I just received my copy of "Bees, An Identification and Native Plant Forage Guide," written by Heather Holm, author of Pollinators of Native Plants.

Beautiful book! If you care about native bees, this is a must for your library.

If you're not familiar with Heather's work, her photographs are absolutely stunning. She also conveys natural history information about each species in a clear, easy-to-grasp, way. As an advocate for native landscapes, I'll definitely incorporate Heather's recommendations to benefit native bees.

Check out the trailer for Catherine Zimmerman's 2016 native landscaping film, Hometown Habitat, Stories of Bringing Nature Home. I've ordered my dvd from Catherine's website, The Meadow Project. Looking forward to watching on a cold February night!

As a native landscaper, I purchase thousands of native potted plants per year. Although I feel great about creating native habitat, I feel guilty about using all those plastic pots, even though I recycle them. I always thought a biodegradable solution should exist. Green Dot approached me a few weeks ago about a biodegradable biocomposite that they're promoting in the horticultural industry, so wanted to share the good news!

Plan a native habitat for bats!!
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In a collaborative effort with The Organization for Bat Conservation, Sparrow Landscaping created an eGuide to native gardening for bats. You can download your free copy by following the link in the blog.

​I follow Eric’s gaze toward the log resting on the forest floor, softening into the surrounding mounds of moss.
 
“Yeah,” he said, gesturing toward the ancient fallen fir. “After we’re done building the cabin, I’m going to clean up this woods a bit. There’s a lot of dead trees in here. Look at all the stuff on the ground.”
 
“Why?” I asked. Not wanting to insult my client, but feeling like I had to at least try to stop the clean-up-the-woods madness that was looming large on Eric’s to-do list.
 
“Why not?” Eric asked innocently, seemingly surprised by my question.
 
A perfect segue. Now I could preach the benefits of snags and cavities as an important piece of the native landscape puzzle from my soapbox. That this perceived woodland “messiness” was actually a thing of beauty.
 
I told him about the flying squirrel that poked its head out of a perfectly round hole near the top of a broken off aspen; black button squirrel eyes meeting my brown ones. This snag, light as balsa, was a pithy remnant of its former stately self; a wobbly home, but a home nonetheless.
 
I also told him about Helen Reddy. No, not the Queen of 70’s pop, but the red squirrel that we named after watching it come to snag sunflower seed from the feeders on our deck; her stop-gap motion a constant source of amusement for us. Can’t be sure it was a female, or even if it was the same individual, but, name her, we did.
 
I’d watch Helen strip the soft fibers from the trunk of the red cedar tree outside my office window, carry a balled-up bunch of them in her mouth through her network of tree branches and deposit them into a hole towards the top of a dead White Oak branch. She was lining her nest; her insulation from winter’s grip. It seemed she was evicted, at least temporarily, however, by a red-bellied woodpecker (I witnessed this apparent tragedy for Helen).  Although red-belly never made contact with fuzzy Helen, the woodpecker flew back and forth in front of the hole, squawking threateningly as woodpeckers do. When woodie took a break, I saw Helen grab a mouthful of her hard-earned cedar stuffing, run along another tree branch network and deposit her insulation into another tree cavity. Maybe she was maintaining two homes all along? Maybe this hole belonged to the woodpecker originally? Many questions.
 
I concluded with a tale of the resident red-headed woodpecker, who has yet to be named, that cached every walnut from a pile of stale ones that we set out on our deck rail.  It was his? her? mission that winter day; fly to pile, pick up nut, fly to cavity in nearby standing dead red oak (a victim of oak wilt), deposit nut, fly back to pile and so on. It was hours. It confirmed my decision to leave that oak alone; a valued vessel for those protein and fat-packed morsels as future food for one of the few woodpeckers that store nuts.
 
Although I think Eric’s eyes were glazed over by the time I got to the red-headed woodpecker story (and I could have gone on), I do think I got the message across. Eric may not leave all the standing snags, but I bet he’ll think twice when he remembers Helen Reddy and her coveted cavity.
 
Maybe Eric will feel the way that I do for the critters that require cavities for their very livelihood. Maybe he’ll empathize with their vulnerability, especially during the dead of winter, knowing that the demand for cavities exceeds the supply in a world that continues to “clean-up” the woods.

“When you think of mass extinction, you think of a major catastrophe, like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This time, humanity is the meteor.”
-Louie Psihoyos, director, Racing Extinction

I watched Racing Extinction last night, which was gut-wrenching. Went to bed thinking about it and woke up still thinking about it. What I found most haunting was the recorded song of the last known O'o bird, a honeyeater endemic to Hawaii's Kauai. A lone male singing his part of what was supposed to be a duet with a female, who would never answer him. 

What would it feel like to be the last of your species?

My mom called me afterwards telling me that she couldn't stop crying and if she had a million dollars, she would donate. That she felt so helpless. I tried to reassure her that her and her husband were doing their part by living frugally. That their carbon footprint was relatively minimal. They rarely eat beef...they keep their dollhouse condo at a coat-worthy 64 degrees for crying out loud...they never fly in airplanes.

I would guess that the majority of people who watched the documentary felt just like my mom did. Helpless. What can we really do to curb extinctions associated with the Anthropocene?

It's easy to feel apathetic when you hear about O'o birds going extinct in Hawaii or Northern white rhinos in Africa. These places are so far away...what can I really do from central Wisconsin?

As Sia croons in a song she and J. Ralph recorded for the movie, "It's better to light one candle than curse the darkness."

​Focus your effort locally.
Three endangered species are staring us right in the face right here in south central Wisconsin.

The oak and pine barrens and prairie communities that pepper the sandy acres of Marquette county provide refuge for the state endangered Western slender glass lizard and grey wolf and the federally endangered Karner blue butterfly. As potatoes, corn and soybeans march on to the detriment of these native ecosystems, habitat preservation and restoration is key. Although it's tough to protect 100 acres to encourage a sustainable wolf population if you don't own 100 acres, you can protect or restore what you do have, even if it's a small space.

If you happen to own a few sandy acres, reduce your lawn and plant a prairie; heavy on the lupine, which is the only known food source for the caterpillar stage of the Karner blue. Your prairie may even attract the ever-elusive legless glass lizard; which you will probably never see, but feel some comfort knowing that you provided a refuge. These relatively small species especially benefit so much from even a few hundred square feet of effort. Plus, a diversity of species in addition to endangered ones will benefit. 

Light your candle. Plant a refuge.
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Winter is coming. Time to pay extra attention to those bird feeders.

​Many of us have elaborate feeding stations equipped with anti-squirrel devices to protect our investment in Droll Yankee feeders fed daily with black-oil sunflower seeds.  We love to see chickadees, finches and cardinals eat!  Seed eating birds definitely benefit, especially those that flock to our feeders over the winter.

What about birds that don’t eat seed? 

What about the other necessities of bird survival such as protection from the elements and nesting sites? 

​Think beyond the bird feeder and create a bird refuge with plants native to prairie, wetland and woodland communities; habitats where native birds evolved.  Plant a blend of perennials native to the American prairie and listen for the early summer call of a vesper sparrow, a bird that is heard but seldom seen, as it builds its nest at the base of a little bluestem plant.  Cover the shady ground under the oak or maple in your yard with Jacob’s ladder and columbine and watch as hermit thrushes and palm warblers rummage through the emerging plants and fallen leaves for insects as they migrate north during the spring.  Let the perennials stand tall in your perennial gardens over the winter instead of mowing them to the ground during the fall.  Fall migrants and winter residents will benefit as they seek shelter from winter winds.

Seeding a Prairie Landscape
 Letting Mother Nature sort it out may not be the best strategy.

Most native seed companies sell carefully designed blends to match the soil, light and drainage conditions unique to any given site. So if your project sports a recently cleared slope with sand-box soils, you would use a collection of species that thrive on sand in full sun. If you’re replacing difficult-to-mow lawn in your drainage ditch, you would use wildflowers and grasses that handle fluctuating water levels.
 
It makes sound ecological sense to match plants to place.
 
Depending on the area, these site-specific native mixes are then distributed either mechanically or by hand, hoping that all species that comprise the mix make a strong showing; a strategy a former colleague of mine coined, “letting Mother Nature sort it all out.”

I never really thought twice about this method until several years ago when I received a call from a client asking to be reimbursed $600 for a pound of meadow blazingstar seed that she paid for as part of her mix, but never saw as an adult plant. At first I thought she was being difficult, giving her my very practiced spiel about being patient and prairies mature very slowly….blah, blah, blah. She politely listened, but then gave me the history of her site, detailing her thorough site preparation, seed mix selection and post seeding management. She had followed the prairie establishment rules to the tee and HAD been patient for six years. She had a valid point. My sales training also reminded me that if someone has the courage to complain, there are many others who feel the same way so I set up an appointment to evaluate the prairie myself.
 
Although I found a handful of blazingstars buried in a fray of other natives, she was right in that they just weren’t there in the numbers that they should be. After a thorough walk through cataloging the early successional “quick to establish” plants and any slower growing conservatives lurking in the understory, I couldn’t pin the absence on too much moisture, weed competition or deer browse. The problem was clearly competition from other prairie plants that were included in her mix.
 
Her prairie looked similar to so many other mature prairies that I’ve evaluated; the relatively aggressive heavy hitters had taken control of the field. Big bluestem, yellow coneflower, monarda, switchgrass, white false indigo, stiff goldenrod and New England aster were prolific, but bossy to the exclusion of other prairie players. Meadow blazingstar just couldn’t compete.

​Her point was now loud and clear.
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​Why did she invest in a diverse mix if ultimately all she was seeing were the heavy hitters?
 
Although we solved the immediate problem by refunding her for the blazingstar, the issue of the no-shows wasn’t going to go away if I continued to follow the same path. Installing diverse seed blends hoping all prairie players would play nice was the goal but, in reality, the A-team had control while the rest warmed the bench.
 
It was the catalyst that prompted the testing of other methods to install prairie seed.
 
After experimenting on a few plots in my yard, it seemed the best way to give every species a fighting chance was to divert from the diverse pre-mixed seed mixes and create custom blends on my own.
 
The method is pretty simple.
 
The first step mirrors the seed mix design process; generating a species list that matches the conditions of the site as well as your native landscaping goals. If you want to see monarchs, include a ton of milkweed. If a native Zen garden is your vibe, emphasize simplicity, keeping the number of species to a minimum.
 
The difference between the two methods is mixing and sowing the seed. Instead of throwing 25 or more species on the ground hoping that Mother Nature will sort it all out, install wildflowers as monocultures with a reduced amount of grasses and sedges (an essential backbone) where you think they will do best, filling in between the wildflowers with a higher seeding rate of grasses and sedges. So when you install meadow blazingstar seed in front of your kitchen window, you know you will eventually see meadow blazingstar plants from that very window and your money’s not wasted.

Wish me luck on my test.....