Virginia Department of Forestry Has Made a Huge Mistake Removing Bradford Pear Trees
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| You need to place your nose right up to a Bradford Pear flower to smell it. It doesn’t perfume the air; if it did, no one would keep it long enough to grow large. |
ALL TEXT © Marlene A. Condon
The Virginia Department of Forestry has committed
a grievous error by encouraging folks to get rid of their Bradford Pear trees.
The blooms of this cultivar feed uncountable numbers of pollinators in early
spring when few other plants are blooming. Its fruits feed birds, such as
waxwings and robins, in winter—the toughest time of year for them.
When Bradford Pears come up in degraded areas, such as roadsides, where
the soil has been compacted and is nutrient-poor, they add value to the
landscape by increasing the diversity of plant life and thus animal life. This
tree is not “detrimental to the state’s environment” because it might not feed
as many caterpillar species as a native tree. All plants cannot be all
things to all animals. What matters is that they do support wildlife, be it
by providing food, shelter, and/or nesting sites.
Environmentalists and government agencies have embraced the false
narrative of “invasive” plants being to blame for our disappearing insects and
birds because these plants don’t have a constituency that will fight tooth and
nail against them. It’s easier to get folks to pull plants than to, say, get
many cat lovers to keep their pets inside.
The American Bird Conservancy has been talking for decades about the 2.4 billion
birds killed every year by cats. Can anyone really believe that alien
plants pose more of a threat to birds than cats do? Yet government doesn’t
regulate these felines as it should. https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
The dearth of caterpillars is not due to an abundance of alien trees, but
rather an abundance of far too many lights at night. Moths are attracted to
lights where they are more easily predated by night-flying predators, such as
bats and owls, which I watched happen every summer for years in Shenandoah
National Park. And moths aren’t procreating if they’re spending the night at
light fixtures that are left burning all night at people’s homes and
businesses.
You know an environmental narrative doesn’t carry much weight when the
people pushing it need to resort to such silliness as how bad the blooms smell
or how easily the plant breaks. This big stink about Bradford Pear trees is a
solution in search of a problem.
NATURE ADVICE:
If you like your Bradford
Pear trees, keep them. Despite what government agencies, such as the Virginia
Department of Forestry, may tell you, these trees DO feed and shelter wildlife.
And that truth is what counts.
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