Now this is a fascinating read and touches on a problem we wrestle with on Dogskull Patch. The invasive and thirsty tamarisk trees get introduced to an area and crowd out native trees, which means less native bugs, which means less food for hungry birds. But! https://twitter.com/nature_brains/status/1357747583083565058

There are still a few generalist bugs, and so you get a major population decline in nesting birds, crashing down to the population that can be supported by the generalist bugs. Which is so small that it becomes susceptible to all kinds of further stresses—climate, cats, etc.

This is obviously non-optimal. You have to take out the tamarisks if you want to put native plants back, which is a massive effort! But then you have almost no trees at all, and no trees means no birds. So now you’ve apparently made the problem even worse!

And here is where stuff runs into trouble. People see a forest with birds, and go “that must be wild and healthy!” even when it’s actually an extremely impoverished ecosystem made of invasives and a few birds that can eke out a living.

And then you cut down all the invasives and there’s nothing left and of course it looks like you’re a Lorax-kicking monster afterward.

And that is why, before you take out huge chunks of even really craptacular mess, you wanna have SOME kind of plan to replace things with native trees, grasses, shrubs, whatever. The birds need someplace to live and it makes the whole thing rather more palatable for observers.

For example, there is a massive thicket of multiflora rose on Dogskull. Multiflora is a Bad Plant. Imagine the brambles that took over Sleeping Beauty’s castle. You need chainmail to clear that shit. Or goats. Fortunately Shep has goats!

But.

While it’s a noxious weed and we are honorbound to kill it it, it’s also absolutely full of birds. So @NeolithicSheep and I have been staring at the damn thing going “We really gotta have alternate habitat in place before we take it out.”

Great question! Depends entirely on how degraded the landscape is. Your invasives will establish fast and furious, of course, but natives really depends on what’s in the seed bank.
https://twitter.com/generalbullet/status/1357755275231563776?s=21 https://twitter.com/generalbullet/status/1357755275231563776

For example, on Dogskull, we took out a bunch of pine and invasive Chinese privet. Great! What is currently in the seed bank is more pine, oak, invasive privet, sweetgum, tulip poplar and maple. What we want are hardwoods like the oak. All fine and good, so far as it goes.

But Dogskull has, say, very few shrubs. (We love shrubs, shrubs are awesome.) But it’s simply been too long since there were any there. The seed bank is empty. We’d be relying on birds and squirrels to bring in native shrub seeds.

But where are those seeds gonna come from? Where’s the nearest stand of honeycup or arrowwood viburnum or oak leaf hydrangea or native azalea?

In this case, I can actually tell you—it’s a couple miles down the road at my house. Well outside the range of any squirrel.

Now, stuff does surprise the hell out of me. Clearing out those trees meant that suddenly we had a native orchid popping up, and where the hell did they come from? But in general, the more degraded the landscape, the more work humans have to put in to get it back into shape.

You can’t always just clear out the invasives and walk away. So in the desert, they’re planting native mesquites and here in the swamp, I wander around shoving cuttings of sweetshrub into the ground and Shep plants pawpaw and whatnot.

The goal is an abundant ecosystem, not an impoverished one. But there’s a lot of steps along the way.

Yes! Seeds are kinda like Cthulhu. They lie dreaming in the soil until the stars are right. We refer to all the seeds lying dormant in the dirt as the “seed bank.” Some seeds only stay viable for a year or two, but some last decades.

https://twitter.com/laencleardale/status/1357779835725217792?s=21 https://twitter.com/laencleardale/status/1357779835725217792

Unfortunately this means that many weed seeds are in the seed bank too, so with some invasives, it’s not enough to take out the grown plant, you get to fight the seed bank for awhile too.