Native Plants as Necessities

I read a book not worth blogging about this weekend, so that freed me to talk about some outdoor, book-free activities—which of course led to more books and thinking about books. Two of my kids and I spent Saturday morning volunteering at a native plant sale held by the Audubon Society of Central Maryland. The annual event supports two local wildlife sanctuaries and environmental education projects (including a schoolyard wildlife habitat grant program that I coordinate), but it’s worthwhile for its own sake as a way to encourage native plant and wildlife habitat gardening. Every year, the offerings grow more diverse, including ferns, grasses, groundcovers, perennials and woody plants, each with indisputable native provenance. We arrived before the crowds, and I altruistically resisted buying the ferns and chokeberries that I coveted, letting the customers get first crack at the goodies. By the time we finished hauling purchases to a few dozen cars, it was too late. But that’s ok; the plants are out there adding biodiversity to central Maryland, even if they’re not in my yard.


It occurred to me that my bioblitz site would have benefited if I’d bought at least some bunchberry to add surreptitiously to the near-monoculture of mown grass at my library. While I picked a lawn-like spot deliberately to see what grows & thrives in that common setting, it’s still been depressing to find so little. It makes me think that a new form of monkey-wrenching could be planting wild columbines to replace New Guinea impatiens and similar acts of sedition (seed-ition?). To learn about the damage we’ve wrought by the simple act of yard-construction, read Sara Stein’s Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards. Stein argues that our tidy lawns (and library grounds) are wiping out vast swathes of wildlife habitat, and that each of us has a responsibility to restore at least the patch around our home. Her efforts to transform six acres of Pound Ridge, New York are chronicled conceptually in Noah’s Garden and more practically in Planting Noah’s Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology. Stein also presents a corollary to her argument that native gardens are good for wildlife--that gardens and outdoor experiences are vital for children--in one of my favorite books Noah’s Children: Restoring the Ecology of Childhood. If that’s not enough gardening books for you, look for recommendations of books appropriate for each region of the U.S. at Plant Native. And if you'd like to witness how a natural landscaper-turned blogger transforms a misbegotten yard into a woodland oasis, visit Wild Flora's Wild Garden.

Sunday, my family managed a hike along the Little Patuxent River and also a visit to an Open House of Chesapeake Climate Action Network. At least once a year, Climate Action invites the public into its founder’s Takoma Park, Maryland home to see how much one family can do to reduce its carbon footprint. We admired a corn-powered stove, rain barrels, and high efficiency appliances, then chatted with a solar water heater installer and a biodiesel car owner. The kids gobbled solar oven-baked cookies, but it was the minescule electric bills that got my husband drooling. Equally attractive, there’s almost no lawn to mow, and blooms of field chickweed attracted a butterfly that would find no reason to stop by my blitz site. The buzz of human visitors, excited by all the possibilities around them, made me think that Sara Stein could extend her argument still further. People of all ages need gardens, outdoor experiences, and new possibilities for improving their environment to thrive. The crowds at the Audubon sale and the Open House were shopping for ideas, for hope.

Bioblitz & Books

I’d much rather be looking off my deck into the dogwood-blooming woods, but here are a few quick BioBlitz-related items. First, I’m happy to announce the first appearance of PinesAboveSnow in the Carnival of the Green, hosted this week at The Evangelical Ecologist. This week’s Carnival features a variety of what the host calls “eco-bloggy goodness” (e.g., wildlife smuggling, National Gardening Week, and ethical retailing ). The most blitz-friendly is a list of “ten not-so-inconsequential things” we can do to save the earth from The Wild Green Yonder, which urges green-wanna-bes to get to know their local ecosystem and native species. What better way than bioblitzing?

In the “ask and ye shall be given” department, no sooner had I finished whining about my lack of an ant guide for non-myrmecologists than a fine review of an excellent new insect guide appeared at
10,000 Birds. Mike puts the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America to the test, checking if it could decipher the identity of a mystery moth. Despite 11,000 possibilities, the Kaufman guide succeeded in leading Mike to the correct id down to the species level. Though I haven’t seen the guide yet, I’m sold from 10,000 Birder’s assessment of it as “ ideal for casual or modestly skilled insect oglers like myself.” I hope it works for those of us even less than casually skilled.


The Insect Guide is one in a series of field guides by the astonishing naturalist Kenn Kaufman. Always innovative, Kaufman solves the paintings-versus-photos dilemma by illustrating each with digitally enhanced photographs. Yet my favorite Kaufman book has no photos at all--Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession that Got a Little Out of Hand. Kaufman’s memoir traces his drive to know birds back to early childhood, fueled by books, supported by parents, and enlivened by countless hours outdoors. At 16, Kaufman dropped out of high school to hitchhike across North America pursuing a dream to count more birds in a year than anyone else. The stories of his adventures not only reveal the origins of his expertise and commitment to birds and conservation but also the 1970s evolution of birding as a national sport and bird protection as a foundation of modern environmentalism.

For a nature book advocate like me, Kingbird Highway has special meaning. Kaufman recognizes the impacts of books from his earliest years, when he checked out library copies of Roger Tory Peterson’s guides over and over. In his teens, Peterson and Fisher’s tale of their North American birding adventure, Wild America became his bible. As Kaufman puts it, “That book became my daily passport to the wilderness.” While I agree that hand-on field experience, including activities such as BioBlitzing, lead many to commitments and even careers in nature protection, books are often equally vital forces. What better testimony to the value of books to shaping environmentalists than Kaufman’s own prolific publishing record? Who knows when a budding myrmecologist will pick up Kaufman’s insect guide and head off on a quest of his own?

Ant-Agonism

I’ve gotten a late start on the Blogger Bioblitz due to a death in my family, and I’ve downsized my site to a small patch just outside my favorite library. Mike over at 10,000 Birds suggests “going for what you know,” but I’m not enough of a naturalist to have a good specialty. Instead, my family and I are trying to id a little of everything on our little spot.

Almost immediately, I ran into a potential roadblock: ants. They’re clearly the most numerous animal in the dry, compacted soil I’m examining. Based on probabilities, the ones I found so far are a native species, little black ants. But with over 11,000 possibilities, how’s a non-myrmecologist BioBlitzer to know?

Burning Silo has kindly provided links to many online ID aids, but she hasn’t posted any for ants (or insects) yet. Here, the brilliance of my plan to blitz by the library becomes clear. I ducked inside and, while no ant field guides popped into view, I found what I needed. First, I spotted The Ants, by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson. I remember the hoopla in 1991 when the exhaustive treatment (it weighs 3.4 kgs!) won the Pulitzer, despite tables, figures, and a bit of jargon. Wilson, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold, loves all biodiversity, but he is in love with ants. Combine his passion for ants and his erudite prose, and you have a readable work of astonishing scholarship.


At 732 pages, though, it may be a little intimidating--and quite heavy to haul afield. I also found a more svelte ant book I hadn’t heard of before, Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration by the same authors. Journey more succinctly explores why ants are such successful creatures and how dramatically they have evolved. Thank heavens I’m not ant-blitzing in the Amazon! Most valuable to any fellow blitzers may be a brief section of advice on conducting ant surveys, which recommends techniques (such as carrying watchmaker’s forceps and searching at night for nocturnal foragers) that hadn’t occurred to me. It’s also worth noting that the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation is an international supporter of citizen science in general and bioblitzing in particular. While I still won't be able to id every ant, at least I'll have a good book to read while watching for fauna that's easier to id.

I’m happy to report that today I also discovered another blog BioBlitzing in my Maryland county over at Field Marking. Their blitz appears to be part of a serious effort to study the use of web technologies to support ecological research and education. They’re way ahead of me in terms of time spent and expertise applied to their blitzing site. But their first post, at least, still doesn’t talk about ants. . . .