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The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees QUOTES

The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees QUOTES

1 " As oaks age they typically lose much of their inner xylem tissue, creating large hollow spaces within their trunks that serve as home to countless creatures, from rare fungi to raccoons, opossums, squirrels, bats, bobcats, and even black bears. We have been led to think that once there are hollow spaces created by rot within a tree trunk, that tree must come down. Not so! Such “rot” is normal and does not affect the living cambium that lies just under the bark of your oak nor the functional strength of the trunk. Hollow trunks are just one feature of ancient oaks that makes them such valuable ecological additions to our landscapes. Beating "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

2 " The water from a 2-inch downpour, for example—more than 54,000 gallons per acre—is captured almost entirely by an oak forest’s leaf litter and the organic humus it creates. Litter and humus don’t hold this water indefinitely, but they do corral it on-site just long enough for it to seep into the ground, replenishing the water table on which so many of us depend. In areas with no leaf litter, the same 2-inch rainstorm causes a flood. "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

3 " Snowy tree crickets have been called temperature crickets because the air temperature can be estimated with surprising accuracy by counting the rate at which they chirp. Although he didn’t mention the species of cricket he worked with, later studies suggest it was the snowy tree cricket that prompted Amos Dolbear to conduct a crude experiment in 1897. While listening to crickets near his home, Dolbear noted that at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, snowy tree crickets made 80 chirps per minute, at 70 degrees they chirped 120 times per minute, and at 50 degrees, they only chirped 40 times per minute. These measurements allowed Dolbear to establish the following relationship: temperature F = 40 + N, where N is the number of chirps per 15 seconds (Dolbear 1897). "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

4 " The end result is that each jay plants somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,360 oak trees every year of its seven-to 17-year life span! It’s no wonder that jays have enabled oaks to move about the earth faster than any other tree species. "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

5 " Another misconception is that we don’t need to worry about the local supply of insects because insects are everywhere all the time. If this is true, where do all those insects come from and what do they eat? Do they just appear out of nowhere? Is Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation alive and well in our popular culture? I hope not. The fact is that all insects, every last one of them, are produced directly or indirectly by plants. They either eat some plant part, or they eat another animal that ate some plant part. What follows logically, then, is that when we reduce the amount of plants in any given place, we reduce the diversity and abundance of insects. Alarming headlines from around the world are reminding us of the critical linkage between plants and insects; we have removed more than half of the forests on earth and, not surprisingly, insect populations have declined globally by at least 45% since 1979 "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

6 " counties, oaks, cherries, willows, birches, hickories, pines, and maples are producing the vast numbers and types of insects that support animal populations. "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

7 " We cannot casually accept the loss of oaks without also accepting the loss of thousands of other plants and animals that depend on them. Oak declines in the United Kingdom, for example, threaten the survival of some 2,300 other species (Mitchell et al. 2019). Fortunately, there is no reason why we should accept the loss of oaks as inevitable; there is no trick to restoring oak populations, and no shortage of places in which to restore them. If you were to add up the amount of land in various types of built landscapes that is not dedicated to agriculture—suburban developments, urban parks, golf courses, mine reclamation sites, and so forth—it would total 603 million acres, a full 33% of our lower 48 states. We have not targeted these places for conservation in the past, but that was back when our conservation model was based on the notion that humans and their tailings were here and nature was someplace else. That model of mutual exclusion has failed us dismally; there simply are not enough untrammeled places left to sustain the natural world that until now has sustained us. Our only option, then, is to find ways to coexist with other species. That’s right, we must construct ecosystems that contain all their functional parts right where humans abound. "

― Douglas W. Tallamy , The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees