At What Price, Perfection?

If you purchase today’s version of the “perfect” Christmas tree (seen here), you may find it is much too densely branched for ornaments to hang from. Instead, tinsel and decorations will lie upon the branches, which isn’t nearly as attractive as in days of yore when they hung freely.

 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

“Perfection” means free from flaws or defects, and it’s a state of existence many people relentlessly chase these days. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, $15 billion dollars was spent in America alone for beauty procedures in 2016. And the Japan Times reported that $10.7 billion was spent in 2017 on just the materials and chemicals practitioners used to perform these cosmetic procedures worldwide.

The price of physical “beauty” is not just in terms of money, but also in terms of real pain and risk for those who choose surgery, not to mention the price of wasting your life (time is something I consider more valuable than almost anything) on something that is ridiculously overvalued.

 

Presumably the point of beauty is to be admired and/or to find someone to love you, yet being beautiful is not in and of itself likely to bring you genuine happiness; it’s likely that even the most gorgeous woman and handsome man have been cheated on. That says a lot (or, at least, it should) about the value of great looks alone in terms of endearment to others.

 

People nowadays are even concerned with how their pets look. According to the New York Post, dogs are getting nose and/or ear jobs, face-lifts, and even testicular implants so male dogs “can regain their masculinity”! Although some procedures, as with people, are done for medical purposes, they are far fewer in number than those for simply aesthetic reasons. In 2011, pet owners—more often known these days as pet “parents”—forked over $62 million in plastic surgery for their pets.

 

Folks are free to decide how much money they want to spend and how much pain they are willing to endure for their own sense of flawlessness. But is it ethical to subject animals to aesthetic surgical procedures they get nothing out of except great discomfort?

 

This infatuation with “physical excellence” in human society borders upon madness. It not only places at risk and brings pain to pets going under the knife for invalid reasons, but it has also come at great cost to the quality of everyone’s everyday lives.

 

Decades ago, when I was in my twenties and had fallen in love with the man of my dreams, I received a dozen long-stemmed red roses from him for my birthday. Oh, the fragrance of those roses! It was divine. Less than a decade later, when I had to undergo serious surgery that I was terrified of having, a dear friend also chose to send me a dozen long-stemmed red roses. The cut flowers still held the marvelous rose essence that was able to carry my thoughts away from the hospital and the intense pain of my surgery.

 

But by the end of the 1990s, the scent was gone. I couldn’t believe that this emblematic feature of roses had so thoroughly disappeared, and I also couldn’t imagine how it could have been allowed to happen. It was perhaps my first brush with this new world in which physical “perfection” plays such a dominant role in so many aspects of everyday life.

 

The rose fragrance was sacrificed on the alter of “beauty”. Gardeners growing their own roses preferred new pastel colors that were not biologically linked to the heavenly scent of red roses. Florists who wanted access to roses from around the world needed hardier specimens that could withstand travel and last longer in the customer’s hands, and the plants bred to meet these standards lost their scent in the process.

 

There has been equal demand for looks over substance in the food industry, with equally regrettable results. Apples are especially noticeable victims of this trend, with most of the commercial varieties looking like the artificial wax fruits that adorned my mother’s dining-room fruit bowl when I was growing up. Their “perfect” looks belie their loss of great apple flavor, not to mention nutrition.

 

The lack of robust flavor and aroma in strawberries ranks right up there with the rose situation as a truly lamentable development. Time was when you would bite into a strawberry that was fully red inside and chock-full of sweet juice. Now these fruits tend to be mostly white inside—even if bought from a local farmer—and, not surprisingly, flavorless by comparison.

 

I used to make strawberry ice cream following a recipe that suggested you might want to add red food coloring, but the naturally red and tasty juice made such an addition totally unnecessary. I can’t even imagine making my own ice cream from the strawberries on today’s market.

 

Then there are the Christmas trees. I’ve always adored these decorative icons of the month of December, whether they be the fake tree we had during my youth, the Eastern Red-cedars cut for free from a farmer’s pasture during my college years, or a field-grown White Pine Christmas tree bought from a parking lot when I was a young adult.

 

The beauty of these trees came from their openness. Ornaments hung down in all their colorful glory in the spaces between branches, and free-hanging shiny tinsel augmented the glow of the lights, be they big or small. The trees looked as real (albeit decorated) as when they’d been growing in a forest or field (unless, of course, they were the pink, white, or blue aluminum trees some folks liked in the ‘60s), and even the fake ones mimicked the airiness of natural trees.

 

These Christmas trees gave you a sense of connectedness to the environment, a little bit of the outdoors brought inside for a special holiday. In contrast, today’s overly sheared trees evoke the hand of man, not nature.

 

The trees are pruned to make them grow in a “perfect pyramid” shape (Christmas tree-grower lingo for "much wider at the bottom than at the top"). If they aren’t “full enough”, the lateral branches are sheared to increase density. But the thickness of the branches doesn’t allow tinsel and ornaments to hang freely as they are supposed to do, making the trees far less attractive because the ornaments instead lie directly upon the greenery.

 

I’m guessing that someone decided that live Christmas trees should look as they are drawn in cartoons and on cards and other stationery. Indeed, they now do, which means they look as artificial as Christmas tree-shaped jewelry.

 

Perhaps artificiality is to be expected when such a large percentage of the populace spends a good deal of time living in a virtual world instead of a real one. But folks should be careful about “improving” Mother Nature. In many cases, they end up eradicating the very qualities that made things extraordinary, making the price of “perfection” way too high.

 

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

Before bringing your live Christmas tree into the house, be sure to check it over for mantid egg cases. Otherwise, immature mantids might hatch out (due to the heat) inside your home, where they will have nothing to eat and will die.

 

When you find an egg case, cut off the entire branch. Do your best to position it within the branches of a shrub, with the egg mass in its original orientation. Try not to leave the egg mass obviously exposed because birds feed upon mantid eggs.

 

You can visit the site below to read descriptions of the mantid egg cases of three commonly encountered species.

 

https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mantids-mantises

Tallamy’s Talking Points Miss the Point

Tiny Hover Flies in the author’s yard in Virginia flock to Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) for food in November. This “invasive” flowering plant is one of the last to hold blooms that serve as a lifeline for insects out and about on warm, late-fall days.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

A friend sent me a link to a YouTube video of a presentation for the Santa Clara (California) Native Plant Society by Doug Tallamy.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esNIhiWWr84

His basic message continues to be that the best way to save birds is via caterpillars, which he expects you to accomplish by landscaping your property with native woody plants.

 

The problem with Professor Tallamy’s directive is that it’s simplistic at best and destructive at worst. He ignores a whole host of injurious human activities to focus on the one (gardening) that may be the most palatable to people to act upon (because they enjoy this hobby), but it's actually the least helpful for the perpetuation of wildlife. 

 

And although Dr. Tallamy avoided mentioning pesticides in his talk to Californians who are presumably more sensitive (and thus more enlightened) to the pernicious effects of putting these chemicals into the environment, he has previously made clear his support for employing them to get rid of so-called invasive plants that he mistakenly believes have “pushed out” native plants. [Please see “Invasion Biology: Perception Trumps Reality”, posted here on October 6, 2020.]

 

In other words, Doug Tallamy’s talking points miss the point; he’s not going after the real obstacles to maintaining insect and bird numbers, but rather is trying to get folks to apply a band-aid that will not make much difference. Even if everyone on the planet landscaped only with native plants, it still wouldn’t increase the populations of caterpillars and birds because a dearth of native plants is not the main reason for the dearth of caterpillars. The main reason there are so few caterpillars (the larvae of moths and butterflies) is due to the ubiquitous lights found in human environments.

 

Most of the caterpillars you’re likely to spot are immature moths, and what do many of them do nowadays as adults? Instead of mating to perpetuate the species, many spend the night flying around outdoor lighting along streets, in parking lots, and around homes and businesses where they are more easily caught and consumed by owls and bats. They also will remain on the outside surfaces of windows in which nothing blocks indoor lighting from escaping. When moths don’t get a chance to mate, caterpillars are not created.

 

When Dr. Tallamy penned his first book, he showed a nighttime composite photo of the United States that he employed to point out “the extent to which we have converted natural areas to developed landscapes”, rather than discuss the real danger illustrated in that picture: lights! Thirteen years later, he’s finally come to recognize the danger posed by lighting, but does he suggest that the Californians listening to his program shut off unnecessary lights and employ curtains or blinds to shield their glow from insects outside? Nope. His answer is to keep the lights burning! Just use yellow lights that are less attractive to insects.

 

Of course, keep unnecessary lights on and you are especially guilty of contributing to the warming of our climate. However, global climate change is somehow not high on Doug Tallamy’s list of environmental concerns, even though a real problem for many insects nowadays is that—thanks to warmer winter temperatures—they are active in months when they should be hibernating. With nary a bloom in sight, they can’t feed to replace the energy they are using. Run out of energy reserves and you die.

 

Then there’s the lawn. While showing a photo of a house with a humongous lawn, he blithely tells folks to just get rid of half of their lawn, as if wasting the remaining 50% of the sizable amount of land in the photo would be acceptable. Why doesn’t he tell folks that a manicured lawn—dosed at regular intervals with deadly chemicals and kept “weed-free” (i.e., no flowers, such as dandelions, for butterflies, bees, etc.) doesn’t help our wildlife? After all, aren’t the people listening to him supposed to be ones who care about doing what’s right by the environment? Or are native-plant folks flocking to his lectures only because he’s the spokesman for their raison d’être?

 

At the end of his presentation, the Santa Clarans were able to ask questions. One person wondered if it was okay to grow a close relative of a native plant instead of the actual plant native to California. Professor Tallamy’s answer? You should be more concerned with the function of a plant in the landscape rather than its origins—even though neither he nor nativists (people who prefer to see native plants being grown by gardeners) will ever make this statement when discussing purportedly invasive plants.

 

Doug Tallamy’s overall message perfectly meshes with the current push by native-plant societies to get rid of many alien-plant species. But, as exemplified above, this effort is contradictory. Everyone knows that when calling a plant “native”, it’s not supposed to have been imported from somewhere else. Yet plenty of nativists want to have it both ways, and Doug Tallamy isn’t going to incur their wrath by disagreeing with them.

 

Lastly, Tallamy has a bad habit of making comparative evaluations of both plants and animals. He has no problem denigrating the animal species he doesn’t believe are as “valuable” as caterpillars, and he implied that 85% of native plants are essentially useless because they “aren’t supporting that much in terms of food webs”. Of course, this suggestion is ludicrous.

 

First, as every creature exists for a reason (otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, it wouldn’t be here), it’s an improper concept to posit that some kinds are more valuable or important than others. Second, and perhaps more critically, people are already overly prejudiced against many lifeforms, which is hugely detrimental to the environment. It’s hard enough to get people to accept nature in its entirety without having an authority figure convincing them to favor some kinds of animals/plants over others.

 

If you listen to Doug Tallamy or read his books, I highly recommend you employ serious critical thinking. This scientist’s training is in entomology and it shows. He espouses a worldview that is far too narrowly focused, disqualifying him as a spokesman for the environment in its entirety.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

With global climate change already occurring, consider growing nonnative plants that bloom as early as March and are still blooming in November (the Common Dandelion is a cheery flower that will bloom even in winter sometimes if it’s in a sunny spot and the temperature is warm enough). Many of these plants may be classified as “invasive weeds”, but they are crucial for assisting a variety of insects to survive the current conditions on Planet Earth. 

 

COVID Craziness

If you’ve wondered how trash ends up in our local waterways and then the oceans, you’ll find the answer in this photo of a discarded mask near a river. 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

On my daily walk recently, I came upon yet another disposable mask on the ground. It was disturbing for many reasons, one of which was that it was quite close to my local river. This refuse could easily be wind-blown into the waterway, beginning a journey to the Chesapeake Bay and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.

Movies or television series (especially, it seems, those from Europe) often show people discarding all kinds of things directly into large bodies of water or the tributaries leading to them, as if such areas represent just another wastebasket. Apparently, quite a few people are oblivious to the fact that many forms of wildlife reside within these liquid habitats and human refuse poses serious harm to those organisms.

The number of disposable masks I’ve seen in parking lots and along roads is sure to rise because “disposable” equates to “one use” in our wealthy society—even when an item could easily be reused. My husband and I bought two disposable masks when the pandemic began over six months ago, and we are still using them. When we get home from shopping, I flatten the masks and leave them out so any COVID virus organisms on them will become dehydrated and less virulent or completely harmless.

Additionally, we wash our hands at least once while out-and-about and immediately upon arriving home, and we practice the six-feet-apart rule as much as is practical in public. But, what I consider most important of all, is that we do not touch our hands to our eyes, noses, or mouths unless we’ve cleaned them first. If this one bit of reasonable and effective advice was impressed upon the public, we would not have had to shut down businesses, many of which will never reopen. Instead, we’ve had pandemonium, a chaotic situation in which government and medical officials alike have responded with fear and overreaction.

Yes, this illness is quite infectious and needs to be taken seriously. However, it never meant we needed to put people out of business, depriving owners and employees alike of their livelihood. Individuals can take their own proactive steps to protect themselves from COVID-19 while still visiting restaurants, museums, grocery stores, etc.

The one reaction by government and medical officials that has been proven to be overkill—as evidenced by the relaxation of government insistence for it—is the sanitation of virtually everything in sight. Just because we’re able to spread these chemicals everywhere does not mean we should. Common sense should tell us that inhaling chemicals not meant to be ingested can never be good for one’s wellbeing, and yet people have been subjected to that experience.

I got to the post office a bit early one day before the service section opened. As I waited in the lobby, a man came around to sanitize every wall and object in the room. He wasn’t near me, but—much to my dismay—his spray filled the lobby and I ended up breathing those chemicals.

Another time, my husband and I stayed at a hotel that offered breakfast with the night’s lodging. We got into the dining room first thing to eat, and only one other person was having his breakfast. Yet, the moment he left, an employee came around and wiped every single table in the room, rather than just the used table, with sanitizer. We weren’t only unhappy about having to breathe sanitizer and wonder what ill effect it could have on our health; we also could not enjoy the rest of our breakfast due to the fragrance. This experience did nothing to encourage us to travel again, which would be a help to the industry, from hotels/motels and restaurants to gas stations and other kinds of businesses.

I complained to the hotel chain, which blamed it on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines they were required to follow. It’s sad but true that those in charge with the power to impose rules rarely think through their edicts to be sure they are logical and don’t go beyond what is absolutely required and suitable. Of course, those in government have guaranteed income and employment, so they are immune from the consequences of the rules they impose upon the rest of us. Thus, they probably don't concern themselves with the repercussions. Craziness can be defined as “something that is totally unsound”, which I would suggest has been the case with the extreme sanitation requirement in the general public realm (rather than just in medical settings).

 NATURE ADVICE:

The COVID pandemic has been disastrous for our environment. Think of the tons of additional waste, thanks to restaurants that had to offer take-out service only (with its plastic utensils and Styrofoam containers that are hard to recycle) in order to survive. Think of all the people throwing away disposable masks after a single-use. Think of all the sanitizer chemicals that make their way to wastewater treatment plants and then to waterways, yet have not been proven to protect you any better than using plain soap and water and keeping dirty hands away from your face. It’s a fact that outside of a hospital, most people catch respiratory illnesses directly from infected people, not contaminated surfaces.

https://www.rush.edu/news/does-hand-sanitizer-work

Speak out against lockdowns that harm people financially by keeping businesses shuttered and sanitary measures that bring unnecessary harm to our natural world.

 

 

Invasion Biology: Perception Trumps Reality

Numerous pollinators, such as this Tiger Swallowtail, obtain nourishment from the blooms of Autumn Olive (Eleagnus umbellata). Their feeding fertilizes the flowers, which then provide fruits by late summer for birds and mammals.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

 

One definition of perception is “a thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances”.

 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/perception

 

It’s the perfect description for the field of invasion biology that deals with plants. When particular nonnative plants became noticeable in number alongside roadways, trails, and in fields, folks suddenly became aware of them and concluded these species had “pushed out” the native plants they felt should be in these locations. But their assumption was based only upon what they were seeing. While seeing can sometimes equate to believing, seeing can be quite deceiving, especially in regards to this issue. I can make clear this point by sharing a true story from my life.

 

I made the decision to work for a year before going to college. My parents did not have money to pay my way, and I didn’t want to end up thousands of dollars in debt by leaving for college when I was 18.

 

My one-year delay turned into five long years. Although I worked sixty-plus-hour weeks, I realized hostessing/waitressing in a restaurant and cashiering in a department store were not going to get me the money needed for college. Therefore, when a managerial position became available at a store 45 minutes away in another town, I jumped at the chance to get it, which I did.

 

Within my first few weeks there, my sister asked me to pick up diapers for her recently born baby. As I was only about 21 and this was the very early seventies before the term “Ms.” had taken hold, I was addressed as “Miss” because I wasn’t married. Immediately word got around that I was a single mother with a baby!

 

Obviously, appearances can be deceiving, and people should refrain from reading too much into them without further investigation. Although it may be difficult for older and younger people alike to grasp how our natural world became so full of plants they mistakenly believe to have “invaded”, that’s no excuse for jumping to conclusions that are, indeed, erroneous.

 

How can I know (and I do know) that the field of invasion biology is way off track? I know because I’ve paid very close attention to the environment throughout my life, which now adds up to many decades of observations.

 

The reason many of the so-called invasive plants exist in the United States is because they were deliberately brought here from other countries. They were known to be effective for preventing erosion by covering disturbed areas (such as that caused by road construction) where most native plants couldn’t possibly return because the soil conditions weren’t right for them. Plants (e.g., Kudzu) continue to grow in such sites, and in developed areas cleared for new construction that has been long delayed or never happened. Invasion biologists overlook the fact that all plants have soil requirements that must be met for them to grow; to home gardeners, it’s known as “right plant, right place”.

 

It’s said again and again that alien plants crowd out native species, but the reality is that they first come up where no, or very few, native plants are already growing. Ground that is compacted and nutrient-poor (either due to construction, trail use, or hundreds of years of cows treading over the landscape) is where nonnative plants fulfill the important role of colonizers that rehabilitate the soil. Over time, native plants can come in, and they do.

 

Invasion biologists must not be gardeners. Otherwise, they couldn’t possibly ignore—as the entire field has done—the truism that environmental conditions dictate which plants can grow in disturbed soils.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

When I first moved into my newly built house 30 years ago, the topsoil had been graded away and the landscape was as gray, and every bit as devoid of life, as the Moon.

 

By working some of the yard while allowing nature to take its course in other areas of it, I soon had a nature-friendly garden that consisted mostly of non-native plants, some of which are known as “invasive.”  But every one of these plants contributed to a wildlife habitat that has become a haven for a huge diversity of organisms.

 

People are being made to feel guilty for allowing plants to grow that are well established in this country and are providing the structure necessary for superb wildlife habitat. Don’t allow yourself to be dictated to by friends and neighbors misguided by the invasive-plant movement that is, itself, misguided by scientists.

 

 

 

The Air Potato Incident

An Air Potato Vine is loaded with little “potatoes” by the end of September in Virginia.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

The Air Potato Vine (Dioscorea bulbifera) gets its name from the aerial “tubers” that look just like miniature potatoes (at least on plants growing in Central Virginia where I live; in warmer areas they can apparently be much larger). This vine is not native to the United States and is considered “invasive”. Consequently, it’s on the hit (with herbicides) list of nativists (folks who prefer only native plants be grown in this country).

 

Thus, it came to pass that I happened upon two people on a very gray, cool, damp, late-September morning with spray tanks on their backs. They were walking in and out of woods within 100 feet of the local river. I stopped to ask what they were doing, and was told they were searching for Air Potato Vines to destroy. When I asked why, I was given the usual spiel about these vines being invasive and harmful to the environment.

 

Their plan was to pull the vines down off whatever plants they were growing on, and spray only the bottom few feet with Triclopyr, an herbicide that—according to its label—can pollute ground water where it's shallowly located. Considering the proximity of the river, the ground water table must have been very close to the surface of the land where these two folks were spraying. (Waterways are indicative of ground water level.)

https://alligare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ag-triclopyr-4-specimen-label.pdf

 

Disregarding the fact that Air Potato Vine does not seem to get very large in the area where I live and hardly poses much of a threat to trees growing along the edges of roads or bordering driveways (this plant requires sunlight to thrive), there were plenty of other practical reasons why these folks should not have been ordered by their employer to spray for Air Potato Vines on that particular day.

 

First and foremost, it was far too late in the season for this activity. These plants would have already made their little “spuds”, which must have gone flying all over the place when the vines were pulled down. These people were, in fact, assisting the vine to “invade” an even wider area than it would have reached on its own (people’s involvement in so-called invasiveness is rarely, if ever, acknowledged).

 

Additionally, herbicides are supposed to be used on plants while they are in the growing stage, which the plants were well past by the end of September. Therefore, chemicals were being put onto these plants for no purpose whatsoever as they would have no effect. And even if the plants were still growing, it was supposed to rain that day and the air was already quite humid. Herbicides should never be employed when leaves are damp because their effectiveness is diminished, and rain, of course, simply washes these substances off into the environment.

 

Pesticides are never good for our wildlife. Amphibians have extremely absorbent skin, which means they are poisoned by these chemicals. Just the day before I'd found a very young Gray Treefrog resting on a plant leaf along that very road.

People need to start recognizing that animals are out there and being harmed by their zeal to rid the world—via pesticides—of nonnative plants that do not pose anywhere near the harm (if, indeed, any) to our environment as the poisons they employ.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

The Eastern Chipmunk that lives in this area fills its cheeks with Air Potato Vine tubers to store in its den for winter food. If those little spuds are sprayed with pesticide, the chipmunk will be poisoned. If you don’t want certain plants on your land, it’s far better to pull or cut them at the right time of year than to use weed killers that can hurt our wildlife.

                             

Chickadee Chicanery

 

A Carolina Chickadee grasps a Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) seed it found in the author’s yard. Seeds are an essential component of this bird’s fall and winter diet.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

Prefatory comments: You’ve probably heard of Doug Tallamy and his famous chickadee study that claims its “results demonstrate that nonnative plants reduce habitat quality for insectivorous birds”, and thus “private landowners should prioritize native plant species” on their properties.

 

These overgeneralized statements are: (1) fallacious, as they are based upon the mistaken belief that a Carolina Chickadee is urban-adapted, as if it can nest successfully in virtually any yard containing a bird house; (2) wrong, in that they are only applicable to the Carolina Chickadee and similarly forest-dependent species; and (3) misleading, as the authors left out the word “woody”, leading the reader to believe they include herbaceous plants, which they don’t.

 

Unfortunately, people have been so misled by this study that much perfectly functioning habitat has been destroyed, often with the assistance of herbicides that not only bring harm to wildlife in the area, but can also accumulate in the environment.

 

Something is amiss in the realm of ecological sciences when a paper is peer-reviewed and published despite being deeply flawed in its execution, and its results so overgeneralized as to deliver several faulty conclusions. Such is the case with “Nonnative plants reduce population growth of an insectivorous bird”, published in 2018 by Desiree Narango, Douglas Tallamy, and Peter Marra.

 

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11549

 

The scientists state they performed this research to rectify that “no study has examined the impact of nonnative plants [in urban areas] on subsequent population responses of vertebrate consumers”. They chose as their study subject the Carolina Chickadee—a forest bird that too many people mistakenly believe to be generally “urban-adapted”. Surprisingly, this group included ornithologist Peter Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, whom one would expect to realize that the Carolina Chickadee can nest successfully in an urban area only if the area is well wooded.

 

Chickadees are as tied to large native trees (the definition of forest) as fish are to water because these trees provide both the natural cavities for nesting and the multitude of leaf-eating arthropods to feed a chickadee family. In other words, for a chickadee population to be sustained in urban areas, there must exist (1) natural forest nearby (parks/natural areas or unbuildable areas between homes where trees remain) or (2) virtual forest (from the perspective of a bird flying above the canopy) because a profusion of mature trees surrounds homes.

 

So yes, you may entice a chickadee into your yard with an artificial cavity (a bird house), but you better have nearby forest to fully support it. Narango, et al., overlooked this ecological niche of the Carolina Chickadee, which automatically would have told them this species couldn’t possibly do well in a novel environment of mostly nonnative woody plants (their image of most urban areas) that are “poor at supporting [caterpillar and caterpillar-like] insects that are critical food resources”—a fact they pointed out in the introduction to their paper.

 

Truth be told, calling a forest-dependent chickadee urban-adapted is comparable to, for example, doing the same for the Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) of prairies and meadows simply because it’s able to flower and make seeds in many yards. Both the chickadee and the coneflower will only thrive, however, if their ecological requirements are met—large native trees to sustain the bird and at least six to eight hours of sunlight a day for the plant. This information is well known, so performing a study to prove its easy-to-understand veracity is a waste of time, effort, and most importantly, grant money.

 

Therefore, these three scientists had no justifiable reason to expect a chickadee to successfully reproduce in “fields” (i.e., yards). To study the effects of nonnative woody plants upon birds in urban areas, which the investigators were purportedly trying to do, you must study legitimately urban-adapted native birds (i.e., those species that move in of their own accord to landscapes not intentionally created for them—for example, an Eastern Phoebe that chooses to nest on a gutter downspout). Thus, the Narango, et al., paper should have been rejected for publication first and foremost because the scientists studied a bird of the forest in an urban setting, which should have axiomatically told the reviewers (as well as the researchers) that their results would be erroneous—as they certainly are.

 

The authors write that “[their] study suggests that nonnative plants do not provide enough arthropod prey during reproduction to sustain bird populations”, but if this statement were accurate, there’d be no Brown Thrashers, Gray Catbirds, Northern Cardinals, or Northern Mockingbirds spending the breeding season in urban/suburban yards to reproduce. The fact is that genuinely urban-adapted birds do find enough insects to feed their nestlings, reproducing quite well in yards with many alien woody-plant species because other kinds of birds are not as dependent as chickadee chicks upon the caterpillars and sawfly larvae that only native trees can provide in abundance.

 

My own experience over the past 34 years (documented in writing and photos that provided the basis for my book) clearly demonstrates that a mix of native and nonnative plants of all kinds constitutes excellent habitat for a vast array of organisms, including the Carolina Chickadee because forest is nearby.

 

Garden/news writers and native-plant/conservation groups have glommed on to these study results, but these folks have been seriously deluded.

 

NATURE ADVICE:

Unless your yard has forest nearby, you probably shouldn’t try to coax chickadees into reproducing there by putting out a bird box—the only legitimate recommendation to be derived from the Narango, Tallamy, and Marra study, which (although they didn’t intend it) conclusively proves the Carolina Chickadee is, indeed, a forest-dependent species.

                          

Roadside Stiltgrass

Roadside Stiltgrass

Highway departments help spread Japanese Stiltgrass by mowing in fall. Their mowers pick up and distribute seeds, creating miles of stiltgrass along roadway edges. 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

People tend to manage their properties without giving much thought to the detrimental effects of their actions upon the wildlife living there. Even folks who self-identity as environmentalists are often guilty of this lack of consideration for the creatures that share their world, although their actions may well be due to a lack of knowledge. Perhaps that situation can be remedied.

 

Consider the removal of so-called invasive plants. Much pressure is now applied to neighbors and friends by those who, in environmental-activist circles, believe it’s their duty to shame people they know into removing these plants by suggesting that such plants pose a great risk to the environment. But removal of these plants itself poses risks to wildlife that are never discussed; if it were, people who truly care about wildlife might build a wall of resistance to their friends’ or neighbors’ efforts to manipulate them into doing what they are told.

 

Recently, I noticed in the area where I live that a landowner had pesticided the Japanese Stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) growing alongside the road of his property, along with some stiltgrass growing in a parking area. Employing pesticides is rarely a good idea, and in this case, the use of poison was completely unnecessary. The amount of stiltgrass to be removed covered a very limited space that could have easily been cut in ten minutes with a string trimmer shortly before the plants had bloomed.

 

Timing is everything. Stiltgrass is an annual that blooms in late summer (the end of August where I live), and cutting it at this time prevents seeds from forming that would be the source of plants next year. On the other hand, people removing stiltgrass alongside roadways where the species grows in abundance are wasting their time if they think their property won’t simply refill with these plants in the future.

 

The seeds from all the ignored roadside plants extending for miles in both directions will find their way there, courtesy of the highway department. It sends mowers out in fall along the local roads and the huge machines “catch” seeds, which then fall off farther along the road where they germinate the next year. People then blame the alien grass for “invading” when our highway department is to blame for the ever-increasing amount of ground covered by stiltgrass.

 

Personally, I don’t see this as a bad thing. White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos spend the cold months of the year in our Mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast, and the stiltgrass shelters and feeds these birds well during what can be a very harsh time of year. This consideration is important in a world where most people’s properties consist mainly of lawns kept overly short which don’t provide much for wildlife in any way.

 

Additionally, Japanese Stiltgrass, despite being nonnative, is a host plant for the Carolina Satyr, a brown butterfly with eyespots on its wings. Efforts to remove stiltgrass where this butterfly resides puts populations at risk because the plants may contain eggs.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

Garlic Mustard (Allaria petiolata) and Princess Tree (Paulownia tomentosa) are two other common alien plants that people are pushed to remove from their roadside property. Garlic Mustard is usually pulled, while Paulownia is cut down and possibly pesticided later. Removal harms early pollinators that can use both plants for nectar and birds that feed upon Paulownia seeds during the winter. Additionally, the roots of Paulownia prevent soil erosion—an important consideration when it grows along a river, as it does where I live.

Correcting the Narrative

Correcting the Narrative

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) decorates a Washington (Olympic Peninsula) clearcut in this slide taken in the 1980s. A clearcut is hardly recognizable as such when it regrows, and it provides for a variety of wildlife dependent upon successional sites.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 If you care about the natural world, you’ve probably depended upon conservation organizations for information because you believe them to be knowledgeable and trustworthy. But can you take what they tell you as gospel? Not necessarily.

 

In the 1980s-90s, the Sierra Club provided the narrative regarding clearcuts (areas of forest cut down for timber), telling us how bad they were for the environment. Few people, if any, would have doubted this perspective because, to human eyes, a clearcut appears as a site of total devastation.

 

However, forest regeneration provides habitat for wildlife, too—although not for all the original inhabitants. A variety of other kinds of critters depend upon such “disasters” to create open habitat they need for the perpetuation of their kind, as I discovered while birding clearcuts. I found many species of avian creatures, along with butterflies, rabbits, lizards, etc. My experience belied the Sierra Club stance.

 

A close birding friend of mine had also realized clearcuts provided for warblers and other species when the land next door to his house was completely logged. But while he didn’t hesitate to admit that fact to me, he would never have dared to breathe a word of it to anyone else. People tend to be terrified to go against the prevailing narrative, lest they be ostracized. No one wants to be banished from his social circles.

 

But signing on to a false narrative is not at all helpful to Mother Nature. You can’t possibly make the proper choices about how to take care of the natural world if you base your decisions upon falsehoods or misleading information. So, I wrote an article about the true value of clearcuts.

 

I originally sent it to major conservation organizations, thinking they would surely want people to know the truth. Not a one would publish it. Tellingly, the editor of  a national birding organization's magazine phoned to admit I was right, but this group believed it would lose members if my article appeared in their publication. The realization that environmental organizations were required by their members’ beliefs (wrong as they might be) to kowtow to an erroneous narrative was revelatory and very disturbing to me.

 

Does any birder really want Ruffed Grouse to disappear? As of 2015, 15 states listed the Ruffed Grouse as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, mainly because of loss of habitat. This species requires the young forest that clearcutting helps to provide, yet birders apparently would have opposed receiving this information. Why? Psychologists explain this as "herd mentality", which minimizes social harm to individuals, but poses significant risks for our environment.

 

My article got published—first, by RGS, the magazine for the Ruffed Grouse Society (hunters), followed by Michigan Forests, the magazine of the Michigan Forest Association (foresters).

 

If you love our natural world as I do, I hope you will subscribe to this blog so you can be privy to real-world truths. Mother Nature desperately needs folks willing to fight inaccurate narratives that perpetuate faulty and ruinous information.

 

NATURE ADVICE:

Despite people’s aversion to clearcuts, they essentially replicate them when they clean their gardens in fall (known horticulturally as “putting the garden to bed”). Instead, you should leave the dried plant stalks, leaves, etc., until spring because this material is used by wildlife to protect eggs, larvae, and adult organisms from harsh winter weather.