Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants

by Douglas W. Tallamy

It is hard to overemphasize the impact that the loss of American chestnuts has had on deciduous forest ecosystems. Castanea dentata was the primary nut producer of eastern forests, dwarfing the contributions of oaks, beeches, and hickories as wildlife food sources. Squirrels, chipmunks, deer, elk, black bears, turkeys, passenger pigeons, doves, blue jays, and mice were just some of the animals that depended on copious quantities of chestnuts to make it through long winters. Equally important but more poorly documented was the role American chestnuts played in producing insects that supported huge populations of songbirds. Castanea dentata is a member of the plant family Fagaceae, which supports hundreds of species of caterpillars and other insects eaten by birds. The niche vacated by chestnut trees was slowly filled with other tree species (Cech 1986), and our forests appear today as though nothing had happened—unless you compare the density of wildlife that forests support today with what they used to support. Such a study is now impossible, not only because the chestnut is gone—along with an unknowable number of insect specialists that ate only the chestnut—but also because our forests are now so fragmented. Nevertheless, because none of the species that replaced the chestnut is as productive as the chestnut (Diamond et al. 2000), I predict that such a comparison would show smaller populations of both birds and mammals in today’s eastern forests. For example, tulip tree ...