From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. For each of us, it's probably safe to bet that our most familiar piece of the natural world is the outdoor space right beside the place we live, our own yard. But how well do we really know even that every day terrain and the creatures we share it with? In his new book called Close to Home, Conservation Biologist Tor Hansen encourages us to retrain our eyes and connect more intimately and also to take actions that can enhance the biodiversity of the place we call home. So more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbel Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMoengSeeds.com. And by White Flower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com Tor Hansen is a conservation biologist whose work has taken him around the globe to a wide diversity of habitats. He's a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the John Burrow's Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing. And the author of multiple books, The Lays to which is close to home, the wonder of nature just outside your door. I'm so glad to welcome him to the program today. Nice to speak to you, Tor. How are you? I'm doing just fine. Thank you for having me on. Out there in the state of Washington, the other side of the country. Hello. So before we get started, I'll say that we'll do a book giveaway with the transcript of the program over on a way to garden.com. And I've been enjoying reading it very much. A good escape from the news, the big headlines, and sort of talking about like looking at the little things, which is wonderful. The little things that are really the bigger things. Yes, and an escape that is always right next to us, close to home, right outside. Yes. So you say in the introduction that the heart of backyard biology has three themes, three guide posts, and then the book in the book you remind us of them a number of times. So tell us about those sort of three guide posts of backyard biology. Sure. Well, I developed these to organize the book around these these fundamental themes, observation being the first one. What's out there in the yard? So retraining our eyes to try and see these things that we overlook as the background of our daily lives. We walk right past these things all the time that might be buzzing around in the shrubbery or rustling through the grass. And we don't take the time to pause and look at them. So that's the first one is observation. And then the second question that I really wanted to ask was not just what's out there, but what's it doing? And we give ourselves, again, more time in these places, we can observe behaviors that are, many times very surprising and revealing. And then the third theme of the book that I wanted to explore was how can we help? What are the simple things that we can do to improve the habitat in our yards or neighborhoods and really boost the biodiversity on almost any patch of land? At one point in the book you confess that despite your expertise and training and there was one area of your home property in Washington state where you lived that you say quote you had been looking at daily for years apparently without seeing a thing and I think that's really true of all of us yes. Absolutely, absolutely. We tend to focus on certain aspects of any scene that we're looking at. The brain will identify certain things and then kind of fill in the rest with images and things from memory and colors and shapes and so on so that we can walk through the world without being constantly distracted. but in a sense, what I'm asking us all to do is to allow ourselves to be distracted, to allow our keen powers of observations to really see what's happening all around us. And when you do that, I think, even for someone who is a trained biologist as I am, you're astounded by all that's going out

on in these tiny and familiar places. Mm-hmm. I know as a gardener, it's easy to get caught up. You know, oh, the next chore, I have to go out and blah, blah, blah, you know, moat the whatever, weed the whatever, edge the something or the water the blah, blah, blah, and you can get fixated on that and your mission, so to speak, and see nothing else.

You know what I mean?

I believe. something or other water the blah blah blah. And you can get fixated on that and your mission, so to speak, and see nothing else. Do you know what I mean? We oblivious to everything else. And that's a shame, but I do it, we do it. And I have to remind myself there are the other times when I need to just slow down. Yeah, I tried to come up with ways to sort of trick myself into doing so. And one of them was I decided, all right, well, I'm going to crawl through the yard.

Oh, I love that. I tried to come up with ways to sort of trick myself into doing so and and one of them was I decided all right

Well, I'm going to crawl through the yard Oh, I love that that was the knees favorite part of the book you changed your perspective you said it was just like wow Yeah, you get down and suddenly a it seems like the yard is much larger because you're moving so slowly But also with your perspective down at ground level, all of these tiny little things that you wouldn't see from the lofty heights of your normal position come into view. They might be, you know, tiny fungi, little mushrooms, a size of matchsticks or insects and spider webs in amongst the grasses that you've never noticed before. All of these things happening down there at that micro scale. And that's not just what you see, but it involves all the senses. One of the most striking things to me when I did that, getting down on all fours, was I came face to face with the smell left behind by a fox. And I knew that there were foxes passing through the yard. I had heard them occasionally seeing them and so forth. And even on occasion, a pie, you know, smells that sort of musky smell that I associated with a fox. But to hit it at fox level was overpowering this agent signal, this aroma that they put out to mark their territory. And couldn't of course understand all the nuances of what the Fox was trying to tell other Foxes, but I certainly understood the basic text. It was a very powerful signal. Recently, in the spring this year, I was standing up doing something walking around and out of the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like ash had fallen or some kind of, you know, almost look like black spray paint on this stretch of stone walkway and the adjacent, the bottom of the adjacent stone wall next to it. And so, and I kind of looked at it and I almost just kept going, you know, I thought, oh dirt, you know, whatever. But I thankfully got down on my knees and crawled around. And it was, I don't know if it was hundreds of thousands or millions or how many ever many. It was alive. It was all these little like tiny beads of caviar. It was springtails, all together and they were just pulsing. They were just moving. It was alive. And if I hadn't seen it then and if I hadn't crawled around right then it went away pretty quickly. But again, it looked like a big stain over about 15 feet of this area and then it went away because they were on the way somewhere. It's incredible. And yes, so many of these things are fleeting. And so when you think, oh, I'm going to come back to that later. No. You can't do it. And so you really have to give yourself and force yourself to make it happen in the moment. Yeah. And we don't have to be a scientist to make, you know, these observations, right? And you point that out in the book too, is that we just have to use our eyes and slow down and look carefully, tune in. We don't have to have the training. And in fact, even lay people, let's say, like myself, we can, we can make observations that are valuable, that are important to ourselves, and also we can share them, and they can be valuable, yes. Absolutely, there's never been more opportunity for just that kind of direct participation in the scientific process by anyone with an interest in nature, in that we have, you know, these applications now on cell phones or people with an internet connection can contribute their observations to a huge variety of, you know, community science or citizen science-based projects where scientists are tapping in to the powers of observation that we all have. And there are so many scientists in the world, yes, but there's a lot more data than those scientists could ever gather on their own. And so time and again, they are reaching out and asking all of us to contribute our observations on answering questions, on everything from climate change to amphibian populations, to the timing of spring events, to almost anything you can think of. There's a wonderful project where they wanted to get samples of soil from across the country. And it was these biochemists looking at this stuff because they were interested in the compounds that soil fungi were making, most of which had never been described. And people were so excited to do this. They were just overwhelmed with samples, but they processed this stuff. And they've basically rebuilt the library of compounds that people at the National Institute of Health use to access when they're looking for new drugs and new cures for disease and so forth. And one single sample from a backyard in Alaska has already yielded a promising new compound that is being investigated as a cure for breast cancer, as well as a compound that eliminates the odors of almost anything you throw at it. And so that has been licensed, and we'll soon probably show up in your kitty litter. Okay. Oh my. So you are early in the book, I think you cite a few well-known names that who have sort of spoken about this, you know, looking closer and so forth. And John Burrows, I mentioned that you want to John Burrows medal for your writing. And he famously said, look underfoot. And I always think about that, you know. And I think he also said, every place is the center of the world. So it's not, you know what I mean? It doesn't have to be anywhere. We don't have to go to Yellowstone or whatever, or the Grand Canyon or what some famous place right here is fine. And you mentioned one of Darwin's discoveries that was in a very familiar spot, not some fancy place, right? His discovery, I think, about the seed bank? Yeah, terrific stuff. I mean, we think of Darwin and our minds, you know, jump to the Galapagos Islands and the world. Right. And she made on the beagle and this round the world trip and how the Finches and the Galapagos helped inspire his thinking. But we forget that he was actually a homebody. And once he got back home after that round the world journey, he never left Great Britain again. And he spent most of that time at his home, down house, a sort of country estate to the south of London, and he was reluctant to even go to London for a meeting. He just wanted to stay home, so the vast majority of his research and his discoveries took place really in his backyard and neighborhood. And his ideas about seed banks began to take shape, you know, simply from walking along what he called the sand walk through his yard and seeing, you know, a plant come up in a place that had been recently disturbed that he hadn't seen for years and realizing that the seeds must still be there in the soil. And that led to a whole bunch of experiments. You know, he saw similar things

on walks through the countryside where they were doing, you know, road work and they'd expose a new bank of soil. And suddenly there'd be all these plants coming up that weren't anywhere nearby. And he realized that these seeds could remain in the soil for years or even decades. And that was an important discovery that informed all sorts of

management. the soil for years or even decades. That was an important discovery that informed all sorts of management of land and agriculture and how we understand the nature of seed banks and botany in the wild. Yeah. I didn't that that was one of his accomplishments, so that was fascinating. And so a little bit about sort of the, some of the other kind of why look more closely and what we can infer and, and sort of actions that we can take, because if we know more about what's going on, not only will be fascinated and so forth, but maybe we can help or at least not hurt. And you give examples, I think you use one example of, for instance, of ground nesting bees and the particular soil conditions that they require and that if we don't have Have any of that kind of, I guess, open and I would say, for I. But I don't know what the word is.

Soil in our landscape, they don't have as good an opportunity to make use of it, right? I mean, things like that, we can learn and then maybe make a space or stop doing some behavior that harms or prevents, and you give other examples, you know, birds, nests and so forth. So let's talk a little bit about some of those takeaways, I think. Oh, sure. This, you know, gets down to something that, you know, in a sense, came up before me at a recent talk I was giving someone asked afterwards in the Q&A, well, does all this do any good, talking about nature and getting out and are you convincing anymore? Are you changing anything in the real world? And I told him, I said, one thing we know of is that you can't care about things you don't know about. And so when we do slow down and start observing these things close to home or broader scale when we start learning about these things, it engages our empathy. And it opens the door to helping. And when we look at that, you know, in a backyard or a neighborhood park or some place close to home, there are all sorts of things we can do in changing the management of these areas that boost biodiversity. You mentioned bees. There are all sorts of ones to encourage the nesting habitat that bees require because they're not just there in your yard during the few weeks. You see them on the flowers in the summertime. They're there all year long surviving in the soil or in holes in wood or the ends of twigs and things. So when we provide that nesting habitat, we can encourage them year round. The same goes for things like birds that might require a particular kind of nest or that might require a particular kind of food. One of the great things that we can do that is hardly takes any effort effort at all, has to do with light pollution. And that is, that after hours, we're used to the idea of seeing Ma's circling a porch light or Ma's at a bright window landing there. And it's nice to see the Ma's, but keep in mind that every time you see that happening, you are witnessing an organism doing something that it shouldn't be doing. In that, those moths are disoriented by the light and they're wasting valuable time in their brief adult lives that they would otherwise be using for finding a mate and contributing to the next generation. And you might think, well, you know, I'm not moths anyway. Why bother? Well, if you really want birds in your yard, you're going to want every moth you can get. Because it turns out that songbirds use moth caterpillars as one of the main food sources for their chicks. Thousands and thousands of them have to be gathered, not over a huge areas, but really within just a few hundred feet of the nest. So all of these small things we can do, you turn out the light, you draw the shades on the window, you change out the outdoor lights to motion sensitive rather than on all the time. All of those things are simple and they really do boost biodiversity. Yeah. You talk about in the book you write about you mentioned nests and so forth as well and and birds nests and I always think well for me really I always feel like it's such an intense sense of privilege that comes with witnessing any of these creatures going about their lives. But certain of them, I mean, like discovering where a particular species of bird nests and how it constructs the nests. And of course, I'm just completely dumbstruck by the fact that members of the same species seem to know the recipe and the architectural plans for that, that species nest, you know, and where to place it exactly. And I mean, it's just, it's amazing. It's amazing. You can almost, even with an empty nest, you can kind of figure out who, who's it is, or get close at any rate. You talked about a bird that I love very much, the brown creeper, and it's nest, and how you've welcomed more of them, or attempted to invite more of them to be able to nest in your yard by making them at home. How did you do that? Well, there's this concept in an ecology that we call the limiting factor. And the limiting factor is the resource that is in shortest supply in any given habitat. So what is preventing the population of organisms from growing or thriving is usually the things that they can't get enough of. And in our yard, I often see brown creepers in the wintertime, and I love the song that they sing. Even on a day in February, they're already practicing their spring moves and their wonderful delicate little voices. But we would never have them during the breeding season. We would never have them. They would just disappear. They would visit in the winter and then move on. And I realized that the reason for that is that we didn't have the habitat for them to build a nest. They are looking for a particular place. They look at old trees that are dead or dying and have bark that is beginning to peel off from the bottom. So there's a little cavity underneath that peeling bark, and that's where creepers nest. That's what they look for in any forest. And since the woods behind our house are relatively young, and we don't have those sorts of trees, they would have to move on. They wouldn't spend the breeding season here. Well, it turns out that we heat with firewood and I spend a lot of time at the chopping clock and if you do that you end up with a lot of bark that that peels off of some of these some of these rounds of wood and I thought, you know what, maybe I could provide that habitat and and relieve that limiting factor for these creepers in the yard. So I went out without high hopes, but I thought it's worth a shot. And I put up some strips of bark in the right sort of position on some tree trunks. And at first there was nothing and nothing. And then I'd almost given up hope, but late in one spring time, I peered beneath one of those strips of bark and creepers had nested. And now they are, you know, resident here all through the nesting season. I am embarrassed to say how many of these things I've put up, but it's got to be more than 20 now. I'm very fond of creepers and... Me too, me too. This year alone, three of them are filled with nest and isn't that marvelous and that's again And you know an example of it's a small thing this little thing, but here we have improved the the habitat for this you know great species right here at home and we can see yes Yes, I've again been privileged to watch a goldfinch using her beak in like a small circling motion to wrap bits of spider web from you know on the outside of my windows that I hadn't dusted the outside or something. She's collecting sort of glue adhesive for her nest and you know I've seen great crested fly catchers searching for shed snake skins in my stone wall and then flying off with one and it's big to make its nest high up in a tree. And this is just miraculous stuff. When you realize that you have some of the raw materials or as you did, you're providing more of the raw materials once you've discovered what those were. So we have maybe four or five minutes and I feel like night time, you've been talking about turning out the lights and so forth. You know, we don't see so well in the dark and a lot of the creatures of the night do. They have special kinds of eyesight, adaptations and so forth in structures of in their eyes. But I feel like by going out at night and And for me it was going moth thing, going to moth nights and so forth in structures in their eyes. But I feel like by going out at night and for me it was going mothing, going to moth nights and so forth. I met a lot of other residents of the area. A lot of other organisms that live here that don't come out during the day. Do you also do you kind of explore at night too in your place? I mean, have you gotten to know the night life, the night shift sort of of creatures as well? Oh, absolutely. This was something as well, when I was really focused on this project and trying to explore things that I'd never explored and see in different ways. I did things like climb trees and explore the canopy of it. Up there. And one of them was to go outdoors at night thinking that here I feel like I have a handle on this place, but how much time if I spend out there at night, almost nothing, almost nothing. So getting out there, you realize you're missing half the

shell. There are all of these maws and there are the wonderful owls that are active at night. You're going to see the bats. You're going to see insects of all kinds that you haven't observed during the daytime. And there are a couple of tricks that I think are really helpful for for getting out there at night.

One is what you can do with a flashlight. And if you take a flashlight, a typical head lamp or a handheld that you have lying around, there's something magical that happens in that it reduces the world that you see to that one beam and it helps you focus on a tiny amount of habitat, a tiny amount of space. Where if you go out in the day, you just see everything and it can be kind of overwhelming to try to focus on something small. Well, the flashlight does it for you. So that allows you to see things in a very different way. And then the other thing you can do is if you flashlight has the features to switch it to the red setting. And it's very damn at first, but your eyes will adjust and you will be able to see in that red light. And that gives you a real advantage. You get to see more, but you also are seeing in a way that is less disturbing to a lot of creatures out there. So if you have frogs in your neighborhood, for example, and you've been trying to find them, you can hear them singing or what have you, well, you go out at night with the red on your flashlight and those frogs don't see in that spectrum. So you can come right up next to them, right up close, and they see you as just just part of the darkness. They don't see that red lamp at all. So you can observe them without disturbing them. And that's quite magical. And the same is true of many, many insects. Yes. Well, that don't see in the red spectrum. So you can sneak right up on them and get a wonderful view at night without disturbing them in the slightest. Yes. Well, Tor Hansen, I've really enjoyed close to home your new book and as I said,

we'll have a book giveaway with the transcript of the show, our four on a way to Garden.com.

And I hope I'll speak to you again. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you. I look forward to another conversation that's been at the light.

Great. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. I don't miss an episode. You can subscribe for you to the podcast version of the show on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And you can find me anytime at a way to garden.com and on Facebook and on Instagram as at a way to garden. And happy gardening meantime. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs. A third generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont Professional Quality Vegetable Flower and Urbals Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified.

On the web, highmoingseeds.com and by Whiteflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected

and expertly grown garden plants.

On the web, whiteflower farm.com.

A way to garden with Margaret Roach is a joint production of WayToGarden.com and the smallest

NPR station in the nation,

Robin Hood Radio.