Who is Doug Tallamy?
Why he’s important, and why you should attend Bringing Nature Home: Renewing Our World with Native Plants: An Evening with Doug Tallamy
Doug Tallamy wrote a book called Bringing Nature Home; How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants. He’s a professor at the University of Delaware, Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, and an entomologist who studies the interactions of plants, insects and other species. Did you know that we all need to eat plants or eat something else that eats plants? That something else is most often insects, and, if you care about birds, you had better care about insects and arthropods (spiders). Spiders eat insects. It is estimated that sixty to eighty per cent of a hummingbird’s diet is made up of small spiders and insects. Native insects eat native plants because they co-evolved together. Exotic plants like Crape Myrtle, Hong Kong Orchid, Jacaranda and Podocarpus, to name just a few, are from other countries. They are not edible to most of our insects nor are they larval hosts for our butter ies and moths. “Ninety-six percent of terrestrial birds rear their young on insects.” Every bug in your yard is a meal for someone. When a bird looks at your yard, what does it see?
Dr. Tallamy explains these complex relationships in an eloquent and entertaining manner with the science to back it up. We have over 40 million acres of lawn. We add 2 million acres per year of development, and we tie it all together with 4 million miles of roads. We have over 400 species of North American birds at risk of extinction, and our natural areas are not large enough to sustain our birds. Songbirds have lost over 40% of their numbers since the 1960s (in our lifetime), and common species like the Northern Bobwhite and Eastern Meadowlark have declined 82% and 72%, respectively. Not only have their numbers been sharply reduced; they are no longer in areas where they once had healthy populations.
Dr. Tallamy will weave together the narrative of biodiversity, gardening for life, caterpillars and
oak trees, native plants, and how we can help save or delay many species from extinction. You will learn how to make small changes that make a big difference!
I urge you to join us for an evening with Doug Tallamy. Audubon Everglades, the Atala Chapter of the North American Butterfly Association, FAU Pine Jog Environmental Education Center, Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County, and the Palm Beach County Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society have teamed together to bring Doug Tallamy to Palm Beach County for a life-changing event you will never forget.
Managing landscapes in this crowded world carries both moral and ecological responsibilities that we can no longer ignore. -Doug Tallamy
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