Exploring The Natural World of Washington, D.C.: An Evening With Author Howard Youth
Aired April 29, 2021
Gary Krupnick:
Welcome. My name is Gary Krupnick. I'm a research scientist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. I'm in the botany department where I head the Plant Conservation Unit. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the evening program, Exploring the Natural World of Washington, D.C.: An Evening with Howard Youth. In today's program is the culminating event leading to the 2021 City Nature Challenge. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. Let's see. And put this in the right view here. Again, thank you so much for coming. So today's program, well, let me start with saying that one week ago was the 51st anniversary of Earth Day. And to celebrate Earth Day in Earth Month, today we are going to explore the theme of urban nature, pollinators, biodiversity, and Earth optimism.
Before we get to this evening's program, I want to share with you two exciting citizen science projects. The City Nature Challenge is a friendly global effort to safely explore biodiversity. And it's a worldwide competition among metro areas to see whose residents can spot and identify the most wildlife. We're asking our fellow nature enthusiasts to visit your local parks, your neighborhoods, your backyards, to see what plants and what animals share our environment. The DC City Nature Challenge this year runs this weekend, from April 30th to May 3rd. It's free to participate and everyone in the metropolitan area with access to a camera and the internet can join the fun. We're asking participants to find plants, animals, fungi, slime molds, and any evidence of life that you can find in the D.C. metro region. Once you find them, take a picture of it, and then share those pictures using the iNaturalist app.
iNaturalist is very easy to use. After downloading the app, you can create an account and then you can upload your animals, your plants or fungi photos to the app. Once you upload your photo, the app will help identify the date of your observation and the locality. And then you could type in the name of the organism that you took a photo of. If you don't know what it is, iNaturalist provides suggestions based upon images and location. For instance, I uploaded this beautiful blue flowered plant a couple of weeks ago that I saw blooming in Great Falls, Virginia. That easily identified it as Virginia bluebells.
The City Nature Challenge of D.C. is more than just the city. If you live in or participate in any county surrounding D.C., as shown in this map, your observation will count. We're asking you to observe and take pictures of wildlife this weekend. After that, upload and identify your species next week, and then join the celebration on May 10th when the total number of observations and species will be revealed. And if you live in Baltimore County or those surrounding counties, you can participate in Baltimore's City Nature Challenge. And if you live outside this region, don't fret. There are hundreds of other cities around the world participating in the 2021 City Nature Challenge. Just visit citynaturechallenge.org to see if your metropolitan area is participating.
The second citizen science project that I'd like to introduce is called PolliNation DC. It's related to the City Nature Challenge as it also uses the iNaturalist app. But this project runs through the whole year. First, let me tell you a little bit about pollinators and pollination. Pollination occurs when pollen grains are moved between two flowers of the same species by wind or by animal. As you can see in this video, this hummingbird is inserting its bill into a flower of a Heliconia plant. The milk part of the plant, the pollen grains, are deposited upon the forehead of the hummingbird. As it moves to another flower, those pollen grains will fall off its forehead and attach itself to the female part of the flower, the stigma.
Successful pollination results in the production of fertile seeds. Almost 90% of all flowering plants depend upon animal pollinators. So who are these pollinators? Well, we just saw the hummingbird. So there are several bird species that pollinate plant species around the world. More important, there are the insects. There's bees, flies, butterflies, moths, even beetles and some wasps pollinate flowers. Bats are popular pollinators in the tropics and even in the Southwest of the United States. And then there's a huge, unusual suite of pollinators like honey possums or lemurs, even a gecko on a tropical island is a known pollinator.
What are these pollinators doing? Well, they're collecting more rewards. They're looking to eat nectar or pollen. They're collecting oils and fragrancies and resins. They may even lay their eggs in the flower and that flower will host as a brood site. So the animals are getting a reward, and the plants get the reward of successful reproduction. However, pollinators today are in peril. Over 16% of vertebrate pollinators are threatened with extinction, and over 40% of invertebrate pollinators are threatened with extinction. And these threats include habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, pesticides, diseases, and parasites, and global climate change.
So why should this matter to you? Well, think about the food that you eat. Whole Foods did this amazing campaign a few years ago where they took a photograph of the produce section of the grocery store. And you can see all the great fruits and vegetables that you could buy at a grocery store. Well, if you remove all the plants that depend on animal pollinators, your grocery list would look much different. In fact, apples and blueberries, strawberries and melons, tomatoes and potatoes and almonds all depend on pollinators. Even vanilla and coffee. Even tequila depend on pollinators.
So what can you do for pollinators? Well, I have a list of three simple things here. You can watch for pollinators. Just observe. Get connected with nature and look for pollinators. You could reduce your impact. Reduce or eliminate your pesticide usage and increase green spaces for pollinators. And you could plant for pollinators. Create a pollinator-friendly habitat with native plants that supply pollinators with nectar and with pollen. And if you don't know where to begin with creating a pollinator-friendly habitat, we've created tools to help you.
So my colleagues and I created these garden recipe cards available at pollinator.org. And like a food recipe card, these cards have ingredients, steps to prepare your dish, and pictures for new chefs. But instead of ingredients, these recipes have a list of suggested plants that you should be able to find at your local nursery. Instead of cooking directions, these cards provide instructions on how to plant your garden. And on the flip side of each card is a picture of your meal. But instead of the food you're going to eat, it's the plants that you will plant in your garden. They're separated by blooming season so you can see which plants will bloom in the spring, summer, and fall months. And having plants in the garden that bloom each season provides pollinators with food from early spring to the end of fall. Cards from four regions are available now at pollinator.org, and we plan to introduce more cards later this season.
With all these tools at hand, the Smithsonian teamed with our partners to launch the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge a few years ago. The challenge was a nationwide call to action to preserve and create gardens to help the health of pollinators across the US. And registering your garden is easy. The garden can come from your backyard, from your school, from your workplace, or even a place of worship. Within three years, the Million Pollinator Gardens surpassed its goal, and now has over 1 million registered gardens. Now for me, a research scientist, the next step is to see if these pollinator gardens actually work. What pollinators are benefiting from these pollinator gardens?
So this spring, we are launching a citizen science project called PolliNation DC. It's easy to participate. When you are in a D.C. community garden or on the National Mall, take photos of animals you see visiting the flowers, and then upload those photos to iNaturalist. With that, we'll get a great record of the urban pollinators that visit community gardens. The D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation manages 35 community gardens across all eight wards of the district. And the Southwest Community Garden shown here is just one of these 35 community gardens. You could see in the raised beds, there's both vegetable plants and native plants that all attract pollinators.
Here is the Southwest Community Garden iNaturalist page. And so when you upload your photos to iNaturalist, you can also see what others have uploaded to see what pollinators have been digitally captured. In essence, you're creating a photo journal of some of the wildlife visiting and living in the garden. And if you come to the Smithsonian, feel free to take pictures of pollinators in our Smithsonian Pollinator Garden or at the U.S. Botanic Garden and their native plant gardens. We'll then be able to compare what pollinators visit pollinator gardens that are specifically planted with native plants versus community gardens, which primarily plant vegetable plants. With that information, we'll be able to make recommendations and actions that can help our most threatened pollinators.
So with that, it's now my pleasure to introduce the next speaker. We're going to provide all the links that I shared with you in the Q&A box, and you'll receive more information after the program via email. Now before we get started, please take a moment to locate the Q&A box at the bottom center of the Zoom interface. This is where you'll be able to see your questions for the Q&A, and this is also where we'll share any relevant links and resources. Today's program features closed captioning. To turn captioning on or off, you can click the CC button located at the bottom right of the Zoom interface. After the program, you'll see a survey come up, which we hope you'll complete. We learn a lot from your feedback.
Now please join me in welcoming our host of today's program, Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History. Okay, Kirk. Go ahead and share your video.
Kirk Johnson:
Let's see. I think we got it. Excellent. Thanks, Gary. And thanks to all of you for coming tonight. It's great to see everybody. Tonight's program is part of our ongoing signature Evening With series. For those of you who are able to join us at the museum in the past, welcome back. And for those of you just joining us now for the series, welcome. In his "Field Guide to the Natural World of Washington, D.C.," naturalist Howard Youth takes us on an urban safari, describing the wild side of the nation's capital. If you're like me, you know and love that D.C. is home to great outdoor spaces and plenty of opportunities to discover different plants, animals, and ecosystems across the city. I'm looking forward to talking to Howard tonight, and I'd like to go ahead and welcome him on as I introduce him.
Howard Youth is a freelance natural history writer and a former associate editor and communications manager for the Friends of the National Zoo. His work has been published in the Audubon magazine, National Wildlife, and the Washington Post. Currently, he is the senior writer-editor at the American Bird Conservancy, and he specializes in content related to natural history and wildlife conservation. He describes his present job as birds and words. Howard will tell us more about the book and the natural world of Washington, D.C., then he and I will have a brief conversation. And after that, we'll take questions from the audience. Feel free to submit your questions in the Q&A box as soon as you have them so we can get through as many as possible. Now, without further delay, let's hear from Howard Youth. Here you go. Take it away, Howard.
Howard Youth:
Thank you, Kirk. Thanks very much. Good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here to share a bit about the journey that was and is the "Field Guide to the Natural World of Washington, D.C." The idea of the book was twofold, to introduce people to a dozen top spots specifically within the city. As anyone who lives in this area knows, we are very rich in parkland here, in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs as well. But with this particular project, we were focused specifically on the three-quarter diamond that is Washington, D.C. And so, one of the initial challenges was trying to do justice to all this abundance, this cornucopia of biodiversity that we all live among, to try to introduce people to the dozen places, and also to give an idea of the basic species that one might encounter that are emblematic of the area.
So the challenge from the start, and I spent a number of mornings sitting, trying to come up with a list based on my lifetime growing up in this area, enjoying the natural history and different places, but trying to say, "Well, what is it that readers will like, that'll give them the best beginning cross section, and from there to further explore?" And that's what we ended up with in the book. As an example, there are 322 species according to the eBird database that have been recorded in Washington, D.C. So that's bird species. And for the book, I had to cherry-pick fewer than 40. But I also had a supplementary section that kind of gave an overview of common species and different seasons. That's just an example. The same with the hundreds and hundreds of species of native and ornamental trees that we are blessed with in this city. We had to narrow it down to several dozen.
So it was kind of a fun and kind of a vexing exercise. But I think that when it came out of it, it kind of reminds me of when I lead birding trips. It's always important to stress when you're starting out, don't get flummoxed by the details. It's kind of like a language. You can't get caught in the little tiny pits. You have to kind of do a broad brush start. So if you're going into Washington, D.C., for example, one of the species that we selected was the ring-billed gull, which does not nest in the D.C. area. But yet, that's the gull you usually see wheeling over the White House when you're watching the news, or over the Capitol. They spend a lot of time here starting in the summer, post-breeding dispersal through the winter. A lot of them roost around the Tidal Basin.
But among them are more unusual, less common or less abundant species, that you can start watching for. And each gull has multiple plumages. So it's just to say that with nature, you start with the basics and you start by getting most familiar with the most familiar species. And that was one of the main goals of this book. As I said, I grew up in this area and I was always fascinated with animals. It's interesting that I should end up speaking to the Smithsonian audience, because basically this journey started at the Smithsonian for me. As a child growing up in this area, my parents were Smithsonian Associates members and were very interested in nurturing my enthusiasm about nature, although they themselves were not naturalists. And they were very generous in providing me opportunities.
One of the most poignant was when I was 14 taking the new Metro down to the Natural History Museum to the Baird Auditorium to see lectures on natural history, several of which were led by Don Messersmith, who ended up being my ornithology professor when I went to University of Maryland. Again, I ended up interning at Friends of the National Zoo at the National Zoo. And I ended up actually working for Friends of the National Zoo in their communications office and writing for many years for their magazine, Zoogoer. My mentor there and my boss, Susan Lumpkin, is actually the person who recommended me for this book job when someone from Johns Hopkins came calling and asking who might be a good author who she knew. So, the Smithsonian features very strongly in this book, and you'll actually see that there are accounts of the National Zoo, of the pollinator gardens and Natural History Museum, and other places along the Mall where you can see wildlife.
Everywhere you go in Washington, D.C., you see wildlife. And the more you drill down and look closely at things like insects, the more amazed you are at how much nature is all around us. And of course, I wrote the book before COVID-19 hit. But we've all focused much closer just by necessity in recent months. And that of course has drawn a greater interest in the wildlife around us, when people were limited and they weren't suddenly doing international travel or even national travel. Well, those who were stuck in the Washington, D.C., area were very fortunate. Because even though in the city itself for a while the parks were closed, there's four seasons of interest in Washington. And each place you go, one point I wanted to make as a take home point for people is, each place you go, there's only a dozen detail outlined places in the book, but there's many others mentioned. And if you look at a map of D.C., you find many other small pocket parks there, community parks, city parks, many federal properties, much more federal properties than you'll find in virtually any other city, I would say.
I did look it up recently. As recent as 2019, in looking at percentage of cities in parks, Washington, D.C., ranks, according to the ranking that I came across, eighth in the nation at almost 25% of the area in some sort of parks. So that's all to say, you could spend a lifetime exploring just within the confines of Washington, D.C., let alone exploring outside the Beltway. So what I would encourage everyone to do is kind of, one of the things I always thought of in writing the book, and that was kind of a journey for me, was there are so many places, for example, Roosevelt Island, that everyone knows about. But especially when we get back to our full capacity of rush hour, everyone's whizzing past those places. And unless you make the effort to stop, and with Roosevelt Island, you better plan your route because you have to oftentimes go a different way on the Parkway and follow your GPS carefully and safely to get there if you're coming, for example, from the north.
These places are wonderful places and many people are just whizzing past them. So as we rev up again as life gets closer to something like normal, I would encourage people to really appreciate the great natural riches that we have in this area. And in doing so, I was very lucky to work with some wonderful people who were able to make some images and make some of the graphic elements of the book that really help bring home this point and really help people get closer to these places. I had the help of a long-time friend and photographer, Robert E. Mumford, Jr., who was generous in, he had a wealth of photographs he had taken for another book that he was working on called "Springtime in Washington." And we use photos from that effort, as well as from special trips that he made to report on locations that he had not covered before. And also there's thumbnail photos of trees for identification purposes in addition to the paintings.
I worked closely with Mark Klingler, who's a wonderful illustrator. He's one of those illustrators who has this rare gift of being able to not only draw plants, but draw birds and insects, and even the skeletons of dinosaurs. He works at the Carnegie Museum. But he can also draw things that come to life. And so we're very fortunate to be able to work with him and have him draw some of these representative species that we talked about. And also the maps. We worked closely with a colleague and friend of mine, Gemma Radko, with whom I work now on Bird Conservation Magazine, the membership magazine of American Bird Conservancy.
So there was a lot of efforts. And in addition, I have to say part of my journey, even though I grew up in this area and I'm in this area, part of my journey was that I wrote part of the book in other parts of the world. I wrote some part of the book in Canada, and some part of the book in Ecuador, which is just the way life turned out. And it was wonderful, but I did have some help. For example, I needed a little bit of ground tracing on some of the pathways of Glover-Archbold Park. And longtime friends and naturalists of ours, Amy Chang and Bob Young, they said, "Okay, Howard. We'll do that for you. We'll report back." And they sent photos back and they walked the trail that I didn't get a chance to do.
So I want to thank everyone who helped with this effort. And I'm glad that the book is still out there, it's been reprinted this year. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about books is having the chance for something that you write to be out there for people to enjoy for a while. And hopefully, it will spark interest. Because that's the number one purpose of a book like that, is to get more people out there, more people interested. And if you're like me, nature really resonates and it fascinates you, whether it's large or small. And that's one of the nice things about the book is that we also had a very small place where we could focus on represented insects, for example. Even though I wrote the book a while ago, I chose the annual cicada, or the dog-day cicada, as one of the represented insects. Because that, as many people who live here know, that's the signature sound of July through August into early September, is the rising crescendo, almost like to a blistering volume, and then it fades away.
And I was mindful of periodical cicada, which we're going to enjoy very soon. And we did mention that in the book as well, because it is a very characteristic thing. We have the Brood X, as people have probably been reading, is one of the largest claves of cicadas and they're about to emerge. So I think the Mike Raupp of University of Maryland, I call him the Anthony Fauci of cicadas. He's been all over the press, allaying people's fears. These things are not harmful. They're very noisy. They're very good nutrition for birds and squirrels and chipmunks.
I'm very much looking forward to their emergence, but I don't think everybody feels the same way. It's just another example to say that, in looking at nature, many people resonate with butterflies or flowers or birds. But if you look into the beautiful red eyes of a periodical cicada, as long as it's not surprising you on your sleeve, and you look at it closely, it's hard not to say there's not beauty there. And there is. Again, I wanted to also mention, and I know I'm getting a little bit low on time, but I wanted to mention that people really with this four seasons approach that I'm talking about, the beauty of this area is in its lushness and also in its location, and also in the seasonality that we have. And a couple points I wanted to make about our wonderful location here is that D.C. is at the confluence of two rivers, the Anacostia and Potomac, that feed into the nation's largest estuary.
We're also, within the city for example, if you're standing on road from the northern part of Roosevelt Island, you walk to the southern part, you go from the Piedmont down to the coastal plain right within the city. This is incredible. You have the uplands of just Roosevelt Island alone, and the lowlands and there's different plant communities right there in that relatively small natural area. We also have the iconic areas like C & O Canal National Historical Park that starts at Georgetown and then traces the west edge of Maryland all the way up to Western Maryland along the Potomac for 184 miles. So talk about a lifetime of exploration. There it is.
And another point I wanted to make in terms of iconic places that you really shouldn't miss is Rock Creek Park in D.C. The portion that's in D.C. is as old as any national park almost in the United States. It's one of the oldest national parks. And the forts that were in that area, the sightlines were cleared during the Civil War. But there's forest in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., that are as old as any forest you would find within several hours drive of Washington, D.C. It's phenomenal to have an urban wild park like that set into the nation's capital. So I would encourage people to explore the trails inside Rock Creek Park, as Teddy Roosevelt used to. He used to take his kids and they used to scramble over rocks. He used to grab his friends. He used to scramble around there. You can still do that today. It's kind of amazing to think that there was the foresight to preserve something like that, and that we still are enjoying that in this city today.
And again, you can find your local neighborhood parks and start exploring closely, and you'll find new things. And there are citizen science applications like eBird or iNaturalist where you can contribute as a citizen scientist. This is a very exciting time to be exploring nature and be interested in nature. So, hopefully this book has been a bit of a contribution in that direction. So time wise, I think that we are, let's see, I've got some more time I believe. And I do have some more things to say. So one of the things that I used to argue with my father about was, I was interested in dinosaurs and reptiles from elementary school age. But when I was 12, I got interested in birds during a vacation when we went to Florida. And I fell in love with herons, as well as reptiles, which I was in love with before.
And I said to my parents, "We got to move to Florida." Or, "Someday I'm moving to Florida. Florida's got the best birding and the best nature." And my father was not a naturalist as I said, but he thought he would have some fun. So he was reading around and he got the Chesapeake Magazine and he was a sailor. And he said, "Well, we've got the Chesapeake Bay. And we've got the Northern-Southern influences that are meeting here. I think this is a better area than Florida." And I think I won with the numbers. If you look on eBird or other places, Florida has a higher species total, for example, for birds. But there is truth in what my father said, which is the North and the South meet here. And you have the coastal plain and the piedmont right within the city changing this transition. Within a few hours, you can see prothonotary warblers in or around Washington, D.C., kind of a signature bird of the bottomland south.
And in a few hours you can drive to the Appalachians and see nesting Blackburnian warblers in some of the higher places. That's kind of phenomenal. And in Florida, you don't have that kind of altitudinal change. And you also don't get things, spectacular sights like we do just outside of Washington, like snow geese in the winter, the clouds of snow geese on the Eastern Shore. It's a regional thing going down to maybe North Carolina, coastal North Carolina. So growing up in this area, again, just like the monuments, just like the Smithsonian, just like the museums, it's very easy to not fully appreciate what you have.
And then when you get out and about, you realize that we really are gifted here in Washington, D.C. So I also, as I said, was working on this from overseas. And in looking at the history of the parks, in looking at the maps of the parks, in thinking about my experiences in the parks in D.C., and being able to write about them from afar was actually very helpful because it got me very excited about sharing it with everyone, because it was really much more apparent of how special everything is here in the city. So I just wanted to share those points. And I think I see there's some questions coming across on the chat. Is this a good time?
Kirk Johnson:
Sure. I'll start firing some questions at you, Howard. And it's great. I loved, because I came here as a director of the museum just before the book was published and I wrote the forward for it. People said, "Hey, there's a book about the natural history of Washington, D.C. You want to write the forward?" I'm like, that's great because in a way the director of the museum is sort of the chief natural historian of the nation. And Washington, D.C., is such a cool place because it's not a state, though it should be. And we've got this incredible double crossroad, as you say, both the north-south and the rocky stuff down to the muddy stuff. And I'm kind of curious, do you have a favorite park or favorite place in D.C.?
Howard Youth:
I would have to say, well, there's several favorites. One of the places that I've really spent the most time is the zoo because I used to work at the zoo. And even before I worked at the zoo, I would go to the zoo and I frequently would go, I don't know if you can go in early now. I don't know if the gates are open at sunrise anymore. But I used to be able to go in at birding hours and before many people were in the park. And during migration, there's a lot of birds. The landscaping of the National Zoo has always had very strong native species focus, things like river birches, plants that attract a lot of insects to the catkins this time of year, warblers would be hanging from that or on the hillside where the old wild eagle exhibit used to be.
There'd be brown thrushes poking through the brush. There's a lot. And we would have sometimes outside of the visitor center building when I was working in the office, we look out and on the railing one fine August morning, a golden-winged warbler and a hooded warbler. I mean, these birds, it's just to say that this time of year, Rock Creek park is a favorite. Of course, the C&O Canal is also a favorite of mine. But the opportunities this time of year to see amazing birds, if you have the patience to scour the foliage in Rock Creek Park at the zoo early in the morning, in the morning as early as you can get there. Around the exhibits, there's a lot of nature, a lot of species.
Kirk Johnson:
So what was it that got you writing about natural history?
Howard Youth:
I originally wanted to be an ornithologist, but I always liked writing and I never liked math or hard science. So, that's part of what got me writing about nature. I've always been very enthusiastic about wildlife and conservation and I always have been writing about it. So it was kind of a natural way to go. I mean, I ended up at Maryland. I started in an environmental science major initially, but I very quickly switched to a journalism major with a minor in zoology, so I could take my marine biology, my ornithology classes, my animal diversity classes. And I remember in the creative development office of the journalism school, they said, we've got you as a magazine focus with a wildlife focus. Are you sure you want to pigeonhole yourself that much? And I said, yes, because I've always been very focused on natural history and conservation.
Kirk Johnson:
So D.C. is too small to have any real endemics, but I'm wondering, is there a plant and a bird that to you represents Washington, D.C., more than any others?
Howard Youth:
Well, I think there are a few invertebrates that might be endemic isopods or something. I don't remember. I'd have to look that up and I don't really know, but in doing some research, I think there were maybe some invertebrates. I'm not sure. For me, the catbird and chipmunk are two, Eastern chipmunk, are two species that I'm kind of amazed at how ... I remember at one point years ago, they had registered a decline in the gray catbird population. And there were some they had red listed or something. This is a couple decades ago. And I was remembering as a kid of the suburbs, I was thinking, oh no, the catbirds are going too.
But fortunately that hasn't happened. And if you go to the National Zoo or you go to the Mall, you go to some of the gardens, the Smithsonian Castle, et cetera, you'll find catbirds singing right over your head. You'll find them skulking around in the shrubbery. And they're like constant companions, but mostly noticed by people who appreciate nature, because they're in the shadows. They're always talking at you or they're talking for their own purposes. They're singing. But they're living among us and they're doing very natural things and it is kind of a happy coexistence. That's one of the reasons I love the catbird.
Kirk Johnson:
You didn't tell me a tree and I'm not going to let you choose the cherry. So if it's not going to be a cherry tree, what's the tree that speaks to you about Washington, D.C.?
Howard Youth:
The tulip tree. I think the tulip tree is a gorgeous, gorgeous, and very unique tree that grows in our parks and that towers. And the birds love it in the spring. Even the hummingbird stop by and probe the tulip-like blossoms and things like that. I saw my first scarlet tanager in a tulip tree in our backyard.
Kirk Johnson:
Excellent.
Howard Youth:
Tulip tree.
Kirk Johnson:
I'm sitting here in my office in the National History Museum looking west, so I look out across the American National History Museum and I look directly at the Washington Monument. Shortly after I got my job here, I was sitting typing at my computer. I look over the top of the screen and much to my amazement, I saw a bald eagle flying around the Washington Monument. This is crazy. Even the birds know that this is the nation's capital. That's crazy. Did you work much with Mark Klingler, the artist on the thing, or did you just tell him what you wanted and he just went away and did the drawings?
Howard Youth:
We were in touch. He was in Pennsylvania. And I was, like I said, in various places. I was here, I was in Canada, I was in Ecuador. He would ask me for example, well, so I'll draw the yellow rump warbler and it'll look like this. And I said, oh, well, we need to make sure that we have it in, we don't have it in breeding plumage, because you will see it this time of year. But many, many of the months that we see them, they're more drab looking. So we had that kind of back and forth. I'd prefer if you could, if you make it that. So he would ask me about some details or some source photos if he had some questions about a regional difference. So it was a good communication. He's a very, very talented artist.
Kirk Johnson:
Yeah, no, I've worked with him in my interactions with Carnegie Museum. He's a great guy. Where are the oldest trees in Washington? Are they in Rock Creek Park?
Howard Youth:
In terms of the oldest natural growing trees, I think so. I think so. I pretty much think that the forest in Rock Creek Park is about as old as it gets in this area. Although yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Rock Creek Park.
Kirk Johnson:
I just moved a couple months ago to a house near Rock Creek Park. It's just an amazing thing. And it used to be the far Eastern park of town, never went there, but boy, it's a great facility and I really love the National Arboretum as well.
Howard Youth:
National Arboretum is amazing. I didn't get a chance, I don't know if I mentioned that when I said it, the seasonality. The four seasons, that is the prime example. You can go in all four seasons. Right now, the azalea show that's going on there is one of the best anywhere. The dogwoods. And I tried to poke around before this talk, there was a bloom calendar. I couldn't find it on their website. It's in the book, it's adapted in the book, but yeah, I could not find it on the website. But when you go to the Arboretum or if you ask, you inquire with the Arboretum, they'll hook you up with a one page calendar. You could spend the whole year exploring the National Arboretum and its natural forest there has a lot of birds. It's very, very birdy.
Kirk Johnson:
Excellent. I'm going to pivot and start taking some questions from the audience right now. The first one is, does the large volume of tourists in Washington, D.C., in normal years, not this year, have any impact on the wildlife population?
Howard Youth:
The tourists at the busiest season?
Kirk Johnson:
Yeah, in the summer, the place is just jammed with tourists. Do they impact the wildlife from your perspective?
Howard Youth:
Yeah. In my opinion, one of the effects, I'll say that very briefly. I think that it probably has affected, especially because I noticed in Rock Creek Park, I bird at Rock Creek Park a lot during the spring, a lot of people don't follow the leash laws and they let their dogs run through. And there's also a lot of mountain biking on some of the trails. And that has a huge impact on the habitat. The native plants, there's been a lot of incursion of invasive species just over the past few years, plus the over-browsing of the deer and grazing on, but mainly the browsment. The recruitment of native shrubs and young trees is being impacted, and heavy traffic on the trails, visually, the past two years, the places I've gone near the border with D.C. and Maryland, those trails have widened and there's grasses that have moved in.
And of course, the Japanese stilt grass that moves in both on the hooves of the deer and on people's shoes. So keeping to the trails was very hard also, especially when people were trying to keep away from each other. I know people were trying to keep safe distances, especially this whole past year with masks and everything. So I think it's had an impact on the habitat. In terms of having an impact on the wildlife in terms of disturbance, again, I think the habitat, in my opinion, the habitat degradation around the trails around the very heavily foot-trafficked areas, especially over this last year, has had to me a visible impact in some areas.
Kirk Johnson:
Do you expect the bird population to pick up just in response to the Brood X cicada thing that's going to kind of happen?
Howard Youth:
Recently, I just read an article today in the Maryland Breeding Bird Atlas newsletter that was written by a friend of mine, Gabriel, who's the head of the effort. And he looked into that. And cuckoos were notable, that yellow billed, and the few black billed don't really nest in this area. They're very close, they're spotty but very close. The cuckoos will be, according to his sources, beneficiaries, for sure. And they're also doing a citizen science effort where they want people to report which species of birds they see feeding on cicadas this spring so they can try to get an idea, because it does seem apparent that it will be a helpful thing to the birds, but particularly for cuckoos. It's not going to be all that they eat, but it's going to help.
Kirk Johnson:
Excellent. See, Grant would like to know what's your coolest wildlife sighting in the District?
Howard Youth:
Well, that golden-winged warbler from my office window at the zoo, that's got to be one of them. Golden-winged warblers are so scarce now. And I've seen very few in the D.C. area. And that's the only one I think I've seen in D.C.
Kirk Johnson:
I guess the panda doesn't count, huh?
Howard Youth:
Sorry?
Kirk Johnson:
I guess the panda doesn't count, huh?
Howard Youth:
No, it doesn't count. That was too easy.
Kirk Johnson:
What's the best place for a starting birder to go to watch birds in Washington, D.C., do you think?
Howard Youth:
One of the best places I would suggest is the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, because when you're starting out birding, like I said, the herons really lit my fire with birding. And you can see in the late summer especially when herons are dispersing, they pass through, the old aquatic gardens that are there alongside the Anacostia River, it's irresistible to small numbers of water birds. And there's a boardwalk there. Bald eagles often pass by, prothonotary warblers can be seen in spring. And there's open areas, orchard orioles, as well as wooded areas, amphibians and reptiles that you can see close up. It's like, it's very similar to a small Huntley Meadows. Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria is one of the better boardwalks going into a wetland in this area. And Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens has a really nice one.
Kirk Johnson:
I really love that. Those just huge fields of Nelumbos as well. Those incredible lotuses, because they get so gorgeous. Let's see. What would you say is the most surprising nature oriented thing you have discovered in D.C. area, like a real oddity or a major change in a habitat for a particular species?
Howard Youth:
I think, at least in the past it was the Hydrilla mats on the Potomac. Even though Hydrilla was an invasive, exotic aquatic plant, at least at the time when they were finding it out, they found out that water fowl were using it because there was no other submerged aquatic vegetation. And also I think perhaps at low tide, maybe even shore birds benefited because of insects attracted. That was one thing. There's a lot of benefits to the tree planting that's gone on in the city, like Casey Trees, the efforts of the city over the years. The forest cover of Washington, D.C. has been declining over the years, but Casey Trees, a nonprofit that works with the city, and the city and the federal parklands, they've really worked hard to try to counter things like the emerald ash border and the Dutch Elm disease that destroyed many of the stately elms to get Elms in that were hybrids or to treat the trees, so to keep Washington really kind of a city of trees.
So those efforts, I think, in a lot of places still need work, but in others there's been a lot of benefit. And so I would say that the embracing of using or keeping native trees in the city canopy has a huge impact on the insect populations, the beneficial insects, and the birds that eat the insects and the chipmunks that eat the insects part of the time and the acorns that are provided. In this city, you can find night herons that were nesting at the zoo and hopefully are starting to nest again, wood ducks that part of the year eat acorns and are on Rock Creek and nesting in the holes of these tall trees. These are right inside the city. It's fascinating. It's amazing.
Kirk Johnson:
Yeah. I just saw my first wood duck a couple of weeks ago. It was an amazing thing. Being from the west coast, I'd always seen pictures of these amazingly gorgeous kind of filigreed ducks, and boy, they're amazing.
Howard Youth:
Oh, they're gorgeous.
Kirk Johnson:
Pretty skittish I got to say. You need to put the real sneak on them to see them. Helen wants to know, so I often hear birds singing when I walk my dog in the morning. Would love to identify them on the basis of their song. Are there any apps that help you identify birds for their bird songs?
Howard Youth:
I think that Cornell Lab of Ornithology is working on a device that will do that. There's been some attempts to do that. I don't know of one that's really hit the nail on the head yet, but I think they're working on it and I think it will happen. Or it has happened to a certain degree. There was, for Bird Watcher's Digest just many years ago, I wrote a review of a very early device that would give you a couple of candidates. So there probably is something out there, I'm just not too well versed on the latest. But I know that the Lab of Ornithology is working on it.
Kirk Johnson:
Well, say our new deputy director here at the museum is going to be taking on the job as a director of the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell starting in July. So beginning of July it will be Ian Owens is the director. And he's from England, but an avid birder and avid data guy and the incredible work that the Lab of O has been doing with Merlin and eBird and that stuff, a real highlight in terms of citizen science and birds. Or dinosaurs as I like to call them. So let's see, here's a request for me to keep the DC Birds exhibit intact. And as you know, we've got the exhibits around the Barrett Auditorium. And I don't know when it was originally installed, but it's been around for a while. But it's one of the few systematic exhibits we still have in the museum. I have no intention of getting rid of it.
Howard Youth:
I'd like to raise my hand and say, please don't get rid of it. It's part of my childhood.
Kirk Johnson:
Excellent. Excellent. Let's see. Am I doing a major disservice to D.C. wildlife by planting tulips instead of native plants?
Howard Youth:
I would say tulips are not harmful as an invasive species. And I can't answer how attracted they are to pollinators versus other flowers. But I would say if you enjoy them and they're not, you can grow other native plants nearby, so they're not going to do any harm as far as I know.
Kirk Johnson:
I know. That's interesting. Have you interacted much with the new digital accessibility of the museum's collections, Howard?
Howard Youth:
No. No, I haven't.
Kirk Johnson:
You know, one of the things we've been doing is we've been digitally scanning the herbarium sheets. And we just recently crossed the 3 million mark for scanned herbarium sheets. So if you go onto our open source site at the Smithsonian, you can type in any genus of plant. It'll pull up the whole stack of herbarium sheets, which is a pretty cool asset for the museum to be putting on line now.
Howard Youth:
Wow, that's great.
Kirk Johnson:
We're looking forward to-
Howard Youth:
I'm sorry, Kirk. Somewhere along the line, I saw a chat message that flashed from a colleague of mine in American Bird Conservancy. And he said something about the isopod, but I think there's some, I'm sorry, Dan, I can't find it, but he said, he named it and I can't find it. But there's-
Kirk Johnson:
So you think there's actually an endemic isopod in Washington, D.C.?
Howard Youth:
I think so. One or two if I remember correctly.
Kirk Johnson:
Oh, that is impressive if that's the case.
Howard Youth:
Ah.
Kirk Johnson:
Have you spent much time on Plummers Island?
Howard Youth:
No. No. I recently read about it in the Washington Post.
Kirk Johnson:
Yeah. That's been the little enclave of biologists for almost 100 years. And that's allegedly one of the most studied pieces of natural wildlife anywhere in the world, because it's been infested by Washington, D.C., naturalists for over a century who've published on all sorts of different aspects of the island.
Howard Youth:
Yeah. It sounds like a great place. I continue, as I learn more plants, I continue to be surprised at how many of those native plants are ... When I first got into native plants and I was trying to buy some for my house about 20 years ago, I was shocked. And I thought, well, where are these native plants? And I'm still noticing them. As I go into Rock Creek Park, as you know, certain flowering plants that flower, they all of a sudden stand out in the forest. Eastern plum, hello, I'm here. Black-haw viburnum, hello there. It's this week. So I noticed the first time that my Black-haw viburnum is flowering and now I'm seeing them all over Rock Creek Park. So I'm still adjusting myself and saying, these native plants are around us. We just don't notice a lot of them. It's a lot to learn.
Kirk Johnson:
It's an amazing thing. I think if you walked exact same trails on a regular basis, that's one way to see the things come in, the timing and the phenology of the plants and the hybrid birds. So Howard, it's been really great chatting with you. This is the first time I've met you, but it was fun to write the forward for your book. And it's a great book for a great town. And I want to thank you for tonight's program. I will thank the audience for showing up. And normally we'd have a round of applause, but everybody's digital, so just imagine people clapping for you in the background. We do hope that everybody's going to join us for the City Nature Challenge.
Look out for an email for more information on that. And if you use iNaturalist app or don't, it's a great app. And there's also a new app called Seek, S-E-E-K, which is also a derivative of iNaturalist. And you can literally just take your iPhone and put it at something and you have a pretty good guess on what it is using artificial intelligence. A pretty cool tool. After this webinar ends, you'll see a survey pop up asking for some feedback on the program. Please take a moment to respond. We're always very interested in hearing what topics you might be interested in seeing for future programs. And thank you for coming this afternoon and thank you, Howard. And everybody have a wonderful evening. And it's my pleasure to sign off.
Howard Youth:
Have a good one.
Kirk Johnson:
Cheers.
