Nature in Your Neighborhood with Marni Fylling

Note: This episode was transcribed by AI and was not thoroughly checked by a human. Please forgive any mistakes or wonkiness. 

Marni Fylling  0:00  
I just want to capture that beauty on and know more about it like you could get lost looking into the center of one Daisy and get lost in there you just look deeper and deeper and deeper and there's always more there and it's beautiful.

Michelle Fullner  0:12  
Hello, and welcome to Golden State naturalist, a podcast for anyone who's ever been enchanted to find a ladybug making its way across a rosebud. I'm Michelle Fullner. And today we're talking with Marni filling, whose voice you just heard about the species that are likely right outside your door whether you live in a suburb down a rural road or in a bustling city center, because today we're talking about American marsupial's the tiny oceans inside of Roly polies. What happened to earthworms during the last ice age, pocket terrarium, the Venn diagram between weeds and invasive plants, and how to welcome entire food webs right in among us as our neighbors. And if you like learning about the natural world, especially in California, make sure you're following the show wherever you listen, because there are so many new episodes coming up soon recorded all across the state all with delightful and engaging guests. So hit the Follow button on Spotify or the little plus sign in the top right corner of the screen in Apple podcasts and make sure you won't miss an episode. I also want to thank everyone who's supporting the show on Patreon for as little as $4 a month you make this podcast possible and with more people joining all the time, you are absolutely validating the decision to quit my job and pursue this dream full time. I'm super grateful for every single person in the Patreon community. And as a thank you there's even a new patrons only book club where we vote on and read interesting ecological books and then discuss them every month. If you'd like to join the book club or just support the show, you can find me on Patreon at patreon.com/michelle Fullner. That's Michelle with two L's and Fullner is fu ll en er if you want to keep up with me online you can see pictures and videos from my various nature adventures by looking me up at Golden State naturalist on both Instagram and Tiktok. There's also a Golden State Naturalist Facebook page and you can check out my website at Golden State naturalist.com Which is where you can find merch and get cozy with a golden state naturalist sweatshirt or mug just in time for colder weather. But now let's get to the episode Marni filling earned her bachelor's degree in zoology with a minor in English literature from UC Davis and a Master's certificate in natural science illustration from UC Santa Cruz. Since then, she's done everything from teaching college level biology labs to creating award winning seasonal window displays out of recycled packing materials and an independent bookstore to writing and illustrating for books including her guide to Pacific Coast tide pools, and of course, a beautiful guide to nature in your neighborhood. So without further ado, let's hear from Marnie filling on Golden State naturalist.

I met up with Marnie at her house in Sacramento back in the end of May.

Marni Fylling  3:19  
This is I can't believe it's not hot, I thought I don't know two o'clock and looking

Michelle Fullner  3:24  
down the street, I could see an assortment of mostly single storey 1940s or 50s era homes with carefully edged grass lawns. The bushes under the windows cut into neat rectangles and an occasional geranium rosebush, or citrus tree dotting the landscape. This neighborhood reminded me a lot of the one where I grew up in Napa, and many others I've driven through around the state except with more palm trees than sycamores along the road, Marnie and I got miked up and stepped out the front door

Marni Fylling  3:54  
really two steps out and there are all these shiny egg shimmery slug trails. Right and

Michelle Fullner  4:01  
right in the midst of the many species I've come to expect in human dominated spaces. There was something surprising if I had seen it on my own, I wouldn't have known what I was looking at one of my favorite things that's one may have just walked right past it because it was only a few inches across and really looked like a few small green leaves lying down stuck into the dirt almost mixed up with the dirt. But what was this thing, not an actual

Marni Fylling  4:28  
plant that doesn't have roots and stems and leaves. It's more closely related to like mosses or not kind of grade of plant that needs to be somewhere damp, which is not Sacramento. And certainly not the last few years though this year. It definitely was. So apparently there were some parts that were resistant enough to survive there, but it's a liver wart. It's one of my favorite things from doing botany. It's a little very low growing plant. It's called a phalloides one because it has a bog It has like wide parts that are close to the ground. And it doesn't have these parts now, but I'll send you a picture there two reproductive phases, and the one that's asexual that makes spores it makes like little it's called Luna. Malaria is the genus name. So loon like the moon, it makes little kind of Crescent Moon little cups. And then there are almost little like green eggs in there that are the little they're called gemmy that grow into the next life stage, which produces sperm and eggs. And then the union of that grows into this. So it's a alternation of generations. But why

Michelle Fullner  5:40  
does it grow so close to the dirt, it has to be in contact

Marni Fylling  5:43  
because it doesn't have roots. So it can't, it can't pull water out of the soil, it has to actually make contact with the soil to get the water from it. And it doesn't have any of the tough plant things that all these like this lavender can live in pretty dry habitats, but not the liverworts.

Michelle Fullner  6:02  
Like one of the first experiments in plants coming on land,

Marni Fylling  6:05  
sort of a thing. Yeah, first tries. So that means it's super ancient. Yes, they've been around for a long time, like losses.

Michelle Fullner  6:15  
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest known liverwort fossils were discovered in Argentina in rocks data to be between 473,000,470 1 million years old. So these guys have been doing their thing for a long time. Humans as a species are only about 300,000 years old, which is a lot less years old. We're sort of the babies on the scene. Evolutionarily speaking, yet humans have had profound impacts on our environment, both positive and negative. And one of the places we can see that most clearly is in our neighborhoods. So this episode is an invitation to slow down and look more closely at the organisms that are your neighbors to lean into your curiosity and find out more about them so that you can deepen your relationship with the police where you live, learning what a species is something of its history, whether its native, introduced or invasive, how much wildlife it supports, and how it fits into the broader ecosystem are all things that add so much context to a simple walk around the block and allow each of us to make more informed choices about which species we welcome into our yards. We get into all of that on a walk through Marty's neighborhood with a stop in Sacramento's largest urban park after a quick break.

Today on Golden State naturalist, we're talking about the nature in our neighborhoods with Marnie filling as Marnie and I started our walk down her Street, we noticed a bunch of dead leafless vines wrapped around the upper half of the palm tree like roots

Marni Fylling  8:23  
of some English. I was gonna ask if that was an English IV, and you can tell because you can see where the old roots were. And that's how they attach. They have like special blues and roots that they send out from the stems, whereas a Boston IV has those little they have little suckers. Okay,

Michelle Fullner  8:42  
let's talk about English IV for a second. I just looked it up on the California invasive plant Council website or cow IPC. And the IPC gives each invasive plant one of five invasiveness ratings, starting with watch at the very bottom up through alert, limited, moderate, and high all the way at the top. Any guesses which reading English IV earned? I'll give you a hint. It's not any of the bottom four. This one's really highly invasive. And if you're like, hang on, what exactly is an invasive plant? Isn't it all just part of nature? Honestly, I should do an entire episode on invasive plants. But basically, they're plants that come from somewhere else. Notice that they don't have any natural pests or diseases in their new home and get a little carried away spreading across the landscape and they can create a monoculture by keeping other plants from being able to grow while they themselves spread, which by definition decreases biodiversity and harms entire food webs. Here's cow IPCs definition of highly invasive plants such as English ivy from their website. It says these species have severe ecological impacts on physical processes, plant and animal communities and vegetation. Instructure their reproductive biology and other attributes are conducive to moderate to high rates of dispersal and establishment. Most are widely distributed ecologically. But what if I really like English IV and I would like to just plant it just in my yard, because I know I'll keep it contained. I wish it were that easy. Unfortunately, invasive plants are really, really good at spreading even when we don't want them to many send out underground rhizomes. Others have seeds that drift on the wind or get stuck in fur, and some have fruits or seeds that are appealing to birds, which then disperse them far and wide. I was driving to Auburn in the Sierra foothills the other day to go hiking with my family and I noticed some English ivy that had escaped from someone's yard, taking over an entire section of forest along east bound IED. And in that whole area, the understory had been smothered the only plant living there was the English IV, which was starting to make its way up the trees, which it may also eventually strangle. This plant is still for sale in California. Unfortunately, there are like four varieties of it for sale at my local Home Depot right now. So please just do not buy and if you're looking for an alternative ground cover, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife suggests the native alum route, which is beautiful lakes a lot of the same types of places is English ivy is super low maintenance and won't escape and kill a forest.

Marni Fylling  11:24  
I have yet to identify some of the trees still working on it. There are so many are so many different kinds of in Sacramento is the city attorney's.

Michelle Fullner  11:34  
Marni has lived in New York for the past 20 years and just recently returned to her home city. So she hadn't heard that the city's nickname was changed from the city of trees to America's Farm to Fork capital, which has caused quite a kerfuffle locally. But before all that happened, there's the history of how Sacramento became the city of trees, settlers

Marni Fylling  11:54  
started coming here and they were just like, it's too hot. So they started planting trees and the wives of the magnates had their little projects and we got some pretty amazing trees between Capitol Park and Lampard are mocking you too now.

Michelle Fullner  12:12  
Oh, there is so much here. First of all, Sacramento has a lot of nicknames. It's been called Cap City because of course, it's the capital city of California River City because it's located at the confluence of the American in Sacramento rivers, and then the more casual sack and sactown but the two nicknames causing the stir are city of trees and Farm to Fork capital. This is because the water tower located beside southbound I five of few miles south of downtown for years bore the words Welcome to Sacramento City of trees. But then in March of 2017, it was repainted with the words Welcome to Sacramento, America's Farm to Fork capital. A lot of people were not fans of this change. I went down some rabbit holes on Reddit and found a lot of vibrant self expression happening over there. But I think that the redditor Sacramento historian summed it up best by simply commenting for that. But why were people mad Farm to Fork is good, right? I mean, Sacramento is known for ag and it's a positive thing to source food locally and lower the carbon emissions from transporting food long distances. Plus city of trees isn't exactly a unique nickname. the Wikipedia page for city of trees lists 14 cities currently nicknamed city of trees, six of which are located in California. Those are Burlingame, Chico, Claremont, South Pasadena, Tustin, and woodland, which is right down the road from Sacramento, in two cities, formerly nicknamed city of trees, one of which is Sacramento. And all of this is true, but man do people love trees in Sacramento really does have a lot of trees. According to sactown Magazine, which admittedly might be biased. A project called tree pedia out of MIT has been measuring tree coverage in cities using Street View on Google Maps. And they found that quote, among the 15 cities we analyzed, Sacramento is the greenest city in the States. And the article goes on to say that globally, we ranked third after Vancouver and Singapore and trees do all kinds of wonderful things in cities. Yale climate connections.org has a whole article on this, which I'll link in the show notes, but a few of the noteworthy contributions of urban forests are that urban forests alone offset the climate pollution from nearly 10 million cars. And the article goes on to say that the cooling provided by urban forests can increase resilience to worsening heat waves. Access to trees can also help reduce individual stress, improve mental health, strengthen immune systems, reduce crime and improve student academic performance, among other benefits. Unfortunately, not everyone has equal access to well canopied city streets and canopy cover is disproportionately low in poorer communities and black and brown communities than in affluent and white communities. locally. The Sacramento tree foundation is working hard to address this disparity and regularly plants trees in less canopy neighborhoods and parks and has partnered with our local media reusable Utilities District to give every SMUD customer up to 10 Free shade trees, whether they rent or own their property. So check that out if you live in Sacramento. There are also similar projects and other parts of the state such as city plants in Los Angeles. So definitely check to see if there's anything near you. Okay, but another reason so many Sacramento uns want the nickname to stay city of trees. It's a long standing tradition, at least when compared with a Farm to Fork title. It's been called city of trees since 1855. Meaning that people who grew up here or have had family here for several generations have known it that whole time as the city of trees. Okay, but this goes even deeper, because before it was the city of trees, it was the city of Plains, which is very different from a place with trees. I found a cap radio article about this and they interviewed a local Research Ecologist Paula pepper who said that a miner stuck 12 cottonwood trees in the ground outside of his tent, and that was the first planting in Sacramento. She also noted that eucalyptus trees imported from Australia and now known to be invasive in California, by the way, were soon to follow because they sucked up water from swampy areas. And as Marnie pointed out, a lot of wealthy women took up the cause and influence the planting of more trees around the city. So how about you? Are you Team farm to fork or team city of trees? Personally, I gotta go with city of trees, but like Let's plant as many native trees as possible. Now back to my walk with Marnie in the most canopy that part of Sacramento land Park. As we left the neighborhood and entered the park, we noticed a bunch of little daisies growing in the grass. Daisies just like the ones Marnie remembers growing outside her kindergarten when she was a kid,

Marni Fylling  16:38  
we would sit out there and make the daisy chains and make crowns and necklaces and bracelets and all that, like it was just so prosaic. That's one of the things that I think is good for people to do to try when they're starting to naturalize for the first time is to use your camera as a magnifying glass, because that's a great point like dandelions, and Cosmos. And so many, so many flowers, daisies have are made up of hundreds of flowers, the

Michelle Fullner  17:11  
tool you have on you is the best tool. So I try but Marnie suggested with the Daisy and took a close up photo, you take a minute to then zoom in and look at it, you can see the different colors, like you think of it as just white and yellow. Within you're like, oh, there's this like, creamy, and there's

Speaker 3  17:26  
this greenish in this. There's all these colors within the Daisy, and

Marni Fylling  17:31  
different phases of flower development, right. And so each, each of the petals is a flower that is specialized to attract pollinators. And then each of the bumps in the middle of those yellow bumps is a flower. And you can see that when you zoom way in like that, you can see that it has little petals and has little little reproductive parts. But that's one of my favorite things to do. Like you can I've taken pictures of you know, if there's a insect that's being still and crawling around, you can zoom way in, and I've gotten amazing pictures with my cell phone. I don't have internet out here, so I can't find it. But you can really look and see all those close things. You know, most insects have little tiny, simple eyes in the middle of their forehead. And you can zoom right into that and see it What's your phone

Michelle Fullner  18:18  
that's so cool and caring, and you have it all the time. So you don't need a special toolkit. Right? So cool. Are there other tools that you recommend for people? Or would you say just go minimalist,

Marni Fylling  18:29  
I would start without the phone. Unless you really need that to get you interested? I think the easiest thing to do is just to walk around and just look, just observe and see what you can find. And the funnest thing for me is watching life cycles. If you look on my Instagram or anything

Michelle Fullner  18:48  
more nice Instagram is at Marni filling, that's m ARNIFYL L I N G

Marni Fylling  18:56  
I'm always doing like the development of the flowers or the development of the fruits from the flowers or that kind of stuff, because it's fascinating to see the changes or how the leaves unfurl. And so just look at everything and come back and look tomorrow and look the next day and just keep coming out and looking and see how it changes and what happens because you might be surprised I one of my locks, I was just taking pictures of buds. It was the middle of winter I was taking pictures of all the buds I could find anywhere. And one of them just looked so messy and funky. The picture looked terrible. And I thought oh, I should delete this one but I didn't and I was really glad because as it grew over the next like couple of weeks, they turned into those little some Aras of maple trees. Oh, they just they started out as this funky flower stuff. And then as it got bigger, the stem started growing out and the seeds start growing out and then you had these droopy little seeds on the ends of the stems and it was like magic. I hadn't No idea. That's how they started. And most trees have, while flowering trees anyway have flowers. And sometimes they're not super showy because most of them are wind pollinated, but they still have flowers. And you can find the different male and female parts. And it's very, very cool to watch him develop. And

Michelle Fullner  20:19  
that's one of the cool things about checking out what's growing in your neighborhood, too, is that you can get that right relationship over time, right? Because I feel like when I look at the development of a plant, right, and I'm like, Oh, this year, I noticed, you know, these little buds, the buds on my poppies, right, and they've got that little hat for a second, right? Like, it's like it hasn't popped off yet. And the flower hasn't quite opened up. And, and looking at it again, the next year can kind of transport me back to the moment last year. And I can I can, yeah, I can travel through time to like the first time I saw that or noticed it. It's almost like a painting or a drawing that you return to every year and you add like another layer, you're deepening that relationship and you're going back and you can go deeper when you're in one place over time. Right.

Marni Fylling  21:03  
And the poppy is a great example because it does have that little cap you just want to watch the petals unfurl, and then you watch that capsule just a harrowing girl and girl until it gets like that long. And then if you let it dry out and watch it explode, and those seeds go everywhere, everywhere.

Michelle Fullner  21:20  
We moved on from the patch of daisies and continued our walk to the park. Marnie pointed out so much as we went like dandelion

Marni Fylling  21:27  
also like daisies, they're made up of multiple flowers, but they're all the right flower

Michelle Fullner  21:32  
and a nettles woodpecker, I've

Marni Fylling  21:33  
seen a few just in my neighborhood, woodpeckers. I love it. That's crazy. They're just they mean,

Michelle Fullner  21:39  
we stopped for a while to look closely at Timber clover. This is

Marni Fylling  21:42  
also really cool to look at magnified, because it's like a spiral. Yeah, I wonder if I have my loop. What's really cool is that I just use my phone for all that stuff now have a loop that broke

Michelle Fullner  21:53  
over our a Mediterranean plant and the California invasive plant Council lists them in the limited category of invasiveness. So not great, but also not wrecking habitat as thoroughly as English ivy. And if you find yourself pulling them out in your yard, take a good look at them, especially with a loop magnifier or using the zoom on your phone because they're really cool looking close up. Oh my goodness, there's like several layers. They remind me of sea anemones, or sea urchins or sea urchins. Yeah, even more so.

Marni Fylling  22:24  
And it's fun to again to watch these overtime too, because you see the little yellow flowers first. And then you come a couple of weeks later, and the fruits are starting to develop and then you come later and they're getting bigger and more mature. And then they're gonna be prickly. And now we have full of seeds.

Unknown Speaker  22:38  
They start out so delightful. They will you

Michelle Fullner  22:41  
the next creature we found was one that was especially important to Marnie and her budding connection to the natural world when she was a little friend.

Marni Fylling  22:52  
That's a good cat.

Michelle Fullner  22:54  
It was a little ladybug larvae, which doesn't look anything like an adult Ladybug. And you wouldn't think that it was a ladybug unless you knew that you were looking at one because they don't have the characteristic red outershell with the black dots. Instead, they're sort of elongated black spiky little bugs with some orange or reddish orange markings. So

Marni Fylling  23:12  
eggs will be laid on leaves around bark. Anywhere that might have aphids, or something that they can eat that would be nearby. But I used to have all these little insects as pets when I was a kid. And so I got to see all their life cycles. I used to have ladybugs and you'd see amazing and you see the eggs and then you'd see the larvae that really look like little alligators almost and they're super voracious. Are they Yeah.

Michelle Fullner  23:40  
Did they eat aphids to like the adults?

Marni Fylling  23:43  
And they'll eat each other if they're smart enough aphids for them. So you had to make sure if you had the babies that you had to feed them well or they would just Monge on each other.

Michelle Fullner  23:52  
Did you go find aphids for them?

Marni Fylling  23:54  
I did. We had rose bushes that had lots of aphids on him. So just cut off a little rose bud which nobody my family cared too much about that so it was fine. And I would even I'd bring my favorites to school with me in a tic tac container. A little I'd have a little cut off a little rose bud with aphids on it and put like my favorite lady bugs in it and stick it in my little shirt pocket and bring them to school with me.

Michelle Fullner  24:16  
Oh, that's fantastic. You had a little traveling terrarium. Yeah,

Marni Fylling  24:20  
I brought my pet mouse to school in my pocket sometimes too. I was a weirdo. I've always been a little a little odd like that, but in a good way. These are things that it is funny that they eat the same thing as the adults because a lot of insects that go through a complete metamorphosis like that though, larvae eat something different and it's part of the insect strategy is that the larvae just eat, eat, eat or like little stomachs have legs and they just eat like crazy and then the adults usually eat something different or maybe they don't eat at all. Adults can focus on attracting a mate and reproducing they don't have to waste their time. showering as much as the babies do. One

Michelle Fullner  25:03  
of the things Marnie and I didn't talk about on our outing was lawns. I think this might be because lawns aren't exactly known for being a wellspring of biodiversity, so they didn't offer a lot for us to observe while getting closer to the neighborhood nature, except for the weeds growing amidst the grass. I also think that lawns can become almost invisible to us because they're so ubiquitous, but I wanted to make sure to discuss them in this episode, because they're one of the most common green things in so many of our neighborhoods. They're so common, in fact that a 2005 study by NASA estimated that more surface area is devoted to lawns than to any other single irrigated crop in the country. That's including corn long takes up roughly three times the amount of space as irrigated corn in this country. And unfortunately, lungs don't offer a whole lot of ecological benefit in the way of pollen or nectar for pollinators, fruit or nuts for birds or mammals, or appealing leaves for caterpillars to eat, which would in turn feed birds. And I've heard people defend Lawns by pointing out how much carbon they sequester, and they do sequester carbon. The problem is that as Harold Mooney and Erica Zavaleta put in their book ecosystems of California, the benefits of lawn soil carbon sequestration for mitigating global warming are offset by greenhouse gas emissions for lawn maintenance and fertilization. There are also myriad other problems with lawns like using all that drinking water we use to irrigate them with and the subsequent runoff from fertilizers and pesticides ending up in our waterways. The point is, well, small areas of lawn can have a lot of utility around our homes, most of us don't need as much as we have, there's a good chance you already know this. And maybe you want to do something about it. But it can be costly, time consuming, and overwhelming to think about removing a lawn and replacing it with something else. So if it's not feasible for you to remove your whole lawn right now, just remember that progress can come in small steps. Even just stopping using pesticides and fertilizers makes a difference. I'm currently doing that and also replacing bushes with native shrubs, and reducing my lawn by adding a native plant border. I want to do more in the future. But that's what I can do right now. And I've already seen bunches of native bees on some of the native wildflowers that I grew by doing little more than throwing seeds on a bare piece of ground. Check out the growing native plants from seeds episode for more on that process. So do what you can when you can incorporate native plants remove invasives and you're making a big difference. I'll also list some more resources that will be helpful wherever you are on this journey. At the end of the episode, you got this. At this point, Marnie, and I found a place to sit in the grass in the shade of a mighty sycamore tree. And the first thing I wanted to know was more about Marty's journey to becoming a scientist and science illustrator wondering like, I know, you grew up in Sacramento, and you mentioned in the introduction to nature in your neighborhood, how you had these early experiences where you weren't going to national parks to experience nature, right? So like, can you maybe just share a few of those formative experiences where you're experiencing nature right in your own neighborhood or backyard? Yeah,

Marni Fylling  28:03  
I mean, I don't know where it came from, because neither my parents is a very outdoorsy person. And there wasn't we didn't have screens. So that was a good thing. Because there wasn't that distraction. We had the old TVs that got you know, like three stations and we had a little backyard and a little front yard and we would make mud and we would you know, sit in the mud and make mud pies and do all that stuff and bake them on the white fence, which I'm sure my parents really loved. And there were so many things that were just right there in the backyard. A lot of them were weeds, but some of them were and they were pillbugs and ladybugs and we had tomato plants for a while. So we had pet tomato hornworms which are this horrible past like as an adult you just want to kill them but as kids it was just like cool. And we had them as pets and we had I did all of them as pets. So I've made little homes we had moss and make little get a little jar my Easter basket and put little moss in there and maybe put a bottle cap with water and pick some violets or something and have those in there make this pretty little home for the insects, the ladybugs, I knew a aphids, so I would cut off a rosebud for them and plop that in there. But the other thing is I didn't really know what they ate. So I just put things in there and my sister actually with a tomato hornworms we made this beautiful home for them. My sister who was younger than me three years younger put her tomato worm into a U band coffee jar stuffed with leaves. And my friend and I who made the moss lines, lovely homes. Our tomato worm started shrinking. And we thought oh, they're turning into pupus and we were so excited but now as an adult I know they were starved. Oh no, which is so horrific, but we didn't know. You know, and my sister's in this jar of leaves. You know she just took a bunch of leaves like this and just stuffed it full hers turned into this beautiful pupa Wow. And she had out and under her bed. And every month or so we'd pull it out and take it out. And it was still like zooming around in there. And I asked her a couple years ago before while I was writing this book, I said, Whatever happened to that big pupa, she was like, I don't know. And I did a little sketchbook drawing of the lady bugs in the tic tac container and the pill bugs and the My Favorite pill bugs, there were some that were orange. And there were some that were purple, but not very often. So they were really special. And I found out also as an adult that the purple anyway is a virus that causes them to turn purple. And to purple, you're actually looking at the virus like, wow, those are the virus particles that are purple, and it makes them not seek out places to hide as much I guess, so that they infect others. Like I don't know what the story isn't that I haven't heard of that. But it just was interesting, they find out that my special special little pillbugs actually had a virus. And they are pillbugs are like one of the few crustaceans, that is terrestrial. You have all these crustaceans with a group of arthropods with insects and all those and the crustaceans are the lobsters and the shrimp and the barnacles and all those guys that are mostly aquatic and mostly ocean, although not all because you have crawdads and stuff like that, that live in freshwater. But the pillbugs are one of the few crustaceans that are adapted to life on land. Except they do need to be in damp places. They have the hard shell that helps keep them dry, and then even their eggs, they hold their eggs and a little marsupium that's filled with fluid. So it's almost like they have a little ocean in their body to raise their eggs and until they hatch, and then they stay in there for a little bit until they're ready to come out. Wow, that's cool stuff. That's just your pillbugs in your yard, right?

Michelle Fullner  31:49  
And that's the thing. Everyone knows this little crustacean. Right, right,

Marni Fylling  31:54  
but everybody has a different word for it. So that's the other thing like I knew, my dad called them potato bugs, and we call them pill bugs and Sal bugs, and people call them Roly polies. And then you get into the British names. Like chunky pigs. She's long, just some really great names.

Michelle Fullner  32:16  
Yeah, that's what I love about common names. They're so confusing, right? Like, I understand people's criticisms of common names, but I delight in the different common names that they that exist around these different species. They're fantastic. Because that just sounds extremely British.

Marni Fylling  32:29  
It is log Yeah, chunky pig.

Michelle Fullner  32:33  
What, American, whatever. Oh, good. I'm curious to hear your take on what is the difference or your take? Or what is the definition? What's the difference between a weed and an invasive plant?

Marni Fylling  32:45  
Well, I mean, a weed technically is just something that's growing where you don't want it. So you could have a rose plant that was growing right here. And if you didn't want it here, it's a weed, technically, and some people's weeds are other people's favorite plants, you know, so there's some weed doesn't really mean anything, it just means where the thing is growing something invasive, is a plant that's taking over a habitat.

Michelle Fullner  33:10  
So we talked a little bit about invasive plants earlier with English ivy, but it's interesting to also compare them with weeds, because to call something a weed is more subjective and open to interpretation based on what people want or don't want growing around them. But the things that are invasive, are invasive, independent of what people think of them because of their observable ecological impacts. So

Marni Fylling  33:32  
when you introduce something that from another place that you know, I've hear if I forget what the stats are, but if you introduce a non native species, there's only like five or 10% of them that will live in the new habitat. And then some percentage of those will be invasive, where they will actually, you know, they don't have any thing that eats them there. They don't have predators, they go crazy. And they take over habitat so that other things can grow there. And that's, that's, I think, the main difference.

Michelle Fullner  34:03  
So it's possible to have something growing that's a weed that's not invasive, like I was at hedgerow farms this spring, which grows exclusively California native plants for seed, and there were lupins growing in a field of California gold fields and hedgerows, had to pull out the Lupin even though they're native plants, because they can't let the seeds get mixed up when they harvest that field. Don't worry, though, there was an entire field of lupins nearby to sow the lupins in the wrong field where weeds but then you can also have invasive plants that are technically not weeds, because people sometimes intentionally plant invasives and want them growing where they planted them. For instance, I grew up in Napa, where invasive mustard is an almost ubiquitous cover crop visible in early spring between the rows of vines so technically both invasive and not a weed. This got me curious about whether there are any native plants that can be used as cover crops. Cal scape lists four species including California poppies, Pacific pea, American vetch and cows clover, I don't know if these would work in vineyards or not, but it would be awesome to see more native or at least non invasive plants used as cover crops so they can help meet farmers needs and ecosystem needs at the same time. And speaking of needs, both humans and wildlife have a lot of them. And sometimes people and animals both get legitimate use and enjoyment out of plants that may not be best for the overall health of an ecosystem. So what should we do if there are plants like this in our yards?

Marni Fylling  35:25  
I think that the natives need to replace something else, not just rip out indiscriminately rip out stuff that you don't like and not replace it. Like one of my friends was saying, oh, yeah, I have neighbors that tore out some trees in their yards because they weren't native trees. And she's like, are you going to put something else there to be like, nesting for birds on? You know, so it's a very mixed bag at this point. I mean, I think there's some kind of way to gradually transition, which it seems like we're kind of moving towards. So I hope that's true. It

Michelle Fullner  35:55  
seems like there's some really good movements now. And there's so much more information and awareness about what you can plant that's going to be the most beneficial to wildlife in your neighborhood. So hopefully that right, John, you know, replace it with something, I think that's a really great point, instead of just like, right, don't just rip it out, you're gonna have a plan, right? Right, instead of just like putting gravel or concrete or something that is not going to create a food source. But one of the things I love the most in nature in your neighborhood, and surprised me the most with was learning about worms. And I'm wondering if you can just give us a little recap of the natural history of worms here, especially I don't know if it's California specific, or what kind of region? I don't think

Marni Fylling  36:36  
it is specific to here, but I don't know exactly. And it was really hard to find that. That was it's one of the things that's wonderful and terrible about the internet is there's just too much information. So when you're trying to research something like this, there's so much information that you find a lot of stuff, you know, is wrong, and you find a lot of stuff. It's like is this right? And so you have to keep looking and try to vet sort of the reliability of the source where it's coming from or talk to actual people who know what they're talking about. And one of the things that I did find, but again, I don't know, I think it's more Norse, northern North America than here. But that during the Ice Age, the glaciers actually literally scraped the topsoil away with all the native farms. And so those northern forests don't have native earthworms. And they have evolved without earthworms. And so if you go turn up the soil now, they don't like it, because they want it stable. And everybody thinks, you know, oh, yeah, plant, get those earthworms. They make the soil good, and it's good for your garden. But it's not good for the forest, which is trippy. And apparently, there are only a couple of native California earthworms that are left so I guess we must have been affected by that to some degree, but I don't know my geology and all that deep time. Right? Yeah. That's it's like millions of dollars or or it's like astronomic time like it just have no concept of it. It's just too much.

Michelle Fullner  38:08  
I don't I don't think my brain can't process. Yeah, I love the earthworm thing because I kind of envision going into a forest right? And if you were to like, dig down in this very earthy way, right, like with your hands into the soil, you imagine like these handfuls of like black earth with earthworms growing through them. And it's probably just really not true. Especially the northern forests. Yeah,

Marni Fylling  38:33  
I was surprised about that, too. What

Michelle Fullner  38:35  
is an organism that people think that they know well, but maybe that they have something totally wrong, or just don't know it very well at all, either a myth or misconception or something that we just really don't know as well as we think we do. By proximity. That

Marni Fylling  38:49  
was partly what I wanted the book to be. Because we all grew up with these things. Like I said, it was the opposite of my tide pool book, or introducing them to just all these new things. And this is like taking all these things that we think we know about. And there's some things where the science has actually changed since I learned it in college and some things that we just had wrong all this time. And one of them that made the impression on me was another earthworm thing, which is that, you know, the earthworms crawl out, you know, we'd go to play tennis in gym and there'll be earthworms all over the tennis courts. And I'd my friend and I would run around and swim in the lawn. And what the thinking was that time was that they were drowning with rain and they were drowning. And so they came up out of their burrows so that they wouldn't drown. And apparently they can live for a very long time submerged in water and so it's still not completely certain some people say that oh, the patter of the rain is similar to a mole digging and so they're trying to get away from the mall. Oh, which might be a component. But the other thing is that since they have that release Then skin and they can dry out really easily. And they will suffocate if their skin dries out, because then they can't get oxygen across their moist skin, they'll travel at night when it's Misty or when it's rainy, because they can travel during that time because things are wet and they won't dry out. And so they will maybe if it's raining, they'll maybe go a little farther than they could have gone otherwise. And then they get trapped in the sun comes out, they're sort of left there in the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of the street and stranded.

Michelle Fullner  40:27  
Wow. And so it's still doing them a service to go and move them off of the tennis court. So they don't get stepped on. But absolutely. But it's not because they were going to drown in a puddle there. Right? Do you have any favorite bits of trivia, if you were like at a cocktail party, and you just wanted to, like make chatter with somebody? What would be kind of your favorite trivia about the little local organisms that we have around here? Why?

Marni Fylling  40:48  
I think it's really funny that I also learned while researching for this book is opossums, which are just fascinating. And they're pretty much everywhere. They are native to the American South. They're the only marsupial that's native to North America. And they're resistant to like, rattlesnakes can bite them, and they have, they can fight it off, and they will eat every single tick that's on them. And so they they don't have a problem with you know, like tick borne diseases, and they're very clean and that way. Anyway, so possums are native to the American South, but they are all over the United States, because there were several different failed entrepreneurial attempts to raise them as pets as meat. And as for because they just breed, you know, they breed like crazy, and their tongues VM, and they eat anything. And so there were all these different attempts over, you know, decades, centuries, probably to bring them different places and try to raise them, and they never worked. And so they would either let them go, or they will escape and so they are now anywhere that they can live where it's, you know, not too cold, or they can get under your house and get warm enough to you know, live though they live everywhere. Wow, kind of funny. That

Michelle Fullner  42:09  
is hilarious. And I'm just imagining like your pet possum, you know, and just what that would be like, yeah, you can fly dead or Yeah. Are they friendly? Like, they're pretty mellow, right, usually? Yeah.

Marni Fylling  42:22  
I mean, they have all kinds of defensive things that they do that look kind of scary, but I don't think they have to. They have a dude, they do have a ton of teeth so they can do anything. And I think they'll hit us and I'll show them off at you. But I don't know if I've ever heard of somebody getting bitten by one. That's what they would rather play dead or run away, which animals would rather do like I bugs me when people are afraid of raccoons are different, but most of the wildlife that we have is really doesn't want to see you and even like snakes, like people are so terrified of snakes. It's like snakes do not want to see you. Like if they know you're coming, you probably have them and you don't even know because they just slithered away. I don't think they're after them like they are in the movies. You know who your combs is? It's coming through into the bedroom. Indiana

Michelle Fullner  43:10  
Jones one fear. So talking about raccoons that why should people be a little bit nervous about records? Records

Marni Fylling  43:16  
or just aggressive? Yeah, and if they're around people, maybe they have there's something wrong with them. But maybe there's not like that's the other thing is like people just assume they have rabies if they're looking kind of scruffy and in the neighborhood, but they also could be a mother who's feeding her babies and is hungry and is not doing too great because she's hungry, trying to feed her babies. So the best thing to do is to just stay away and you could call animal control, I guess, but best thing is to stay away.

Michelle Fullner  43:44  
Okay. Yeah, that's great. All right. Last question. You've been doing this since you were a child. But what about finding nature all around you still takes your breath away.

Marni Fylling  43:53  
I think its beauty. Which is also I like to draw I just want to capture that beauty on a know more about it. Like you could get lost looking into the center of one Daisy could get lost. And there you can pick one of those big weeds. You're saying what's that weed? Yeah. And if you look at it really close, you could see there might be like a Spielberg living on it. Or there could be you know, ladybugs, laying their eggs on it or whatever. You just look deeper and deeper and deeper. And there's always more there and it's beautiful. I just love that beauty. I love these greens. I love to sit here and look at all these different colors and wonder wondered. That's it? Yeah. It's great.

Michelle Fullner  44:36  
Thank you Marnie. I appreciate it. Thanks for making the time. Thanks

Marni Fylling  44:38  
for coming. Yeah, thanks for thanks for prioritizing this. We've been trying to do this for months, months, months, and so get

Michelle Fullner  44:46  
to know the nature that's already in your neighborhood. Get lost staring into a dz. Observe the changes in a tree over the course of a year. Let a ladybug crawl across your palm and remember that you can also help enrich the nature in your day. We're good. I know we often see the negative impacts of humans on our environment. And those are very real, but they don't have to be our identity. People make positive impacts by restoring habitat literally every day. If we do that right at home in our own yards and neighborhoods will have even more to appreciate and connect with all around us. I want to thank Marnie for making the time for this interview and for becoming my friend and constantly cheering for me and this podcast. Don't forget to check out Marty's book fillings guide to Nietzsche in your neighborhood, which is full of lovely illustrations of neighborhood species and a lot of surprising information about them. For example, I as an English teacher was very interested to find out how European starlings ended up on this continent. Alright, I promised resources. So if you're looking to replace your lawn, or simply add more native plants to your yard, I would start by going to Cal scape.org and entering your ZIP code, which will tell you which plants are native to your region and even groups them into categories like trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, butterfly hosts ground covers, and what kinds of growing conditions they like. Once you click on a plant you like, you'll see more information about things like how much sun and water it needs, and which insects it hosts. Cal scape also lists nurseries that carry each specific plant. But if you want a complete list of native plant nurseries in your region, check out bloom california.org. If you're outside of California, search for native plant finder, which is a great tool created by the National Wildlife Federation. I'll list all of these in the show notes. But I know that it can also be helpful to talk with real humans or hire them for help, in which case look for landscape companies that specialize in native plants or individuals or companies that have been certified as native plant landscapers through the California Native Plant Society. If you found this episode interesting or helpful in any way, don't forget to follow the show, share it with all your neighbors and leave a review on Apple podcasts. These things help more than you know. And by doing them, you're helping more people discover this information which could help your very own neighborhood, feed more wildlife and contribute even more to the ecosystem. If you listened to the very end of the episode. I always tell you something interesting for my week. And this week, it's that I went out for an after hours nature adventure last night to talk about nocturnal wildlife for a special spooky season episode that's coming out later this month. I'm so excited to share that with you. It was only my second ever episode recorded in the dark and I'm not used to interviewing a disembodied voice but it rocked and I think you're gonna love it. Okay, thanks for listening and hanging around to the very end of the episode. I can't wait to see you on the next episode of Golden State naturalist bye.