Read By the River: Nature's Best Hope
Our river nerd book club turns to trees: backyard conservation, native plants, and creating habitat that supports the food web.
For our latest Read By the River book club series we turned to Douglas Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope (2020), a compelling call-to-arms for transforming our backyard landscapes (as well as all the other airport, shopping mall, educational campus, etc. land) into more functional ecosystems. For us anglers and river fans, his message rings true, if a step adjacent. Rivers health and the abundance of aquatic life that fish depend on are inextricably linked to the terrestrial habitats surrounding our waterways, which are just outside our backyards.
The caterpillar crisis
Tallamy's central thesis revolves around a series of baffling statistic about how important insects are to birds. Here's one: 96% of North America's terrestrial bird species raise their young on insects rather than seeds. This creates an enormous demand for caterpillars, with parent birds making dozens and dozens of trips per day to feed nestlings scads of caterpillars.
