To Feed the Birds, First Feed the Bugs – New York Times Annotated

OXFORD, Pa

(This Saturday: Native Plant Symposium All Stars-Douglas Tallamy, Darrel Morrison, Dick Lighty, Ian Caton)

Doug Tallamy

Dogwood

DOUG TALLAMY and his wife, Cindy, built their house seven years ago in the middle of 10 acres of former hayfields…

…the Tallamys love being outside. And they share a vision, an imperative, really, that Mr. Tallamy lays out in a book, “Bringing Nature Home” (Timber Press, $27.95), published in November.

They are struggling to plant the native species that are needed for insects and animals to flourish.

“I’m not trying to recreate the ancient ecosystem,” said Mr. Tallamy, who is chairman of the department of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, in Newark, Del., 15 miles southeast of here. “That is gone. I’m trying to create biodiversity.”

Even a lowly fly maggot, which lives inside the hard round galls often seen on the stems of goldenrod, has an important place in the ecosystem. “Fly maggots are really high in proteins and fats, and chickadees love them,” Mr. Tallamy said.

^#1So if you cut down the goldenrod, the wild black cherry, the milkweed and other natives, you eliminate the larvae, and starve the birds. This simple revelation about the food web — and it is an intricate web, not a chain — is the driving force in “Bringing Nature Home.”

The typical garden might hold weeping cherries and rhododendrons, lilacs and crape myrtles. That is beautiful, perhaps, but it’s a barren wasteland to native insects and thus birds.

Almost all North American birds other than seabirds — 96 percent — feed their young with insects, which contain more protein than beef, he writes.

He cites the work of Michael Rosenzweig, an evolutionary biologist based at the University of Arizona, who has analyzed data from all over the world and found a one-to-one correspondence between habitat destruction and species loss. In Delaware, for instance, state ecologists say that 40 percent of all native plant species identified in 1966 are threatened or extinct; 41 percent of native birds that depend on forest cover are rare or absent.

So the message is loud and clear: gardeners could slow the rate of extinction by planting natives in their yards. In the northeast, a patch of violets will feed fritillary caterpillars. A patch of phlox could support eight species of butterflies. The buttonbush shrub, which has little white flowers, feeds 18 species of butterflies and moths; and blueberry bushes, which support 288 species of moths and butterflies, thrive in big pots on a terrace. (Appropriate species for other regions are listed by local native plant societies.)

You don’t have to cut down the lilacs, but they are doing nothing for the insects and birds. “It’s as if they were plastic,” Mr. Tallamy said. “They’re not hurting anything, except that they’re taking space away from something that could be productive.”