A Bad Naturalist’s Journey to Restore a Mountaintop Meadow

Introduction and Welcome

Paula: I’ve had people come up to me at events and say, I’m a bad naturalist too. And I kind of love that because like nobody has the perfect knowledge. Nobody’s going to have the perfect experience. I’m never going to not make mistakes I’m never going to know enough. And that’s just, that’s just the reality.

Shannon: In today’s episode we’re talking with Paula Whyman who is an avid nature enthusiast and the author of the book, Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop. We’ll discuss some of the challenges, lessons learned, and exciting discoveries she and her husband have made as they work to restore a remnant prairie or meadow.

And, if you live in the eastern U.S. and would like help creating your own thriving backyard ecosystem, then I invite you to check out the Backyard Ecology Community. The Backyard Ecology Community is where we provide personalized, ongoing coaching and support designed to help you meet your habitat goals. There’s a link in the show notes where you can learn more about the community.

Nature isn’t just “out there” in some pristine, far-off location. It’s all around us, including right outside our doors.

Hi, my name is Shannon Trimboli and I help busy homeowners in the eastern U.S. create thriving backyard ecosystems they can enjoy and be proud of.

Welcome to the Backyard Ecology podcast.

Hi, Paula. Welcome to the podcast.

Paula: Hi Shannon. Thank you for having me.

Shannon: Oh, I am so excited to talk with you today because I think your story is one that our listeners, no matter how much acreage they have, are going to find really interesting and intriguing and inspiring.

And for those of us that have a little bit more acreage, it’s going to be relatable on a level that sometimes some of the other conversations I have with people who have smaller properties aren’t quite as relatable, just simply because of that level of scale.

I know that some of the challenges, and just your thoughts that you shared in your book, were ones that I’ve had myself, and we don’t have nearly as much acreage as you’ve got. And they’re ones that a lot of other people I’ve talked to who have anywhere from a few acres to a lot of acres like you do have also experienced. So, they’re ones that I think are going to be relatable to a lot of people here.

Paula: That’s great.

Inspiration Behind Creating Pollinator Wildlife Habitat

Shannon: And to get us started, can you share a little bit about what inspired you to start creating pollinator and wildlife habitat?

Paula: Well, um, my husband and I were looking for a place in the country for a very long time. And I’ve always been into nature. When I was a kid, I think I came to it from an interest in insects. I was always really into bugs as a kid. I was always digging for, you know, grubs or beetles and I would let the cicadas walk on my arms and I would, you know, collect caterpillars and all that. So that’s how my interest in nature sort of started and it kind of spiraled from there. And I would get, um, I would get obsessed or do deep dives on particular topics. At various times in my life, it’s been anything from lizards to carpenter bees to mangrove swamps.

And, what happened was when my husband and I were… we sort of kept stopping and restarting this search. And several years ago, maybe around 2019, when we started looking really in earnest, I had been reading about the importance of native plants. And it wasn’t that I’d never thought about native plants, but I hadn’t really thought about native plants in this particular way as a “thing.” You know, as an aspect of the ecosystem that was crucially important.

So, I read Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope, where he talks about his Homegrown National Park idea, and just the idea of the way pollinators are supported by the right plants, and birds need those pollinators, and the whole, you know, all of those connections. And at the same time, I read Isabella Tree’s book, Wilding, which was about her project to allow a very old farm that was, I think around 7,000 acres, go back to nature. That was in the UK.

Both of these projects were really exciting to me and interesting. And I just decided, well, wherever we end up, I’d like to plant a small native meadow. I was thinking maybe an acre, you know. Separately, I’d have a vegetable garden. Maybe I’d have two or three sheep. And, I’d have this meadow, and I would put my little writing hut next to it. And I would watch the birds and the flowers swaying in the breeze…

It was kind of idealistic, but it came from a place of suddenly understanding that native plants were really important and wanting to help with that somehow. So, that’s where it started. Then somehow I ended up with a lot more, uh, than I planned. And, uh, yeah.

Shannon: Yes. And that’s the way it happens a lot of times. You have where you think you’re going, and then you have what reality happens.

So, can you share with the listeners just a little bit about your property and, um, how that changed a little bit?

Finding the Property and Seeing the Potential

Paula: So, we were out in the Northern Blue Ridge area, which is where we were focusing our search for a house. We were looking for a house and a little bit of land, you know, could be forested, could be field, but just for our limited outdoor activities, because we wanted to be able to be outdoors more. We wanted to be in that kind of rural environment.

And at the time, some people were saying, “Oh, you have to go see the view on top of this mountain when you’re in the area. It’s just really unusual.”

And we’re like, “okay.”

So, one day we were out here looking at homes, and it was August. It was really hot. This is Virginia. It was hot and bright and in between looking at other properties, we came here.

There’s sort of a gravel road at the bottom. And then at the time, it hadn’t really been maintained, so it was just kind of rocks and roots. And we ended up parking and hiking most of the way up, which is about a mile. And we come out of the woods, and we’re in an open area. I can tell we’re in an open area even though the plants are over our heads because it was an old farm that had gone to seed. Everything had just been allowed to grow up.

I didn’t know what they were, but there were these yellow flowers sort of lining our path. And they had mowed this narrow path so that two people could walk. And we walked up to this high point and I’m surrounded by these yellow flowers that are like 6, 7 feet tall. Bees are buzzing around me. I look out and I see this rolling landscape of fields with a few trees and sloping forested slopes surrounding these fields. Some of these fields were sort of steep and some were just rolling, but there was almost nothing flat.

Anyway, I looked out at that and I thought, “Okay, this is way more than a little one acre native meadow.” And I got really excited and I was like, “think what kind of an impact I could have in a place like this!”

I eventually learned that this was 75 acres of open fields and surrounded by about 130 acres of forested slopes. So, you can imagine it was quite a bit more. And by the way, there was no house. There was no house, there was no power, no water at the time, you know, nothing. The road didn’t go all the way. It was not at all what, you know… We hadn’t bargained for that kind of project.

Um, but my husband, who’s an Eagle Scout also sort of looked out and thought, “I could blaze trails. I could camp. I could…,” you know, he was super excited for other reasons.

Early Challenges and Lessons Learned

Paula: In the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that it’s one thing to plant or tend a 1 acre meadow. I mean, that’s even pretty big. Right? You know, by suburban standards, which I had been living in the suburbs for 30 years, and quite another to tackle something this large.

And I wasn’t thinking in the moment that I didn’t really have any background in plants. I came at this from an insect and wildlife perspective. Native plants support native wildlife. I didn’t know anything about plants really. And I didn’t know what questions to ask. I didn’t know how to go about an ecological restoration or even that’s what, that’s what I was thinking of was called.

Um, so I had a big learning curve

Shannon: And I think that’s what happens to a lot of people, is that you have that big learning curve. And like you said, it’s one thing when you’re doing a 10th of an acre, a quarter of an acre, even an acre. And it’s another thing when you’re talking tens of acres or even just a handful of acres. And then when you start looking at a hundred acres… Oh gosh.

Yeah, we’ve got 40 acres.

Paula: That’s a lot.

Shannon: And there’s a lot of times when I’m sitting here going, uh, “Yeah, what did we get ourselves into?” But it’s just part of it, I think. I mean we came to it with, both Anthony and I have wildlife biology degrees, so we had a little bit more of a background, but still, yeah, it can be overwhelming. It’s a level of scale, I think.

Paula: You had a leg up because of your expert knowledge at least, and yet I think that it’s not possible unless you have a whole team of people you know, who work for you maybe, or who work with you or like a Boy Scout troop. It’s really, even then, it’s hard to focus on more than a little bit at a time and it can quickly become overwhelming.

Shannon: Yes. And that’s something that everybody I know who does this struggles with. Or does this on our home properties and on a personal level, struggles with whether it’s a small plot or larger, like we’ve got acreage.

It’s that it so quickly can come become overwhelming unless you can focus. But focusing on a place or a project when you’ve got a small acreage is different than when you’ve got lots of acreage and are dealing with a lot of those challenges. But we still have to focus, like you said.

And it’s also a lot different between going from working on big public lands and for somebody and working on your own property because like you said, we don’t have the resources that say a state park or a county park or a national park or forest service or whatever has available to us. Our resources are much more limited – time, money, just skills, the whole bit.

So yeah, like you said, it takes a team and finding out that extra knowledge. I’m sure we’ll talk about some of that stuff more as we go.

Paula: Yes, absolutely. And this was one of the things that I think I didn’t realize in the beginning. I learned some big lessons about conservation and about ecological restoration in general.

Just that, first of all, even though I had all this wonderful, really crucial expert advice, there was nobody who could come and tell me, this is how you do it. Absolutely. And this will absolutely work. And then you’ll be done. 1, 2, 3, follow these steps and you’ll be done. There’s no done. There’s no being done.

Shannon: There’s no done and there’s no 1, 2, 3 steps. There’s no prescription. There’s no recipe. It’s different for every single place and every single situation. And there’s usually multiple ways to go about doing the same thing. So, it’s which one works for your goals and your situation at this point in time.

And yes, that’s something that everybody I know struggles with is we want, myself included, we want that prescription. We want that recipe that says 1, 2, 3, done. Like you said. And it doesn’t exist. And so that’s one of the things that is really hard for us to accept, or honestly for me to accept.

Then it’s also something that when we do our coaching programs and talk to people and help people work through these things, that they have a hard time accepting and coming to terms with because we all want 1, 2, 3, done. And nothing in life is 1, 2, 3, done.

Paula: That’s right. That’s right. And everybody’s land is so different. I mean, just being on a mountaintop presents different challenges than being in a valley.

Being in this like dry, rocky, highly erodible place, no one was really recommending that I do large scale seeding here. Because, well, first of all, we have native plants in the seed bank. So that was the first thing. That’s one of the lucky things being in Virginia and some other places. It’s likely that you have some native plants in the seed bank if they can just find room and if they can fight against the non-native fescues and everything else that’s taking their resources.

But, the idea of seeding here, there’s not much flat area to begin with and just disking or, but I mean anything, it could have led to worse erosion and we just didn’t want that. On the one hand that was good because seeds are expensive and this kind of project already, you know, costs…. Like the costs are really much higher than I expected, which means that our ability to hire someone for like a day of work is much more limited than what I thought it would be.

You know, I was still thinking with maybe the suburban or city mindset of how much it costs to cut the lawn. Well, that doesn’t really translate to how much it costs to bushhog, several acres. It’s a very different thing. So, these were all things that I had to learn.

Shannon: Right, and I mean, even though that highly erodible, rocky soil can be a challenge for restoration work, it’s also probably one of the things that saved your seed bank. The fact that it couldn’t be tilled and turned into row crop agriculture as easily as some of the other areas.

Paula: Yeah, absolutely. There’s not a lot of row crop agriculture in this county at all. It’s mostly, well, this mountain was apple orchards for about 150 years, starting in the 1830s. And then, the previous owner, the person we bought the land from, was a cattle farmer and she had all of her farm buildings, all of her structures and all the infrastructure was in the valley. But she used the mountaintop to graze cattle. When I think about the cattle climbing up these very steep hills to get to the top of the mountain, it’s pretty amazing.

So, those agricultural uses sort of left us with what we have here now – the combination of plants and the soil. Because the fields were bulldozed to eliminate the apple trees 50 years ago or so. There was soil disturbance, even on those slopes, from what I understand, but at the same time it’s absolutely true that yes, there were no inputs, you know, nobody’s like fertilizing up here, as far as I know. Nobody was using chemicals, except maybe on the fruit trees there. I mean, I’m sure later, as it got later on and they had chemicals to use, they probably used them but there wasn’t like a widespread change to the soil, I guess.

Also the native plants here, they evolved with this kind of soil and this kind of dry, rocky habitat so that they grow better than if it was really full of enriched with nitrogen and so on. Which, I mean, that’s kind of the problem with some of the invasives, right? They fix nitrogen and they help themselves spread that way.

Shannon: And nothing eats them and all that other stuff.

Paula: Yeah, so many problems.

Shannon: There are a lot of things.

Dealing with Ailanthus, Tree of Heaven

Paula: Do you all have spotted lanternflies?

Shannon: Not yet.

Paula: Okay, well, yeah, you will. I’m sorry. You probably will.

Shannon: Yeah, I know we will. They’ve made incursions into Kentucky, but they haven’t really become, they’ve been caught fast enough that they’ve been able to, we think, have eliminated them so far. So yeah. We’re surrounded almost though, so it’s like you said, it’s a matter of time and Ailanthus, tree of heaven, is quite common.

Paula: Ug. That’s too bad.

Shannon: Yeah.

Paula: I was going to ask that. Yeah, I was really set on getting rid of the Ailanthus trees even before I knew about the spotted lanternflies, just because it’s such a bad tree. I devote a whole chapter to it in the book because I was having nightmares about it.

I don’t know if you ever read… There was a really popular novel some time ago called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn about a young girl coming of age. Her family’s poor and she really identifies with this tree outside her window that seems to grow no matter what and persist and it inspires her.

I had no idea until I started doing research for my book that that was the tree of heaven. It’s like poor Francie, the main character. She had no idea that this tree was a terrible weed. Oh, well. And that book was written in the 30s or 40s, I think so. It was, yeah, they planted that tree all over Brooklyn.

I’m still working on getting rid of it here. There’s a large area where, um, when I first started meeting with experts someone from NRCS, that’s the part of the USDA that helps advise farms on conservation, they pointed out this big grove of Ailanthus at one end of the meadow and told me to take care of it. And that’s when I started learning about Ailanthus.

We did have that grove of trees treated. It was basically one big parent tree and a bunch of baby trees. Baby trees. They were like 12 feet tall and they all died. It took a couple of treatments, but they all died 2 years ago. But, now there are young Ailanthus trees growing back in exactly that same spot, even though there aren’t any around. So I’m like, what is it about this spot? Because they really were dead. It’s very strange to me. I know that they can send out shoots from 50 feet away, but there aren’t any within 50 feet. So, I’m really puzzled.

Shannon: It could be that they came from off your property somewhere. The seeds got brought in.

Paula: Oh yeah. I mean, we do have them on our property. It’s just weird that it’s that exact same spot again and, ugh.

Shannon: Yeah. Are you still doing hack and squirt on them?

Paula: We might try something else this time. The really little trees that aren’t very big diameter we’ll probably, uh, do, um… What’s it called? Brush them, you know, um, paint them. Uh…

Shannon: Basal bark.

Paula: Yes. Thank you. Basal bark treatment.

Shannon: Look into trying that even on the bigger ones. That works. I mean, it’s what we do on all of ours, and that’s what has been recommended to us because the bark is relatively thin, so it soaks in.

Yeah, when I read that you were doing hack and squirt with them, I was like, “Ooh, there’s a better way. Or at least there’s a better way for that we’ve found and that everybody around us, even the resource managers that I know that work on public lands and do invasive species work use. Basal bark.

Paula: Oh that’s good to know. We did do that in the winter, but they told us not to do that on the largest trees. They said small and medium trees would work. Have you done it on really large parent trees?

Shannon: How large is really large?

Paula: Mmm. So large you can’t see my hands.

Shannon: I haven’t tried it on those yet.

Paula: Okay.

Shannon: But you can go pretty big. We’ve gone pretty big, and I haven’t heard anyone say “don’t do it on on larger trees.”

Paula: Does it take more than one treatment or they’re dead in one?

Shannon: Usually dead in one.

Paula: Okay.

Shannon: It might take a second, but not usually. And then sometimes, like if you do it in the fall, they’ll leaf out in the spring and you’re like, “Oh crap, I’m going to have to go back and do it again.” But then by summer they’re dead. We did it this spring on some of the ones around us and within weeks they were dead.

Paula: Wow.

Shannon: I mean, within a few days we were watching them, because some of them were by the house, we were watching them turn brown. We’re like, “Yes!”

Paula: Wow. Okay. Okay. I’m going to try that. Because I have somebody scheduled to come out and do it in a couple weeks and we were talking about a combination of basal bark and he wanted to girdle them and I said, “No, don’t girdle them please.” Yeah, so maybe we’ll just do all basal bark and see what happens.

Shannon: Yeah, do some research on it and talk to some people for around you. But that might help a little bit.

Paula: If that’s working. Yeah. Because, this guy I work with on it, he was saying that he did not have good luck with the hack and squirt as far as it dying the first time. And the guy who did it for us a couple of years ago also said the larger trees might not die the first time. We might have to do it a second time. And indeed, that happened. So, I’m hoping all for a one time.

Shannon: Yes. And that way you’re not injuring the tree, so there’s no way for it to send out the chemical, the signal for it to do all the root sprouts. You don’t have to worry about any of that. And then you can wait until it’s dead and then you cut it down.

Snags and Their Importance

Paula: Now, do you have to cut it down? Or can you just leave it as a snag? Unless it’s threatening a structure.

Shannon: Yeah. If it’s in a place that you don’t mind having a snag, it’s perfectly fine to leave it as a snag. If you’ve got so many other snags around that you’re just like, “I don’t want a snag there. I’ve got enough.” Then you can chop it down.

Paula: We have many, many snags, but I like snags. I feel like they’re of the best things for wildlife. I love watching them and seeing what goes to them. There’s one right out my window. It’s a dead, actually orchard cherry that’s dead. But, there was a scarlet tanager sitting in it the other day, which was really cool.

Shannon: Oh yes. Snags are amazing. I think we need more snags, but I mean, with anything, you can have too much of a good thing. And you’ve talked about that in your book too, on some of the other things.

Paula: I actually know somebody who installed snags because they didn’t have any. I was like, “Well, if you wait long enough, you’ll have them,” but, but it was an interesting idea and it worked, I think.

Shannon: I know several people who have done that. Or they’ve had a tree that needed to come down for whatever reason. But then they don’t chop it all the way down. They kill it, and they chop off the top whatever, that might’ve been causing the problems and leave enough of the trunk, like 10 foot whatever, so that they’ve also got snag as well. So, there’s lots of different ways to do it.

Paula: Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Goals and Strategies for Ecological Restoration of Property

Shannon: So, obviously your 1 acre meadow, it’s a little bit more. What are you trying to do with your property now?

Paula: Well, my overall goal is to tip the balance toward native plants more so. If it’s 50:50 now, which I don’t really know, it’s probably a little more than 50:50 now. I want to get to at least 75% native plants. It’s hard to say because certain fields are great and then certain fields are really bad. And like am I counting the hay grasses that are mixed in?

I’m really most worried about managing the invasive plants because that’s really the biggest threat to the native plants. Because as far as like hay grasses and fescues, the only way I can really get rid of those is by spraying them. And if I don’t want to spray because I’m worried about turtles and bats and, you know, all kinds of the insects and everything, then the best thing for me to do is to focus on the invasives and spot spray those when the opportunity presents itself or spot treat them. I haven’t done any large scale spraying and I never would.

So, my goal is to get to at least 75% native plants. I don’t know if that’s realistic because this is such a large property and there’s so much going on and animals and birds are constantly bringing in seeds. And the wind. It’s always windy here. In fact, right now I’m watching a fog roll in, it’s almost like I’m on a bus, but I’m sitting still and the fogs going by. So, there’s always something happening here. And each year presents a new set of challenges.

Strategies for Dealing with Invasive Species

Paula: So, like one year the Ailanthus trees are suddenly like spreading everywhere. Another year it’s the mile-a-minute vine. This year it’s spotted knapweed. Maybe Japanese honeysuckle, which we’ve always had, but I feel like I’m seeing more of it.

Multiflora rose, which I think it was always here. But I’m mainly noticing how much there is sort of at the edge where the meadow meets the forest because we bushhogged some new areas in February. And as a result, the multiflora rose was exposed in a way that I hadn’t been able to see it before. And I started to try to like hack at it in the early spring before it leafed out, but you can really get caught up in it. And it has very big thorns. So I think, those need to be treated.

The Japanese honeysuckle I’m hoping that in the winter I can try spot treating in a couple of fields when everything else is dormant. And the spotted knapweed I’m working on right now, which my obsession with it has spread to other family members. So, we’ve all sort of taken turns or collectively been out pulling it. Like right now is a good time to pull it here because it’s just starting to flower and it’s easier to pull when it’s bolted. And when we’ve gotten so much rain.

I’ve even used… I have this big weed wrench, it’s called a Pullerbear that is about as tall as my shoulder. And, and I’ve used that to pull spotted knapweed because the roots are really strong. It almost gets tree-like when it gets really big. It’s slow, but it’s effective.

So, my main approach so far has been when I can get help because I don’t feel competent with chemicals to like safely spray things. I want to be really conservative about that too, because I’m trying to avoid as much as possible hitting desirable plants and doing it at a time when it’s least likely to impact wildlife and so on. And it’s complicated.

That was the other thing that was a big learning curve for me was to understand that everything was going to be a trade off. When I try to solve one problem to help one thing, I’m going to probably harm something else that I don’t want to harm and I have to decide what I’m okay with. And that was a real struggle sometimes to weigh that.

But, what I’m trying to do is keep invasive plants from getting into new areas. So, if I see the spotted knapweed cropping up in a new area, you know, pull that. I think I effectively got stiltgrass out of one area, but it’s all over the place. So, it’s kind of like, “Why?” You know, it doesn’t feel very rewarding when I’m walking around going, “but there!” “no there…”

I don’t have a crew of people who can help me. It’s really just my immediate family and the man who bushhogs for us and I did find someone to do some spot treating and direct treating of invasive trees. But how much I can afford to do that kind of thing where I have to hire people is very limited. I just didn’t realize how much that was going to cost. It was a real surprise.

And also in this county where I am, it’s a very small population and there aren’t a lot of people who are working on those kinds of things. So, a lot of times people might come from a couple of hours away to do that work. So of course… It’s complicated and everybody here, like so many people in this county are interested in doing this kind of thing, which is great and exciting. And we’re all trying to hire the same people then no one has time, you know, they’re all booked up.

So that’s the other thing. We need more people, more landscape people who know how to do that. And in fact, there’s a wonderful group in the county here, a local conservation group, that has put together an education program for landscapers who want to do the ecological restoration type work. I mean, it’s obviously very lucrative, and I think a lot of people are interested. So, it’s great that this local organization is working on things like that.

Shannon: Yeah, that is great because that is something that so many people do struggle with is finding help to do these sorts of things. I get that question a lot too. And, even if you can do part of it yourself… I’m sure this is probably what you hope to be your forever home, up there on the mountain.

Paula: Yeah.

Shannon: Where Anthony and I are at now, this is what we assume is going to be our forever home. We’re going to get old. There’s going to come a time when we can’t do all this stuff. Even the pieces that we can do ourselves now, we can’t do it then necessarily. I mean, 85, 90 years old out there with a chainsaw cutting down trees that need to come down? I don’t think so.

Paula: Yeah. Exactly.

Shannon: So yeah, there’s a need already and that need’s going to just grow.

Paula: Yeah, it’s true. And, I will say though, that, like I said, I lived in the city, I’ve lived in the suburbs, now I live in the country. If I were still trying to do this in the suburbs, it would feel much more manageable, even though when I was there, it didn’t necessarily feel manageable to do things like that yourself.

But, you know, you’re working, I had young kids. My time was really fractured. And, even so, now I feel like, “Oh, that wouldn’t be so complicated to do that.” Which is actually a message I want people to take away.

If you’re in the city or the suburbs, this is totally achievable. You can get rid of your invasive plants. You can have a yard full of native plants. And you don’t have to get rid of your favorite ornamental if you don’t want to, unless it’s a butterfly bush. You can little by little do this yourself.

It’s not realistic on large acreage. You can only… So, I think what I’m saying is, I need to adjust my expectations since I’m not going to be able to adjust my finances. And, even if I could, there aren’t enough people doing the work. You know, there aren’t enough people who are able and available to do the work.

So, I have to really choose what I’m going to concentrate on. And my big aim has been to try to keep the invasives in check. And I can’t do it on all 200 acres or even all 75 acres of meadow. But I can hopefully keep the worst things from getting worse.

Prescribed Burns and Future Plans

Paula: And, I’m also waiting for a prescribed burn. I’m perpetually waiting for a prescribed. I’ve literally been waiting since, well, probably almost a year and a half now because we didn’t get one in winter of 24. So, then I was like, you know what, let’s try a fall burn because there’s all this bramble, woody stuff, that could be knocked back by a fall burn and let’s see what that would do.

Then there was a drought and there was a fire danger and, um, short staffed, not many burn days. So, that didn’t happen. So, then we were back in the queue for this past winter and again, I mean the State Department of Forestry does so much and they just weren’t able to get to us. They’re really short staffed.

And it’s also hard to get a burn day on the mountain because of the wind. It has to be like perfect conditions. I think it’s maybe a little easier when you go down the mountain a little bit, and it’s not quite as windy. You don’t necessarily have the steep slopes that are highly erodible where the fire’s going to spread more quickly and so on. So, there are complicating factors with the geography here.

Shannon: Yes, anytime you get in the mountains, you really get complicated with a fire because fire runs up. Fire runs uphill fast. And then you’ve got the chimney effects of the mountains. Oh yeah, you’ve got a lot more challenges there than say, those of us who are on flatter, I’m not going to say flat, but flatter lands.

Has Virginia started a landowner fire council or fire program?

Paula: Um. You know, not that I’m aware of, although there is a… uh, I think it’s a one or two day course that I could take to become a certified burn manager. I haven’t been able to work it out in my schedule yet, and I want to do it, but even then, I would not feel safe managing a burn here by myself because, I just feel like for the reasons you described, it’s too easy for it to get out of hand here.

But they do publish actually a really wonderful manual about prescribed burns that’s available to landowners for free. And I read that, and it explains how it all works and why it helps. You know, there are different seasons for the burn. We’ve only done winter burns so far. But I’m kind of interested in seeing what would happen if we did a burn at a slightly different time.

And again, we wouldn’t be… Nothing that we do is done on the whole meadow all at once. I’m choosing sections to apply certain tasks. You wouldn’t want to burn the whole mountain top.

Shannon: No. You always want to leave buffer zones and areas where there’s always going to be… Like you said, it’s always a trade off. So when you do a burn. It helps to promote a lot of things, but any insects that are in those stems that are as eggs on that vegetation or chrysalises, or anything like that, you’re losing those. You’re burning them up. There’s just no other way. So, you always need to leave part of the meadow or part of the area untreated so that they can repopulate. Plus, there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into that as well with the ecology of it.

But yeah, when you said that you had a lot of people, a lot of your neighbors, are interested in doing the same thing, I was wondering if there was a way for you guys to work together so that maybe you could extend the program. But, you’re right, unless you had somebody that was really confident and comfortable kind of leading the crew and then a bunch of others that were comfortable helping out, there’s a lot in there with fire, especially fire in the mountains.

Paula: Yeah and our fields are surrounded by forest. So, we don’t want anything to get into the forest. I mean, there are certainly good reasons to do understory burns also. But we haven’t tried that yet.

I was advised by two different foresters that it was important to get the invasives under control in the meadow so that they wouldn’t get into the forest. And that was one way to ensure the health of the forest. So that is the other reason to work on the meadow first. And, I’m hoping that I’m making some impact there, even though again, I think the multiflora rose is going to be a target next winter.

Shannon: And I would say, I mean, especially if you’ve got decently high quality natural meadow and prairie, which it sounded like you had in the book was what your people are telling you on the ground. Then I would go with the meadows too, over the forest because that’s a more endangered vegetation type and habitat overall. That’s a more threatened one, so go with that and you’re probably going to be doing more good in the big picture too.

Paula: One thing I’ve been excited to see, I think things are going in a positive direction despite the fact that I can’t, like unsee invasive plants.

Struggles with New Invasive Species Coming In

Paula: It’s so hard to feel like they’re just, I mean, they are everywhere. We just actually because of all the excavation right around the house site and that area, which is sort of at one end because I didn’t want it to disrupt anything about the meadow. But the excavation, all the trucks and equipment and everything, brought in a lot of weeds that we didn’t even have anywhere else, which was really frustrating.

And, you know, I spent an afternoon pulling jimsonweed, I was just… and there were all these sweet white clover. It’s one that I hadn’t seen at all here before. And it must have come in on whatever truck they were using to grade the road maybe because it’s lining the road now. And I was like, “I have to cut this. I have to go out and cut this,” and so there are things like that.

We just finished, actually, we did plant native plants right around the house where that excavation occurred, so that it wouldn’t continue to present an area for invasives to spread.

Shannon: And that’s a challenge when you’re bringing in equipment to do work and stuff, which you’ve got to bring in equipment sometimes to do work. I mean, there’s no other way around it, but that’s always the risk of bringing in… “What seeds am I bringing in when that happens?” Unfortunately, that’s the way it is.

But yeah, catching that white sweet clover early so that it doesn’t have a chance to get into the meadows, because if it gets in the meadows, that can be a pretty major one sometimes, depending on where you’re at.

Paula: Yeah, so that’s something I’m trying to keep in check.

Positive Changes in Wildlife and Other Exciting Discoveries

Shannon: Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about some of the never ending struggles of invasive species. And I know that’s something that it’s really hard for me sometimes because I see, like you said, I can’t unsee them. They’re everywhere. And we could literally spend 24-7, for years of just out there trying to do nothing but get rid of the invasive species and we couldn’t get rid of them all.

Not on…we’ve got just under 40 acres and I mean, you’ve got hundreds of acres. So yeah, it’s just not realistic to try for 100%, but at the same time, you can’t unsee it. And it’s so easy to get caught up in that, “well, I need to be doing this and I need to be doing that.” And it just really brings you down.

It’s like, “What am I even trying to do here? Am I making any progress?” And I sometimes forget to take the time to really look around me and see all the good that I am doing. And I kind of got from your book that you might be similar in some ways with that, especially the constantly seeing what all needs to be done and getting concerned and worried about that.

But, so let’s take a minute. What are you most proud of with what you’ve done or most excited about finding?

Paula: Oh, well there are, there are a few things. So, the first spring we had the property, the Smithsonian group called Virginia Working Landscapes that studies native plants and wildlife on private lands, they came and did bird surveys and plant surveys here so that I could sort of get a baseline. It was really helpful to know what was growing here.

Well, this year, so four years later, they’re doing a new set of surveys and I was able to go out on two of the bird survey walks in the past six weeks or so. One thing that really struck me was that the first set of bird surveys four years ago when we hadn’t done anything yet here, they heard one bluebird during all three surveys. That was the total.

We added bluebird nest boxes on the mountain. And this time just at the first survey, they saw eight blue birds and that was just the first. And I see them all the time. They perch on the roof of the house. They dive down into the meadow. I see them all over the place. So, they’re not just nesting in those nest boxes.

But I got this great tip from one of the volunteers doing the survey because I was saying “How do I look inside the nest box without disturbing them?” Like, I had been opening it up occasionally and looking to see what was in there. I did not know that you can order an inexpensive endoscope and you can stick it in. And it connects to my phone so I can take pictures and you can stick it in, and like sort of look around, and see on my phone what is in the nest box.

Shannon: Oh wow.

Paula: And it was literally 30 bucks! I have to put in a little plug for that because that was so cool because now I could see like there are eggs in there and there are nestlings in there and I don’t have to open it to see that. So, that was really exciting!

So, every survey, more bluebirds, you know, and so that was really exciting. And there were some other new birds also. There was a great crested flycatcher. There were some cuckoos. Um, what was the other one? Oh, we didn’t have prairie warblers four years ago. We have prairie warblers now.

And I think, you know, a lot of the meadow is kind of, um, dense and I won’t say like…. It’s shrubby. I mean, it’s not shrubs, but it’s shrubby, if that makes any sense. Like with the bramble and like the dense plants and everything. And we get birds here that like that kind of habitat.

The other thing I’ll say is this year I’m suddenly seeing lots of box turtles, which is very exciting. And we now have two American kestrel nest boxes. The American kestrel is a small raptor that’s in decline in this area. There’s something called the Grassland Bird Initiative, which is an organization that’s a collective of several organizations and they’re monitoring grassland birds, and one of them is the kestrel.

And a couple years ago I saw a kestrel hunting in the meadow, which was really exciting. Um, nothing nesting in the nest boxes yet, but they’re brand new this past winter. They said that we might get Eastern screech owls in them if we didn’t get kestrels. So, there’s some exciting….

Oh, and I was walking with a friend of mine who knows plants better than I do, and at the edge of a field that we had burned, she found an orchid, a little tiny, I mean, it was literally this tiny little orchid amid all these other dense plants, called ladies’ tresses.

Shannon: Ooh.

Paula: And it was blooming, it must’ve been like in, in the fall. Now I am like, “Okay, I’m going to go back there and look in the fall and see if I see more of them.” So that was really exciting. Also, because a scientist who’s an expert on grasslands had told me that I would probably never see orchids in the meadow because of past disturbances.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s pretty exciting if you’re finding ladies’ tresses.

Paula: You know, that was the assumption. That we might have orchids in the woods, but not in the meadow. So, yeah, that was very cool.

I did also find, we always had a little bit of Carolina rose, but it sort of gets crowded out by the other bigger things. And I noticed the patch where I usually see it this year, it had gotten much bigger. So that was exciting. It was surrounded by purple crown vetch which is an invasive plant, so I pulled up the crown vetch around it to some extent so that it could breathe a little.

We were also having an explosion of poison ivy this year. I don’t know why. Every year is different. I don’t know why now, but it’s everywhere.

Shannon: Yeah, and that’s one of those natives that’s like, okay, everything else loves it, but we just have to have that overreaction to absolutely nothing. That drives us nuts.

Paula: Oh, and the other thing I found was a blackhaw viburnum in a place where there really weren’t a lot of good plants. Again, this was a place we hadn’t bushhogged in a long time and we bushhogged it and I happened to be down there. It’s at the bottom of a very steep hill, so I only go back there when I know I’m going to be okay walking back up. And it was in flower and so I felt so lucky to see it at that moment. So good things are happening.

Shannon: Yes. And thanks for the hint on that endoscope too, for the birdhouses. Because, the way I knew to do it was you can get those little, um, I think they’re mechanic mirrors or like dentist mirrors, but they’re kind of a little bitty mirror on an extendable pole. You kind of put it up there, you kind of reach in, you look, you see what it is. That’s the old fashioned way before we all had the phones that we could do everything digitally on like that.

But it sounds like you’ve got lots of great fun stuff going on there.

Paula: Yeah. They’re also doing a bat study here on the mountain right now.

Stewarding a Special Ecosystem

Paula: I’m very much interested in having scientific research done here because to the extent that it’s kind of an unusual place. It’s unusual to find open fields on top of a mountain in the East. It’s just usually forested. And I will say that I assumed when I first started this project, I assumed that it was supposed to be forested and that it had at some point been closed canopy forest. But it turns out that I might have been wrong about that.

A scientist who’s a grassland expert he looked around and he said that it was probably savanna – grassland punctuated by the occasional tree with all those rock outcroppings and the fact that it’s had time to convert to forest and it really hasn’t in most places. So yeah, that was really interesting.

And I was already feeling like it’s been like this for at least 300 years and probably quite a bit longer than that. I just date it that way because of the age of the white oak that clearly grew solo and not in a forest. And this very special, natural community has developed as a result, and I’d like to keep it that way. I want to try to maintain it for this meadow ecosystem and the wildlife that need it.

Shannon: Right, and that’s why, like I said, I would prioritize the meadow because everything you described in your book, everything you’ve said here, also tells me you’ve got a natural meadow / grassland there.

And it’s really special because like you said, you’ve got that kind of shallow, rocky erodible land and that’s helped to keep some of the trees out too, even without the disturbances that would’ve been going on previously to keep some of those other, what would’ve been natural meadows / natural grasslands as that, but they’ve now grown up because we don’t have the fire disturbance, we don’t have the elk, we don’t have the buffalo, the bison, the anything like that, those disturbances that were going on for thousands of years before.

So yeah, you’ve got one of those special places, really, really special places there that it’s just amazing it sounds like.

Paula: It feels like a big responsibility. And it is sometimes challenging. We have a lot of yellow poplars, black locusts, to some extent sassafras, but not quite so bad as far as the pioneer species that would like to succeed into the meadow.

And we wouldn’t have all these poplars if we still had more of the original oak hickory forest. But because it was at some point probably clearcut and at some other point selective cut. There’s a part of the forest that’s a hundred years old or so, but then there’s a part that’s maybe 75 or less.

And these poplars just come in whenever there’s a sunny spot, and they proliferate. I had them in the suburbs and I didn’t mind them because… shade, you know. But they’re just very aggressive growers.

I don’t mind the locusts as much. They don’t get as big most of the time, but the locusts also form colonies. We keep some of those colonies, but some of them we try to cut them so they can’t turn the meadow into a forest. And I know some people might disagree with that, but for the reasons you explained, we’re trying to keep as much as we can of the open meadow, and it’s going to be a constant effort.

Shannon: Yeah, it is in the East because we get enough rain for the trees to grow and grow well. So, the limiting factor a lot of times is soil depth and is there enough soil? I mean, that’s not always the limiting factor, but a lot of times for places like what you’ve got, where they have maintained as a meadow for hundreds of years, that’s a lot of times a lot of the limiting factor there. And so, you don’t want to give the trees a chance to grow that can grow in that area because then then you lose the specialness of it.

Paula: Yeah, I was amazed to learn that so much of the South was grassland, was prairie basically like the Midwest. People associate prairie with the Midwest. But there’s all sorts of evidence including, fossil evidence that it was prairie and we basically farmed it all away. Plowed it all away.

Shannon: Plowed it all away. Took out the disturbance factors so that trees did grow up where there weren’t trees before. It’s complicated. But then the eastern U.S. was complicated because it wasn’t just like full on all prairies forever and ever and ever as far as you can see like you can find in the Midwest sometimes. This was a mosaic and a matrix, a patchwork quilt type situation of forest and shrubland.

And there’s a difference between shrubland and meadows or shrubland and forest. Um, but this was a whole big continuum with patches of this and that. It would’ve been amazing. Some of the scientists and researchers I’ve talked to say that the Southeast or the eastern U.S., and especially the Southeast, probably has more different types of prairie and prairie diversity than the Midwest, which is known for it in the Great Plains and stuff.

So yeah, it gets complicated and this is all relatively new research, I mean, within the past few decades is when we really started to discover and figure this stuff out. So really exciting and interesting there.

More Lessons Learned

Shannon: So, if you are starting over, starting over from scratch, knowing what you know, but wipe the slate clean as far as what you’ve done, what would you do differently? Is there anything?

Paula: I might look for a smaller place. No, I’m kidding. It would be hard to turn this down. It’s just a very special place, but I think I would try to go in with my eyes open and less idealistic about what I could accomplish, and in what period of time. And knowing that there is no end to it. Trying to be Zen about it from the beginning instead of constantly like being frustrated and beating myself up about what I wasn’t getting done.

Shannon: Which is hard to do, or at least it’s hard for me. I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, but for me that’s something… it’s like I know I need to do, but oh my gosh, is it’s so hard to do! And part of it’s just me and part of it is I care so much. I’m so passionate. I want it to be really good, and I feel bad when I can’t make it all perfect right away, but I think that’s something a lot of people struggle with.

Paula: I can relate to that.

Shannon: So, what was the most helpful tip you were given?

Paula: Oh, I talked with so many experts who were incredibly helpful coming from all sorts of different perspectives and their varied experiences and backgrounds. I learned so much from them. And at times it was confusing, like, “Well, should I go with that?” Like, like the part about when is the right time to mow? I had mow in March drilled into my head. And when I say mow, I mean bushhog.

I had mow in March drilled into my head and for so long. And then someone came and said, “but you have a lot of woodcocks here. I bet you do. I haven’t seen them, but I bet you do. And that means you should mow in February because they start nesting in March.”

And I was like, “What?” And then I did indeed see a major woodcock courting ritual this past… I guess it was the beginning of March and there were so many. Anyway, so I was glad. But because of that I think the best piece of advice I got was from a friend who’s an orchardist who said to me, “You’ll have your own truth for your own land.”

You know, I can weigh all these perspectives and in the end, it’s going to be I guess my goals and my priorities and that’s how I’m going to make the decision rather than having someone tell me, “You should do it this way.”

I mean, of course I’m going to listen to all of the expert advice because those folks know so much more than I do. But taking all that in and then making a decision has often been difficult to choose among those options. And so, it’s taken me a while to get to a place where I feel comfortable sort of like absorbing all of that and then using my judgment about what feels okay to me.

Shannon: I love that advice because it is so true, and it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning too – there is no 1, 2, 3, follow these steps, done. There are so many different paths and so many different ways you can take and it can be overwhelming, but like you said, we’ve just got to learn the best we can, get the best advice we can, and then choose what feels right, what makes the most sense for our goals and where we’re at and our property and what we’re trying to do with it.

Paula: It’s funny because I’ve also talked with people around here who are doing similar projects or people who work with native plants or work in conservation, and there’s not necessarily, I mean, I guess there’s a core list of invasives that like everyone’s worried about. But then there are some others that I get really obsessed with that someone else will say, “Eh, I haven’t been too worried about that one.”

I was like, “Really? I can’t sleep!” But then there’ll be something else that they’ll say, “Well, the one I’m really worried about is this.” I was like, “Oh no, I need to worry about that.” And like, I didn’t know. So, everyone has their thing that gets to them, I think, and it’s different for everybody.

Shannon: Yeah. And I think with that part of it comes down to, I mean, like you said, there’s the core that everybody’s got to worry about. But then, the invasive plants are similar to native plants. Not every native plant grows well in the same location. Not every invasive plant is going to grow well in the same location.

So, what may be a problem on somebody else’s land may not be as much of a problem on your land, just because of the differences in the land and the soils and elevation and climate and all those things. Because you’re up on a mountain. So that elevation changes things a lot or has the potential to, so it might not need to be as high of a priority for you.

And recognizing, recognizing those gray areas and accepting – accepting is the big thing, you can recognize, but not necessarily accept. The accepting part is the hard thing. That’s what makes the best answer in ecology the hardest one and the most frustrating. “It depends.”

Paula: Yeah, exactly.

Shannon: But that’s the best answer for so many different things.

Paula: Yeah. And the other thing is that I kind of feel a responsibility because of being up on the mountain. That, of course everything, that’s all the land that’s around the mountain, you know, if they have mile-a-minute down there, I’m going to have it up here. But also, if I have it up here, they’re going to have it down there because everything flows down.

Yes, the birds bring it up, the animals bring it up, but they also bring it down. The wind brings it down. The water brings it down. So, I also feel like I don’t want things to get out of hand because at least if I can keep it from being a problem up here, maybe that will make it less of a problem down there.

I know things go in both directions, but especially with water. Like when I see the stiltgrass along the stream, it drives me crazy.

Why Write a Book?

Shannon: So, another question for you, because you did write this wonderful book and it’s a really great story. You’ve got such a great way with words. I really enjoyed reading it and hearing your stories and stuff. And like I said, so many of them I was like, “Yep. Been there.” “Yep. Can relate to that one.”

Paula: I’m glad to hear that.

Shannon: So why did you decide to write a book about it instead of just doing it?

Paula: Well, I am a writer and when I’m writing about something, doing any kind of writing project, I kind of need to be completely preoccupied with what I’m writing.

So, for instance, I wrote this essay that was published in the American Scholar about carpenter bees and an experience I had with carpenter bees. It was like all I could think about that morning when I started drafting it. It was sort of a thing that was happening in the moment. I’m like, I’m just going to write. I need to write this down.

And, I had been working on a novel for a period of time before we came to the mountain. I had intended to continue and finish writing that novel. But I became so preoccupied with what was happening on the mountain, with learning about the mountain, with learning about the connections among the wildlife and plants here that I really couldn’t focus on anything else and I was already taking notes.

I was taking notes every time I toured someone else’s farm and they talked about what they were doing restoration wise. Anytime I met with an expert, I was taking a lot of notes. And so at some point a few months into the project, I thought, “Well, I’m obviously not writing that other book,” which I don’t even remember what it was about now. And, this is like the thing that was my new deep dive.

It was the thing, the only thing I could focus on, and I was really starting to feel compelled to write about it. And for me, that’s a sort of feeling where I can’t not write about it. Like my head’s going to explode if I don’t, get it down on paper. And so that’s basically how it happened. And so, then I was in the somewhat uncomfortable position of, you know, or slightly overwhelming position of writing the book while I was doing the work that I was writing about.

So, sometimes I wasn’t sure whether what I had hoped to write about would even happen, or whether bad things would happen when I hoped good things would happen. And, it turns out that I guess I am probably, just because of maybe my sense of humor, I’m maybe better at, dealing with the bad things that happened, I don’t know, in writing. But, yeah, so sometimes I worried about that, but there was always something going on that I was eager to get down on paper. I couldn’t not write it, is the answer.

Shannon: Well, I’m glad you did write it, but why bad naturalist?

Paula: I think because when I started out, like I said, I really didn’t know anything about plants. I’d done all those deep dives on different topics and in nature. I was really interested in island biogeography for instance, and I was sort of thinking about the mountain as sort of an island, the meadow as an island, and the ramifications of that.

But I didn’t know anything about plants and I didn’t have as much hands-on conservation experience. I certainly didn’t have restoration experience in that sense and in the sense that I was wrong about things, like I made mistakes, that turned out very badly sometimes. And, if I had it to do again, I definitely would not do those things again because then trying to solve them turned out to be a huge, a huge deal. So, I did at times feel like a bad naturalist.

And then when I learned about the trade-offs and that I was always going to be harming something when I was helping something else, it made me feel like a bad naturalist. But I also think probably, um, well I learned a lot in the course of this project and I’m still learning a lot.

And I think, um, well, I’ve had people come up to me at events and say, I’m a bad naturalist too. And I kind of love that because like nobody has the perfect knowledge. Nobody’s going to have the perfect experience. I’m never going to not make mistakes I’m never going to know enough. And that’s just, that’s just the reality. So I think it’s apt.

Shannon: Yes, and I love the title because of all those reasons that you just said. And it’s so easy to feel like we’re being bad naturalists because we don’t have all the answers and we do make mistakes. And especially when the newest invasive species rears its ugly head and it’s like, “Okay, do I go after this or do I go after that?”

And we have to make those choices. And knowing that there are going to be unintended consequences and unintended consequences that we can’t even think about at this moment in time to weigh whether we want to make that choice.

So yeah, I really do love the title. I was just kind of curious if. You it that way for the reasons I thought you did and for the reasons that resonated with me, but yeah, it sounds like exactly that.

Paula: Well, I’m glad you like it.

Taking Time to Slow Down and Appreciate the Little Things

Paula: I think another thing that’s really important to add is that one of the most exciting parts of this project for me is when I learn about connections among plants and wildlife here in a way that I never would’ve known if I didn’t sort of slow down and pay better attention to my surroundings. And when I go for a walk in the meadow, I just kind of stop and stare at a plant until I see the insects that are on it.

Like there’s this amazing, we have a lot of this plant called dogbane, which is related to milkweed. And the first time I saw a dogbane beetle was so, they’re like rainbow colored iridescent beetles, and they’re just so cool looking. Of course, I’m an insect person. I was just excited to see that.

And then…oh, when I learned about voles, which I talk about in the book, the interactions between voles and how they actually help plant white oaks. That was really fascinating to me when I learned it. And it started with a question because I kept stumbling over vole tunnels everywhere. Like, “Why are there so many vole tunnels here and is that bad?” Or, you know, “What does it mean?”

And then I started like trying to figure it out and doing all this research. And so, I’m asking questions like that all the time, and that’s the stuff I get most excited about. And I think that’s what helps me not get totally overwhelmed by dealing with the invasive plants is that those other very cool things are going on the way they’re supposed to, and it means that good things are happening here.

Shannon: Yes. We’re not just planning native plants or growing native plants, encouraging native plants for the sake of native plants, just because they’re pretty, but there are these whole other interactions going on, and supporting one means supporting something else, which supports something else, and it’s positive unintended consequences.

Paula: Exactly, exactly.

Shannon: Yes. All those ripple effects.

Current Scientific Research and an Appeal for More

Paula: The Virginia Working Landscapes bat study that’s happening here. They have set up this ultrasonic microphone where they record bat calls, you know, sounds that we can’t hear. They recently told me, I think there have been over, I’m just going to look it up really quick. I think it was over 6,000 bat calls in a relatively short period of time, actually 3,600 bat calls since mid-May.

They only expected to see two common species of bats. I think it was the big brown bat and the eastern red bat, and it turned out there’s evidence, it’s not final yet because they still have to really analyze the data, but it looks like there are actually five bat species here. So, it’ll be really interesting to see if that turns out to be accurate, but definitely it was an exciting result that they didn’t necessarily expect. So that was cool.

We don’t have mosquitoes here. I will say, and I’m not sure that it’s not necessarily because of the bats. I think that’s kind of a myth that bats eat so many mosquitoes. They’re small bodied insects. I’m not sure that they’re that interested in them. Maybe they eat some, um…

Shannon: They eat them if they need to. But yeah, that study, basically the only thing that they gave them to eat was mosquitoes. So of course they’re going to eat a lot of mosquitoes. But they do help some.

Paula: Yeah, I think we have a lot of frogs here. We had a tree frog that hung out on our gate for three days making a lot of noise. So, we have a lot of frogs and toads and things like that. So, anyway it’s really very cool to see results like that and to know that something must be going right here.

Shannon: Yes. And I love the fact that you’re doing so much scientific research on your property.

Paula: I would really like to do more, so, you know, bring it on. People can contact me.

Shannon: Great. Hopefully they will. I know we’ve got some scientists that listen to the podcast as well, so hopefully they will because that would be fun to hear more about too.

Resources and Final Thoughts

Shannon: But yes, and I do encourage any of our listeners who want to learn more about your habitat journey to check out your book because that really tells the story, especially the early years with it. And it’s really great.

But you also have a newsletter too, don’t you?

Paula: I do, the Bad Naturalist newsletter is free. You can subscribe on my website and it’s monthly, and I include photos, information about what I am seeing and discovering on the mountain, what’s happening here now. I usually include also book or podcast recommendations and there’s always a photo of my standard poodle who I call the official mountain poodle because it seems so incongruous, but she loves it here.

Shannon: That’s great. Yes. And I will put links in the show notes for your book, and for your website where they can subscribe to your newsletter as well, because you’re doing some great stuff there.

Paula: Oh, thank you.

Shannon: You’re welcome. And thank you so much for being a guest on the Backyard Ecology Podcast and for sharing your story with our listeners.

Paula: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Shannon: You are welcome. I enjoyed it too. Take care.

Paula: You too.

Shannon: And don’t forget that if you live in the eastern U.S. and would like help creating your own thriving backyard ecosystem, whether it’s on a tenth of an acre or hundreds of acres, then I invite you to check out the Backyard Ecology Community. The Backyard Ecology Community is where we provide personalized, ongoing coaching and support designed to help you meet your habitat goals.

Because like Paula and I discussed, there are often multiple ways to achieve the same thing, and it can sometimes be overwhelming to try to sort through all those options to find the right one for you and your land. We can help with that. You can learn more at backyardecology.net/community.

As always, I want to thank our Patrons and other financial supporters who go above and beyond to help us produce free content focused on creating thriving backyard ecosystems that you can enjoy and be proud of.

Until next time, don’t forget to take some time to enjoy the nature in your backyard.