new generation of toads were hopping out into the land, a bulldozer came and buried that pond.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Oh my goodness.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

And I reflect back on that. I could have gone next door to my backyard and dug another pond, but it never occurred to me. And it didn't occur to.

I mean, the mantra of the age was to save nature before we destroyed it. It wasn't, it was about conservation, it wasn't about restoration. And there's so many opportunities to put it back.

I wish I had figured that out earlier. What got me where I am today was moving into our current house in Oxford, Pennsylvania. It was part of a farm that was broken up into 10 acre lots.

Old farm been farmed almost 300 years, thoroughly invaded with non native plants. And the last thing they did was mow it for hay. So when you stop mowing, all those rootstocks of the non natives come back.

So when we actually moved into our 10 acres, it was 10 acres of invasive plants from Asia. So that was my first experience with how bad the invasive species problem is. Now I am an entomologist.

I walk around all the time and look for insects. And the first thing I realize, hey, there's no insects on these.

On autumn olive and multiflora rose and Oreo and bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle and so on. So I actually saw that as a research opportunity. Other people weren't talking about that.

You know, how are these plants destroying the local food web? So we of course wanted to get rid of these plants. My wife did most of it.

And we started planting the natives and I got to see how quickly nature restores herself. It's extremely resilient. If you put what she needs back, she'll recolonize right away.

I have since been counting the number of caterpillar species that are using our yard as a home. And I'm up to 1,366 species so far. I mean, it keeps going every year because we put the plants that they need back.

So that convinced me this really works, which convinced me I need to tell other people to do this, too, because we got 135 million acres of residential landscapes, and we've got to restore them.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, definitely. I guess along that line, I mean, you're an entomologist and I'm an ornithologist.

Birds eat insects, and so these yard naturalization projects can have really big impacts on all kinds of different wildlife.

And I'm wondering from a bird perspective, what are the kind of top things if someone's thinking about turning their yard into habitat that they should be thinking about?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Well, one of the things we discovered along the way is not just that birds need insects. They need particular insects. They, particularly when they're rearing their young, they really focus on caterpillars, and they need a lot of them.

So we discovered the chickadee, tiny little bird, third of an ounce, needs between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars to get the young just to fledge, and then they feed them caterpillars another 21 days after that. Where are all these caterpillars going to come from?

They're going to come from the plants that support caterpillars, but not all plants support caterpillars equally. That led us to the keystone plant concept.

Certain plants, actually 14% of our North American native plants are supporting 90% of the caterpillars that support these bird food webs. So if you really want to help the birds, you've got to plant the plants that are going to make the food that they need when they're breeding.

If you have birds come to your feeder and fly away, but are not breeding on your property, you still have work to do.

You've got to get them to breed on your property, which means they need all those caterpillars right there because they only forage about 50 meters from the nest. They're not flying five miles down the road to the nearest woodlot. Yeah, so that's our goal.

That's what we have to do, is get breeding birds on our property.

Dr. Scott Taylor

And so which plants should we be focusing on in that context then? If it's this subset of native plants that are the really good ones.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Right. It depends on where you live. But in 84% of the counties of the US where oaks occur, they are number one by far.

They're supporting more than a thousand species of caterpillars nationwide. Where I live in the Mid Atlantic states, it's 557 species. Now, there are other top plants.

Prunus native cherries in the mid Atlantic support 446 species. Native willows are very high. As you go farther north, willows become more important.

In the dry riparian areas of the west, cottonwood is really important, but those are the ones that are creating most of the insect biomass that supports our breeding birds. So we can easily make an all native landscape that supports very little if we choose the plants that don't support a lot of caterpillars.

So we want to focus on the ones that do.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, for sure.

And I think when people think about how can I change my yard to incorporate more native plants and be better for native wildlife, I don't think trees are ever at the top of the list of things people think about like trees and shrubs, which you just said, you know, oak, prunus, willows, cottonwoods. I think people think, oh, I'll plant rudbeckia or I'll plant lobelia or whatever.

So that's a really important point, that if you really are wanting to change the value of your yard for birds, like, you should be thinking big, thinking about trees and shrubs and those sorts of things.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

That's what you need to do for birds. But of course, most people, when they think about insect decline, they think about pollinators.

And they actually think about the honeybee, which is not a native bee. And we do want to support our native pollinators for sure. We've got about 4,000 species of native bees and naturally you think about flowers.

But you know, our woody plants are supporting native bees too. Most of those are flowering plants, even oaks that are wind pollinated. The bees go to those catkins in the spring and gather up that pollen.

They don't move it to the female part of the flower of the oaks, but. So they're not actually pollinating, but they are using oak pollen. The default landscape is lawn. We got 44 million acres of lawn.

Dr. Scott Taylor

That's crazy.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

That's an area bigger than New England. Yeah. That 135 million acres of residential landscape is five times the area that we are managing in our national parks.

So these are huge areas that we can convert to functional ecosystems.

I think of the four major ecological goals of our yards, one is to support those pollinators, one is to support a food web so you actually have the birds. One is to sequester carbon so we can help climate change. And the other one is to manage the watershed in which your property lies.

Lawn doesn't any of those things. So we need to reduce the area that's in lawn. And that's where I would focus. If you're in an area that supports trees.

So we're not talking about the high, high dry plains of Colorado, but we're talking about most of the other parts of the country. Adding a tree to your property is the easiest thing to do. And putting a bed under it and then all of a sudden you have less lawn.

Do that two or three times and then you have a lot less lawn. So it's, you don't have to do it all at once. That becomes a big job. Just pick at it over the years, it becomes a hobby.

Then you can get where you need to go.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, and I think that's a great point too because I think when people start to consider like, oh, what could I do?

I don't know, maybe this is just me, but I'm kind of like, ah, do it all right away versus like take my time, make a plan, build in structure over time. And so that's a great point to highlight for everyone that you don't have to do it all at once and that you do have to think about where you are.

You know, I'm not suggesting anyone here should be planting oaks, although it's hilarious how many water demanding trees have been planted in Denver where we don't have enough water for them.

From that perspective, I know that you're not in one of these drier climates, but do you have particular advice for folks who are when they're thinking about naturalizing their yards?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Well, you want to plant the plants that belong in your eco region. So if you're in a very dry area, you're talking about xeriscaping.

The temptation there, and I'm thinking of Southern California, is to use Mediterranean plants because they're from a drier region and they're in the trade. So everybody says, yes, I'm using water efficient plants, but they're not going to support the insects either. So use the native dry, adapted plants.

There's a lot of good examples of xeriscape yards that require no maintenance. They're beautiful and they're doing the best to support the wildlife around them. An interesting phenomenon.

You know, I live in the east and there's a lot of trees, a lot of green. You would think there'd be caterpillars all over the place and moths all over the place. And there, there kind of are.

But I did some mothing in Arizona and I thought, oh, I'm not going to get much here. Was much more in Arizona, even though it was dry, that it's not that green. And I wondered where all these things were coming from.

So it turns out that even the dry areas can be really, really productive. So if you just need the right host plants.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Exactly. Yeah.

I'm curious in your own experience, when you started thinking about, okay, I want to turn my new property into something more natural, renaturalize it. Like, I think a lot of people get hung up on where do I get those plants and how am I sure that this is actually what they're telling me it is?

Because I've seen since I started thinking about yard naturalization, there are certainly more things available commercially, but sometimes there are other things labeled commercially that are native that are not. And so how have you navigated that space? How have you seen that change?

And what recommendations do you have for folks who want to find native local seed stock or plant stock?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Right. You can start.

If you don't know about the local nursery, start with your state and native plant society and ask them who is selling the right plants where you live. That'll be a great place to start.

Don't start at Home Depot or Lowe's because those are national box stores that are selling plants from anywhere because they're still buying into the misconception that plants are just decorations. So go to a reputable nurseryman. Now there are nurserymen that aren't that reputable. They'll hire summer helpers.

And you walk in, say, I want a native plant. And they say, well, this is native. Meaning if you go out in the woods, you'll find it.

What it really is is an invasive non native that does really well in that place. Probably. Yeah, yeah. You just have to find somebody you trust.

Now the demand for native plants does exceed the supply right now, but that is a business opportunity. And more and more people are specializing in natives and they're getting easier to find.

Dr. Scott Taylor

I don't know. I've seen so many beautiful yards that are landscaped entirely with native plants. Like, obviously supporting a lot.

But I think the first thing a lot of people think about is like, oh, my yard's gonna look weedy. Or in some cases like an HOA may ban the way certain yards look. And I wonder what kind of discussions you've had with folks about that.

Like, how do you, how do you meet the demands of an HOA or avoid this? I don't. I like a yard that looks natural, but not everyone does.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Right. Well, there are misconceptions about natives and that is one of them. That they're going to be wild and messy. Yeah.

So you can start, if you're talking about with your HOA, by not using the word native, just say, I'm going to make a beautiful yard. What you're doing is getting more plants into your landscape, less lawn.

The lawn you have, though, that's a cue for care that should be mowed and manicured. You don't have to put any stuff on it, but if you do that, it shows that what you're doing there is intentional.

People say, I'm just going to stop mowing my lawn. That's exactly what HOAs don't want. And it's, you know, tall European grass isn't going to support anything either.

So no lawn is the perfect plant to walk on.

So you can use it to line the beds that you're adding to your yard, line the sidewalk, line the driveway, and it shows that this is a designed landscape. Something else that helps, really, is one of these wildlife signs.

You know, Homegrown National Park sign saying, I'm supporting wildlife here, but I'm also creating ecosystem services. You're doing all these wonderful things for society and you're not even charging anybody. It's great.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah. So for Homegrown National Park.

Tell us more about that, because that's this amazing nationwide project now, and I'd love everyone to hear a lot more about it.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Well, you know, we have parks, we've got preserves all over the place, but we are in this great defaunation event.

We're not in the sixth extinction event yet, but we're headed in that direction where almost all the creatures that are out there are declining in abundance. And if they keep declining, they will go extinct.

So the reason they're declining is because the parks and preserves we have are too small and they're too isolated. Who's in between them? We are. It's our private property. It's our parks, our corporate landscapes, our schools and our hospitals. And.

But they all have landscapes. And right now they've been landscaped with one thing in mind, and that is esthetics.

So now we want to landscape them with two things in mind, esthetics and ecological function. And if we do that, we've expanded the viable habitat of those parks and preserves. That's the solution.

The problem is the people that own all of that private property, that's about 80% of the lower 48 states, don't know that that's a goal. So that's where Homegrown National Park comes in. That is.

Our mission is to educate the rest of the country about their responsibilities in conservation. The future of conservation is with the private landowner, because most of the country's privately owned.

So we have to fill in the educational blanks that we didn't get when we were in school. And it's everybody's personal responsibility to take this on, because we all need healthy ecosystems. Nature's not optional.

We absolutely depend on it. And if you, quote, own a piece of the earth, you've got to steward that piece in a functional way.

So the more people that join Homegrown National Park, and it's free, by the way, the greater the movement will grow. What you're doing, really, is making a pledge to, again, elevate conservation in your daily life. And it's a process. It will happen over time.

So you can join Homegrown National Park before you've done anything. It's just, I am promising to reduce my lawn. I am going to put that oak in there, I am going to plant an aster in a flower pot on my balcony.

So it really doesn't matter how small your effort is, as long as you're moving in the right direction.

And when I talk about changing the culture and elevating the importance of conservation, that includes how you vote, because that's tremendously important in terms of what's happening in this country.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, definitely. No, I completely agree. I love that it's a pledge, too. And then you have access to people that can give you this information about, what can I do?

All I have is, like you said, if all I have is a balcony, I think a lot of people feel like, well, I can't do anything. But an aster. Yeah, an aster in a pot can be this amazing nectar source, food source and all of these other things.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

So, yeah, we have a section on the HomegrownNationalPark.org website about container gardening. So the best native plants for containers in your eco region are right there on our site. That's why you go to our site.

There's a lot of information on there. If you're into international travel, go to Singapore. It is the greenest city in the world because they have focused on that for the last 30 years.

Singapore is now an ecotourist destination, the center of the city. People go there to see hornbills and all kinds of things that are thriving right in the middle of the city because they designed it that way.

We could do that with our cities, we could do that with our suburbs. We just have to make it an important goal.

We asked the simple question, what kind of a landscape is required to sustain a population of Carolina chickadees?

And by sustain, I mean not one breeding bird, but you have a whole population and they can be there, quote, forever, as long as you keep those resources there. But we want to do it in a residential neighborhood. So we had volunteers inside the beltway at Washington D.C. and we got an NSF grant to do it.

Former Ph.D. student Desiree Narengo. Desiree put together a whole team of volunteers during the. We call them interns. They weren't volunteers. They got paid. It was a five year study.

It was a huge, huge thing.

Dr. Scott Taylor

It was a huge study. Yeah.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

But what she found, she found lots of things.

But the take home message for a lot of people is that if you have 70% of your plant biomass native, chickadees will be able to reproduce year after year after year. Less than that and the populations tend to crash. So that's that 70/30 figure that people are throwing around. And it certainly worked in D.C.

The problem I have is that I'm hearing that all. I hear that in California this is the rule 70/30. Remember, this was one study with one bird in one place. And we don't want to reify it.

I mean, it's the best information we have. Nobody else has done it. And what it says is native plants are important. The more you have, the more life you're going to support.

What we didn't know at the time was the role of keystone plants. So how many of that 70% need to be keystone plants for it to work really well. And if you have all keystone plants, maybe it only has to be 50%.

We don't know. There's a lot more work that needs to be done.

But again, the more powerful plants you can get into your landscape, the more life is going to be there. That's really what the take home message is.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, I love that take home message. And if someone's like, what do I do, Doug? How do I actually start this path of changing my yard into something functional for wildlife?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

We have thought about plants as if they're decorations forever. There are decorations, they're beautiful. And we do want to decorate our yards. We want to fit in with our neighbors. We want to be high status.

So we have to use plants to do all those things. But at the same time, we want to choose plants that are ecologically functional. We do have beautiful native plants.

I can show you gorgeous native gardens. None of them are maintenance free. So you're not going to use natives so that you never have to do anything again. We have to.

We have to guard against the invasion of these non natives. We've got 3,300 species of plants from other continents that are resident here now in our neighborhoods, but also our wild areas.

And they're really degrading the food web. And they keep trying to invade any garden that we put in there. Yeah.

Kind of deserve that because we brought them in and sold them in our nursery. So you have to be vigilant about that. But those are the big challenges that we face. Yeah.

Dr. Scott Taylor

A garden that is predominantly native plants still requires attention.

Alright, we've reached the part of the show we call that's BS or that's bird stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers. So, Doug, what do you want to call BS on?

Dr. Doug Tallamy

BS? That native plants are wild and messy and that you can't use them in a residential landscape. They're wild and messy.

If you make them wild and messy, I can give you a 100% non native landscape that's messy, you know, and you get thrown out of your HOA. So it's not the nativity of the plant that counts, it's how you maintain your property.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Exactly. Excellent point. Thanks so much. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Doug. Appreciate you taking the time.

Dr. Doug Tallamy

Really had a lot of fun. Thanks, Scott.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Birds are dinosaurs, and around here, we like our snacks. So we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget. Today's nugget is birds don't need more snacks. They need habitat.

And habitat isn't about what looks green to us. It's about what your plants produce, especially insects.

So the real yard design question becomes, which plants actually promote things like caterpillars? And here's the twist. Not all native plants are equal.

A small set of keystone native trees and shrubs do an outsized amount of the work, turning sunlight into insect life and insect life into birds. Meanwhile, a yard can be full of beautiful plants that look lush and still function. P.S.

Home Depot and Lowe's should not be your first stop on this journey. That's a wrap on this week's episode. Okay, but what makes a yard a bird paradise? Thanks for listening, watching, and supporting our show.

We'll catch you next time. Byeee. Okay, But... Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor, with production and creative by Zach Karl.

Transcript Disclosure
This transcript was generated using AI-assisted transcription and may contain errors or omissions. Please refer to the audio or video episode for the most accurate representation.

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Chestnut-sided warbler audio contributed by Jay McGowan, ML191085

• Northern parula audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML79471

• Carolina chickadee audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML100756

• Oriental pied-hornbill audio contributed by Warren Y. Brockelman, ML170843

• Northern cardinal audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML249823

• Black-capped chickadee audio contributed by Jay McGowan, ML202239