"What Does Bird Food Look Like?" is the longest chapter of "Bringing Natives Home" by Douglas W. Tallamy. It's a photographically illustrated introduction to the major groups of herbivorous insects plus a few predatory insects and other arthropods, with some of their life histories.

This is the best thing I've read about gardening with natives in a long while. And why wouldn't it be, when it's written by an entomologist with the proper perspective that plants are primarily bug food?

Who cares about bugs and how to encourage them on a bird group? Presumably everyone here, since 96% of North American birds feed insects and spiders at least to their babies.

The first part of the book is devoted to why we need bugs and bug diversity, why only native plants have a hope of producing that, and why alien plants, and the nursery industry that pushes so hard to import and spread such aliens, are actively harmful--habitat loss plus piggybacked invasive diseases & pests. The details and references cited here could be very useful when talking to neighbors and writing to politicians: 96% of north american bird species feed insects to the babies. Of the increasing number of species they've been able to look at, a native plant will support 10-50 times more insect species than an exotic. In a prairie that's been invaded by an exotic grass, mockingbirds are only half as abundant as a nearby intact prairie. Only about 3-4% of US land is genuinely undisturbed.

There's a strong east coast bias throughout the book. Tallamy is from New Jersey and Pennsylvania and lives and teaches in Delaware. But he stresses that natives need to be -functionally- native, so we need to choose true local natives for our gardens. If there's no long term evolutionary relationship with the other species around it, a species is not functionally native and won't take part in the energy transfer from sun to butterfly and bird flesh. Even hundreds of years of adaptation isn't enough to get past this.

There are regional plant suggestions (including non woodies) in an appendix, with a pacific northwet section which rightly leaves out east of the cascades, but extends too far south through northern CA. Still, the region is more sensible than most I've seen in books.

There's a chapter with the 20 best trees to plant for insect diversity, all northeastern. He admits to slighting us (and most of the country), primarily because species or genera vs supported species just isn't well studied most places. Most of the data he presents is from an extensive (and continuing) literature search by his research assistant. He uses lepidoptera as a stand-in for all insects, partly because they're the best studied, partly because they're a large fraction of insect biomass and species diversity, and partly because if there are leps, there will also be other bugs.

There's a nice table of genus vs number of leps that eat it for 20 trees. Of genera we have here: oaks, (534), willows (456), cherries (456), birch (413), poplar/cottonwood (368), crabapple (311), blueberry/cranberry (288), pine (203), maple (285), hawthorn (159), alder (156), and hazel (131). [The lep number is across all species in the genus; any given species won't feed so many.]

There's a brief description of each tree genus, with less space devoted to the plant than to pictures and descriptions of the caterpillars that eat it. He definitely has his priorities straight!

One thing I'd like to have seen are references to good native plant books and organizations for each region, or at least a clear pointer to where to find them. Anything to make it easier to find reliable information instead of the blather from the average nursery or average 'gardening for wildlife' book is a Good Thing. I was also surprised not see at least a brief mention of the Xerces Society.

The photos in the book are almost all his own, and they're quite good.

Bringing Natives Home by Douglas W. Tallamy, 358pp. $18 trade paper.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88192-992-8
<http://www.timberpress.com/books/isbn.cfm/9780881929928/bringing_nature_home/tallamy>
<http://www.powells.com/biblio/4-9780881929928-0>

A Science Friday podcast interview with Tallamy can be downloaded as an mp3 (or via itunes):
<http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200905225>


"A plant that has fed nothing has not done it's job."

--
Allyn Weaks allyn at tardigrade.net Seattle, WA Sunset zone 5
Pacific NW Native Wildlife Gardening: http://www.tardigrade.org/natives/
"A proud member of the Reality-Based Community"