Speaker 1: What's Up. Welcome to another episode of the Crime Page
A Bond and He Doesn't podcast. I have not. I
don't think I've ever put an NSFW warning on a
podcast before, but the one that you're about to listen
to and putting it on, it's not suitable for listening
to if you got kids in the car or anything else, like,
you might catch yourself having to explain to them what
a glory hole is. Uh, you know we talk about
it's this last podcast I was in North Carolina. We
were I was hanging out with my friends Lily Bird
and Scott Ward, who is one of the best botanists,
probably one of the best. Bid it just like a
dude who really knows how to read a landscape and
talk about the ecosystem and talk about the fire dependence
of North Carolina, which it still blows my mind how
many people that live on the East Coast are completely
in the dark about how common fire was historically in
the East Coast and the fact that they're so in
the dark about it, why the tick problem is so
bad and why so much of the woods look like shit,
because all that knowledge has just been lost in terms
of how to take care of that landscape where you
get the highest rainfall in the United States. It'side from
the Pacific Northwest, and it is just I mean, it's
like the Gulf States too. The Gulf States get a
lot of rainfall, but the Eastern seaboard fifty to sixty
inches a year in most places, very high rainfall, lots
of vegetative growth every year, more than can decompose, and
so it needs to be burned off. It's the same
thing they were doing in Midwest prairies, et cetera. Anyway,
I was hanging out with both of them, and we
were just I have not I have not laughed so much.
I mean, we just the Turets was off the hook.
We were laughing our asses off, talking about filthy shit,
just being absurd and ridiculous, and then interspersing that with
conversation about things like eco tones, fire intervals, burn regimens,
with tons of carnivorous plant diversity. We saw. We saw
saracenia's utricularias, uh uh Dianaea of course, dynam usipola, the
venus fly trap, pinguiculas, et cetera, and all in you know,
sand hills and then uh, savannahs. It was all sand
hills and Savannah Botany, and it was it was incredible.
It was a great week. It was such a nice week.
And then I came back. I got poison oak. I
got Toxicodendron pubescans, which is the fuzzy poison oak that
you get on the sand hills. I've seen it in
Florida too, And now so I'm nursing that all over
my body and it feels terrible, but you know what,
it feels so good when you put the when you
put the hot water on it. So anyway, now I
just gotta hope I don't get a staff infection. I
got a staph infection like the week two weeks before
because I knocked myself with doxacycling. So I didn't get
typhus from the ticks and the fleas that I got
after killing that feral pig and then through the brush
and then that doxa cycling probably annihilated my skin flora,
my beneficial skin flora. Like what is it? There's what's
what's the species? A Staphylococcus epidermaditis I think is one
of them. Epi epidermitis already shade pronounced it. It's a
beneficial bacteria that's on your skin that kind of keeps
the staff away. And then I was going to the
gym because it was it's too hot in South Texas
to go outside per exercise anymore, and so I knocked
out the good flora and then inundated myself all the
nasty shit you get at gym's. So it's really important
again when you go to the gym. You know, used
to that wiping stuff they got, you know, for the
you know, the disinfectants, and always just wash as soon
as you can. There was one day I was I
went through the gym and then I was going out
the plant trees. I was like, I'm gonna get nasty again.
I'm not going to take a shower. I'll wait an hour,
and I went out and then I just I was
moving mulch and my jeans were just soaked and with sweat.
It was just nasty. It was just like total swamp feeling.
And then yet I got the staff no shit. So anyway,
so the staph and then now poison ivy and now
the poison ivy is finally starting to go down or
poison oak rather toxico to ender in pew business. So
Cola what it is. But we I had a great time.
The whole week was just incredible. I got I got
sent out there to do a presentation at the Carnivorous
Plant Conference, which was great. Everybody I met out there
was great, really cool, really sweet people, lovable nerds, just
a fucking good time. Saw some people hadn't seen in
a while, like my friend, you know, my buddy Drew
who runs Carnivoro and then Damon who runs California Carnivores
in Northern California. And we just had a nice day.
Was just a great time. And then I presented on
I did what two presentations, one one day on Western
Hemisphere carnivores and then the other on Eastern Hemisphere carnival carnivores.
Showed a bunch of cool plants Brazil, South Africa, Western Australia,
et cetera. It was a great time. Pinguicula's you know,
for the the all the Mexican peinguiculas, penguicular gypsicola, all
these carnivorous plants. It's a great time. And then Monday, Tuesday,
and Wednesday we just went out to a bunch of
different sites, camped out one night and god, the Sandhills,
I just I love. It's one of my favorite habitats.
But it's so easy for me to see, you know,
because you're driving by it all the time. And you'll
hear this in the podcast in between, you know, the
rants about the doctor Phil gloryhole and sucking and fucking.
I told you, I told you it was. You know,
we're not We're five minutes into the podcast, all right,
you should have should have turned it off if you
had kids in a car. But you know, we're I
told you it was gonna be like this. It's just
fucking we were just laughing our asses off, just saying
absurd crash shit, just offensive shit, just fucking just the
just the barrel of laughs over there. And so uh yeah, man,
it was just it was It was a really fun time.
But yeah, the sand Hills are one of my favorite habitats.
And savannahs too, And of course they're all fire dependent.
They're all fired dependent when you drive, and this is
what I was saying. When you're driving on you know,
roads and freeways, you look at the woods and they're
all the shitty woods. They're just dense inundated half this
you know, probably a quarter invasive species. Everything's just smothered,
fire suppressed for years and so, and probably just laden
with ticks. I mean, it just just a shit show, man.
It's it's a fucking ecological shit show. And it drives
me nuts. How many people that live on the East
Coast see that and just normalized They think that's the
woods are just supposed to be dense and shitty and
impenetrable and filled with ticks. That's not the way it
was for a long time. Okay, if you were think
of like how long were indigenous people living in the
Americas before Whitey came, right like fifteen twenty thousand years,
thirty thousand years in some places, do you think any
human being that, knowing what we love as a species,
we like savannahs and open places, do you think any
human being would tolerate the shitty woods. No, they were
burning them. And before that there was lightning strikes and
the vege would pile up and maybe you'd get a
dry spell or a drought or something, and then you
get a thunderstorm. Lots of thunderstorms out there, and they
would light these woods up. You also had herbivores, large mammals,
you know, prior to human occupation in North America coming
in doing you know, heavy heavy veg removal, because that's
the thing. You get so much rain, the vege grows
so quick you need a way to not get back
to control for it. Otherwise it just builds up too quick,
faster than it could decompose. And so anyway, it just
it blows my mind because so much of the woods
out there look like shit. And I put a post
up about that, and of course there was you know,
all these people that just took it as like a
attack on their region, right, like they're fucking pride is
so stupid and and didn't listen to the subject matter
or what it was about, and also don't have any
ecological education about their own areas, and they just got upset.
So again, fire fire, fire man. There's so many of these,
you know, there's different intervals. Savannah's sand hills two to
five year intervals, right, it opens it up. You know,
some of the more music forests seven to fifteen year intervals.
And this is you know, you this can be studied
in soil records. There's records of this. You know, this
isn't just a bunch of shit people made up in
last fifty years. But you know, people confirmation bias people,
some people still don't want to believe it. So but yeah,
we went to some monodknock manad knock how do you
pronounce it, I don't know, manadnock lookout something like that.
That was a great h that was a great preserve
to visit, nice open forests. And then there was the
one that with the shitty woods that was near Kernersville somewhere,
which just you know, you go in and it's just
it looks like shit. I mean, the woods look like shit.
They're inundated, they're impenetrable. I think it's lob lolly pine,
which wasn't. It's native to the region, but it wasn't
from that area. It's like a lumber tree. It's like
a similar situation with Pinus radiata in California, you know,
like uh, Monterey pine. Right. So anyway, yeah, so it
was you know that that those woods near Kernersville were
just fucking bleak. I will say in all the habitats
we went to, because we were just going to ones
where there had been recent burns and Scott knew all
these places. We didn't get a single tick. You know. Meanwhile,
Scott's girlfriend, who was Melanie, Who's who's She's working as
a consultant through survey. She's a botanist too. She was
out by the coast and habitats that hadn't burned for
a while, and she told us horror stories. At that
same time period we are, she was out near the
coast and she told us horror stories about going through
these fire suppressed habitats and just finding you know, dozens
of ticks crawling on her. You could see him crawling
on the floor. It's disgusting, man, it's I mean, that
alone was probably one of the main reasons why human
beings have been lighting these areas on fire, and why
all these plants like pine long leaf pines show evidence
of evolving with fire, being adapted to fires, surviving low
intensity fires, right, not to mention, you get the low
intensity fires, you prevent the catastrophic high intensity fires like
you get in California because you're getting rid of all
the fuel you're burning it. So, you know, it's really
good to see. And again I'm probably I'm personally I'm
probably a little too pro fire. Maybe I don't know,
but you know, everything's got to be done, you know,
based on study and observation and paying attention to what
you're doing, thinking about what you're doing, you know, listening
the feedback on what you're doing with these fire regimes.
I think a lot of the areas we were visiting
they were burning in February, like late winter, right before spring.
But there's different opinions on that, and I'm not an
expert on it. I just know when I go to
a habitat that's recently burned, I don't have to worry
about ticks, and it looks a hell of a lot
cleaner and healthier. And the quote shitty woods trademark, you know,
like you see in much of the East Coast, like
you see on the sides of the highway, where it's
just this impenetrable wall of very small diameter understory brush
you got, you know, your trees, and then the understory
is just these these small diameter one two inch three
inch diameter shrubs and smaller trees just you know, you
got it. You gotta thin that stuff out and just
discovered in ticks too, I mean ticks everywhere there's you know,
there's too many theory, there's not there's not enough enough fire,
et cetera. So the fires burn the ticks and they
burn the duff that they need to survive. Again, look
at the Learn your Land YouTube channel. Let's learn your
Land Adam Harreton. He was on his podcast a few
months ago and we talk about all that, and he
did a great video on on how fire controls ticks. Anyway,
let's go over a North Carolina ecoregions. Western part of
the state. You've got the mountains, of course, the Appalachian Mountains.
Central part of the state. You've got the Piedmont, which
is higher elevation than the coastal Plain, but lower elevation
than the mountains. It's like basically the foothills. You've got
the sand hills, which are east of the Piedmont, kind
of like in the southeast portion of the state. And
then you've got the coastal plain, which is just flat
and low elevation ten fifteen feet above sea level, et cetera.
And so you get a lot of the good carnivorous
plants and long leaf pine savannahs, et cetera, and a
lot of plants that you'll also see in northern Florida,
which again is also heavily fire dependent. All right, Lake
whales Ridge. When I was down there, all that stuff
was fire dependent. We talk about some of that too.
Our friends down there who live in Lake wales Ridge
who are like pyro ecologists. They fucking love fire. They
understand the land. They see how healthy it comes back
after they burn it. Right, So you know, but like
if you again, if you go it's all nuanced. If
you go to woods that have been burned in thirty years,
you can't just go light them up. You got to
thin it first because you will get those catastrophic fires.
So anyways, you got mountains, Piedmont, sand Hills, Coastal Plain.
The sand hills again were one of my favorite, so
much cool shit. There lots of hairy plants growing on
the sand. That sand doesn't hold water and it doesn't
hold nutrients, so stuff gets kind of dwarfed, Stuff evolves
hair on it. We saw asclepius and plexicolists. Toxicodendron pubescans.
That's basically a poison oak that grows on sand, just
like our plants that grow on sand. In the South
Texas sandsheet right, so fast training, but there's generally water
at depth and everything, you know, builds a like a
sturdy taproot like kind of swollen to store carbohydrates and
also goes quite deep. And I've noticed the plants that
grow on a sand in South Texas need a little
bit more water than the plants that grow in the
thorn scrub because again, there's probably water at depth. It's
probably moist, you know, two or three feet below all
that sand. Uh, it just drains really quick. So again
that's why you like all these sand endemic plants that
you'll find, including Prunus Texana. You'll they'll be six inches
tall and they'll have like a three or four foot
deep tap room. All right, same thing Miskeait and ebany do.
But those aren't. Those are just leggings. They don't they're
not sand indemics. Anyway, this is definitely and not safe
for work podcasts. Don't listen to it with kids in
the car. It's gonna it's gonna be uncomfortable. We're talking
all kinds of crazy shit. It's also fucking hilarious, I think,
so if you've got a sense of toilet humor. If not,
you shouldn't even be listening to this fucking podcast. I
don't know what you're doing listening to me? Right, You
get some squares that wander in the room sometimes like
an AA meeting. Right. You get some fucking stiffs that
wander in a room. They're not actually drunks or addicts.
They wander in the fucking room. They don't know what
they're what to expect. They start getting upset about people
talking some real shit or where whatever. You know, I
don't want to save them the trouble, save me the trouble.
I don't want to hear their whining about it. You
still get people that you know, wander in sometimes and
he curses, soboch, sobach curs, why is it? Why? Why
is he talking about doctor Fell and the gloryhoh shit,
the fuck up. Get out of here. You're fucking square
and doesn't need to. We got programs for you, right,
there's programs that enough for you. This is for people
that got a sense of humor and realize, and it
may be a little bit of nihilism, and realize, you know,
the whole game is rigged in a fucking Ponzi scheme,
and we're on a sinking ship and they want to
laugh on the way down. Anyway, Enjoy this about an
hour and a half. I think maybe a little bit longer.
I'm going on tour tomorrow. I'm leaving and we'll be
doing uh be doing a book signing Alpine, Texas this Wednesday.
What is it, the twenty seventh of May. Then we're
going I don't know. The tour dates are on the
crime Pace website. Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles. Uh
And we might try to book a last CRUs show,
but probably not. It is a short tour. It should
be fun anyway. That's all I got to day. Go
fuck your up by what it's like.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna show you the part in section.
Speaker 1: Lets you get through the chicken, you know, I mean outside,
they've got nice shock liberal barriers. So they just started
tagging each other and applause come out. You know, I've
seen a couple of nice things in that room before.
He had a bunch of hippies plumb on each other.
Speaker 2: To become the SHOGHI we're fighting to get the other chiefs.
Speaker 1: Ninety for eighties. They're pouting, go bad, but they're not bad.
Welcome to the Crime pays, but Boden, he doesn't podcast.
I'm here with my friend Lily Bird, and we're driving
to beautiful Kernersville, North Carolina, en route to the notorious
doctor Phil Gloryhole. Doctor Phil. He has the soothing voice today,
calm Southern father, but he's actually a filthy fuck that
loves to suck. Fuck. It loves to suck and fuck.
I sucked and fucked my way along the South Texas
coastal birding trill. That's a good way to get the
advertisers canceled by saying such filth in the first forty
seconds of the podcast. I just landed. Lily picked me up.
We're driving to the I'm getting paid to speak at
the Carnivorous Plant Conference tomorrow. I don't know why they're
having me. Hopefully this podcast will cut. This podcast will
come out after the conference is over, so they can't.
You know, I have second thoughts. But anyway, we're just
we're just driving. You know, It's it's Friday night at
seven pm, and we're driving through past all these woods
that I'm sure I fill with invasive species and you know,
two hundred years of fire supperation. Every time I see
these these forests out here, I just want to light
them on fire because I'm sure they're full of ticks
and invasives. That's which you think, that's right, right?
Speaker 3: Probably, yeah, definitely. I mean there's there is probably a
little more intact than Florida than the woods in Florida,
but near the cities, I'm sure it's very bad.
Speaker 1: Do you think Do you think doctor Phil loves to
suck and fuck?
Speaker 2: He does?
Speaker 1: Right with that mustache. It's a dead giveaway a waffle
house anyway. Yeah. So, uh, I'm gonna go giving us
presentation tomorrow. You know, presentation is gonna be I'm showing
a lot doing Western Hemisphere carnivores. It should be pretty good.
But then i'd be showing a lot of habitat shots
and non carnivorous plants too, which maybe it'll you know,
at Carnacon. Some of these guys, I don't know, you know,
I don't know how on the spectrum they are if
they're gonna be super demanding that it's all carnivorous plants.
But I like showing the habitat in this sympatrick species
as well. I'm showing pendlicular casabijuana from Dominican Republic cloud forest.
It's an epiphytic carnivore. I'm showing phil Coxie orhizomatosa from
the openings in the in the Katinga, the tropical drive
forest in Brazil where it grows in these sandy openings.
But let's talk about ticks, because we were just you know,
at the one number. I think of Eastern Seaboard, which
of course gets higher rainfall than most anywhere else in
the United States except for the Pacific Northwest. I can't
help but think about the lush vegetative growth and how
the fire at Thurn intervals were roughly what do you think,
lily out here three years?
Speaker 3: No, I mean some of the areas maybe you know,
five or so, but I don't know the North Carolina
habitat well enough. I would say that their pines areas
is probably like three to five years. But the majority
of these hardwood areas they did not burn frequently.
Speaker 1: Really did burn, but they were light and shit up.
I'm sure people were lighting shit up and yeah, pretty
it did burn.
Speaker 3: And there probably is a lot more of hardwood expansion
due to fire.
Speaker 1: Suppression, right, definitely. But there's been that video. I'm sure
you've seen it. There was a video on social media
going out the last few days, some kids in southern
Illinois showing all the takes they picked up in like
a twenty minute into the river. Yet I made the
mistake of commenting on it, and then I watched people
argue in the posts the replies to my comment about
how this is all actually a conspiracy to drop boxes
of ticks lone star ticks infected with alpha gel. The
alpha gel roteine in it that causes the red meat allergy, which.
Speaker 3: Is a short term meat allergy. It only lasts for
like three to five years, and then you are able
to eat meating it.
Speaker 1: That's nice, though. In Cape Cod they're getting fucked with
that thing. It's like they got all these vegans in Florida.
You get all these richies up there, you know, you
get all these you know, all these fancy lads. You've
got to be obligatory vegans. Now they can't have their
steaks and ship. It's not a bad idea. I think
it's kind of funny. It gives me a chuckle. It's
good for their cholesterol too, it's gonna actually maybe it'll
prolong their life.
Speaker 3: Still eat poultry and like, yeah, you can.
Speaker 1: Still pull your pork if you like the second fuck
at the doctor fil I don't think.
Speaker 3: I don't think you can eat an You can't.
Speaker 1: I just saw an opportunity to make a crew remarket.
I wanted to the doctor. Phil Glorio, located in beautiful Curnersville,
North Carolina, flew into Raleigh. Durham got fucked in Kernersville. Okay,
well hold on, but uh we were talking about this though,
you know, the whole, the whole, you know, honestly, with
this conspiracy theory stuff, the simulation has been so fucked
up lately, I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually
a little bit of truth to it.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there is. I just remember the name of
the project. It was like, the government did have this
project called Project Mongoose. I think it was called I
could be wrong, but it researching, you know, using ticks
as biological weapons to dump on Cuba was the idea,
and in its hypothesize it's potentially a possibility that line
came from that.
Speaker 1: This is sixties or seventies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but seeing but the Northeast.
Speaker 1: I could see that because the CIA was doing all
kinds of fuck up shit, but also they are you
don't even need a conspiracy when the situation is so
bad to be giving you have two hundred years of
fire suppression. I don't think how many people in the
eastern half the United States understand how much of an
effect fire has on ticks and how much of an
important part of the landscape fire was. I mean in Florida,
you see evidence of it in all the lineages of plants.
They have evolutions and adaptations. Yes, the fire, yes, which
is so it's fucking nuts that. I mean, when you
stop burning and you have two hundred years of that
and you have an explosive population of vectors, especially deer
and mice, you don't even need a conspiracy, but it
would help, you know, it could be I mean why not, right? Yeah, yeah,
go ahead, what are you saying.
Speaker 3: I was going to mention too, that one of the
major contributing factors is also that we've killed off all
the apex predators. So we have all of these deer
and rodent and other animals that the ticks love to
propagate on. There are populations exploded because the populations of
their hosts have exploded.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the vectors have exploded. But I was asking you,
with all the work you've done in Florida because you
work for Florida Native Plant Society and you've been to
all these different habitats. Have you ever gotten ticks in
a habitat that burned the year.
Speaker 3: Before now, not even the habitat that burned like.
Speaker 2: Three years before.
Speaker 1: Never once? Well, how many years have you been doing
this now? Almost a decade?
Speaker 3: I mean I've been over it. I mean I've been
going out into native habitats looking at plans for like
eighteen years now.
Speaker 1: Maybe it never had a problem with tick because the
tics gets It takes like.
Speaker 3: At least four to six year rough like post burn
for tick populations to begin to start infiltrating again. But
it has a marked long term, multiple year effect on
suppressing tick population as you're.
Speaker 1: Killing the ticks, but you're also figgers too.
Speaker 3: I was just thinking when we were talking about this
that I don't get tiggers in areas that have been burned.
Speaker 1: I would rather have ticks that sugars. Probably honestly, there
if there was.
Speaker 3: No disease risks covered in bites right now, if.
Speaker 1: There was no disease risk, I would rather have siggers,
no ticks. Would you rather have staff or chiggers.
Speaker 3: At least the ticks you can pick off, you know, yeah,
at least.
Speaker 1: Like what the staff infection, Like I got right now
because I knocked out my beneficial bacterory with Doxa cycling
because I thought I had typhis. Then I started going
to the gym and now, and I'm sure I picked
up nasty ship at the gym, and I was my
wallet was chafing when I was moving mulch and my
wallet was chafing through my jeans. It was sweaty and
fucking nasty where I lived because it's like a Petri dish,
and I got this rash. It felt like someone took
a cheese grater to my skin. I was like, no,
that's odd, there's no cut there, And I figured maybe
there was, because I'm always covered in cuts and ship
from going through the brush to the thorn brush. And
the next day I was like, oh, fucking what this
from my nasty ass, sweaty jeans and the wallet that
I had chafing against it. And sure enough the next day, look,
nolah follicles were inflamed, and I was like, fuck man,
And I knew immediately, I'm like, this is going to
turn into cell legs. Yeah. Yeah, And so I was
dreading going to the doctor because it's always a pain
in the ass and the doctor's incompetent and they hate you,
you know, for being there. Yeah, And so I was like,
I'm just gonna lie and through the fake name of
the er thing, and it worked out fucking great. I
was in and out in thirty minutes. I met a
nice doctor, really cool guy. He looked like a Mexican
Sebastian Menoscalco, but he was like he was more attractive,
more handsome looking. You know, I'm straight, but I'm saying
if I was gay, you know what I mean. He
was a handsome fuck That's all I'm saying. He had
like a suave and then he was he was funny
as hell too, and I and uh. And he told
me at the time he got staff on his face
when he was in med school, and he was like, yeah, man,
you're fucked there. I mean, you would have been fucked.
You know, there's no you're not. You can't get out
of this without taking antibiotics. Like there's a slight chance
maybe you could beat it on your own in like
a week, but you know, it's it's not looking good
right now. And it wasn't. Man. I was like it
was getting worse, you know, it was swelling. I was like, fuck,
all right, it was great. And then I paid like
twenty bucks, thirty bucks all together for antibiotics he put
me and cleaned the mice in three hundred milligrams. Yeah. Yeah,
And now that I'm sure they'll send me a bill
for twenty five hundred dollars and I'm never gonna pay.
But that's okay, that's fine. You know, that's what the
system encourages. So but anyway, we're talking about chickers. Yeah, yeah,
so so, but yeah, I would definitely rare. They have
a staff affection than than any of that. But the
chiggers are I mean, they fuck you up and you
can't even see them, so you don't know if they're
still on you.
Speaker 3: Now I can see them, you couldn't.
Speaker 1: I could probably. I don't think they just hanged. I
don't think they'd like bite you and then dip out.
I think that worked for it.
Speaker 3: I usually first see them when I'm out in the field.
I start to get a little bit itchy and I'm like, oh,
is that a tick? And I look and there's no tick.
Then I look at my phone when it's black, when
the screen is black, and you can see the teeny
tiny little cha like spreading all over.
Speaker 1: How many of you seen it once? Oh?
Speaker 3: I've seen them all up my legs, like when we
were at that parking lot in Terrea State Park and
had gotten covered and then I could see them crawling.
Speaker 1: Terrible. We should have taken a promethron bath, right then,
If only I had known? Wait, okay, but uh yeah,
but so when you light sit on fire, yeah, obviously
you'd only kill the the parasites themselves, you also kill
the the hummus that they need to maintain their moisture,
that they need to hide in to maintain their moisture.
Adam Harreton, who does to Learn Your Land YouTube channel,
has done a video on us. He just did another one,
I guess a few weeks ago. But but there's the thing,
I don't you know, you don't even need a fucking
conspiracy when it's when you got you know, people running
things that don't know what the fuck they're doing. Yeah,
you know for two centuries, so you got to burn
these woods man?
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: Is it? A giants coya? There's a fucking giants sequoia
in the middle of the over Yeah. That or a
cryptomrria or something. It was some kopressoid redwood plant that
is a landscape specimen. So now we're getting into the
really filthy parts of Kernersville. A lot of shit. Look humans,
huge locker. Yeah, it looks like the fucking uh you know,
uh East Berlin nineteen sixties, right, yeah, can you imagine
living there? Wonder what they're paying for that ship too. Oh,
that one's unfinished. But yeah, I listened. I listen. Don't judge,
but I listened to that Tucker Carlson interview with Kevin O'Leary,
the fucking shark tank ship bag, the the AI thing,
because there's the thing Tucker.
Speaker 3: Carlson is in the super AI data set.
Speaker 1: H Yeah. But Tucker Carlson, now, you know, you listen
to him once in a while and you're like, oh, yeah,
he's saund like some right ship and then he like
drops in a fucking light. Yeah, he's like, guy, I
shouldn't have to live next to some Somalis. Whoa what
the fuck? Man? Who kids? Okay, all right, whatever, man?
But yeah, it was but the ship that this guy
was saying was just terrifying. Like with the Kevin, the
Kevin Leary guy. When you hear this mother, because he's
behind that data center in Utah. They want to Yeah,
and when you hear about it, and the way this
fucking ship bag talks, it's all lies, it's all phony.
He sounds slimy as hell. And he also just doesn't
sound that smart now, you know, and you're like, this
is who's in control? What the fuck?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 1: You know there you need you need to gonna bring
back the guillotines or something. You know, this is there's
no like these people obviously don't have the well being
of the collective in mind. And he kept talking about
and the big thing they're talking about, all the hard ons,
all that they really have a heart on for China.
They're talking about, we have to be able to compete
with China. That's a big thing, you know.
Speaker 3: It's there's so world behind they're not even competing, which
is wow.
Speaker 1: China built a middle class in like twenty years and
is light years ahead of us.
Speaker 3: And just I mean, this is what they're doing is
just reaming out as much profit as they can before
everything collapsed.
Speaker 1: Because they know this is a collapsing empire. It doesn't
have to be, but it is. It's it's just a
parcel rotten all the way through. It's fucking rotten all
the way through. The Doctor Phil glory Hole. Do you
how many times do you think someone said those words together,
the Doctor Phil, gloryhole or just gloryhole and doctor Phil
in the same sentence. Probably a few times, right, I'm sure,
Old Doctor. If you've seen there's some dude that doesn't
comedy skid like impression of Doctor Phil, it's fucking hilarious, man,
And he dresses up like him and.
Speaker 3: Shitoks like a cop.
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, I don't know why. He just
cracks me up, man, it's I think because it's so
it's such a hammed up impression of you know, like
this old, comforting Southern dad, you know, and it's you know,
that motherfucker's got some terrifying shit in his hard drive,
you know, skeletons in its closet.
Speaker 3: Anybody who's trying to tell everybody else how they need
to live. You know, he's hiding something.
Speaker 1: Was he that cash me outside? Was that that show?
Speaker 3: I think was on his show?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's Welcome to America.
Speaker 3: He's a culture creator.
Speaker 1: I't worth the best Western in beautiful Cournersville, North Carolina.
You were saying you were you were in central Florida
and some like little postage stamp sized.
Speaker 3: Long It was beautiful. There's these old growth this little
tiny preserve that has the old growth long leaf that
somehow got protected. There's very little mature old growth long leaf.
Speaker 1: What are you doing on there?
Speaker 3: I was down there for land management reviews, which is
the whole thing to explain. Basically, it's for your attending
a review of state owned lands, like different state parks
and preserves, in order to see how well the land
managers are, you know, managing the land basically. But I
just did this on my time off, and I knew
that this park was down there and I wanted to
see it, and man, they were so incredible, these massive
old long leaf pines.
Speaker 1: How were they? How big a cross?
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm not really good at judging diameter, but
they were big three hundred and four hundred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it got safe because it was pasture landers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there were pastures at one point beneath them, which
unfortunately destroyed the understory because they planted Behea grass, which
is a non native invasive grass that is used as
a lawn but mostly used as for for cattle. And
so the whole understory, which would have been incredibly diverse
and just so beautiful. There are pieces of it that are,
you know, somewhat intact but not what they should be.
Speaker 1: Where else can you see old growth long leave like that,
like in an intact.
Speaker 3: There's one privately owned property in South Georgia just north.
Speaker 1: Of where I live, and god damn, that's how far
you gotta go. Everything is gone, Yeah, I mean there's.
Speaker 3: There's less than one percent remaining. Yeah, virgin longleaf.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was wondering, man, what if the death cult?
What if the Europeans had landed on the west coast first,
you know, if you know, laid fourteen hundred and fifteen
hundreds and then moved the east and the east was
in better shape. Because that's only reason the west is
really preserved.
Speaker 3: That's the only reason we still have Sequoia's Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because the fucking deaficulty. It took a while for them
to get out there, you know, for the metastasis metastasis
to spread that far.
Speaker 3: But that the one virgin like long leaf tracked in
South Georgia. It has never been cultivated, so the herbaceous
understory is intact. The groundcover is totally intact. And the
thing that stood out to me the most. I mean,
there's incredible diversity, like such densely packed diversity throughout the
whole parcel. But the feel of walking on soil that
has never been cultivated was so different than anything I've
ever experienced because everything I walk on has been cultivated
agriculture or has had cattle on it or yeah, or
agriculture or whatever. But this soil is is intact and
it was like soft. Each time you stepped it was
like walking on almost like a soft carpet, you like
a bed, you kind of sink into it. It was
incredible to experience that.
Speaker 1: Because I had never Why was that parcel saved?
Speaker 3: Because it was privately owned.
Speaker 1: But I mean, what person that was a member of
that society chose not.
Speaker 3: To was it was privately owned by a family and
they hunted on that prop that was where they would hunt,
and they kept it into act and they never for
some reason, the person who owned it never let anybody
log it because I'm sure they got, you know, offer
after offer after offer for lots of money, but he
was independently very wealthy.
Speaker 1: So there's some big trees there, how tall massive.
Speaker 3: I don't even know how tall they are. I filmed
a video with standing next to one of them, and
it's just it's, you know, I look, I look tiny
in the wild.
Speaker 1: God, that would be so nice to go out and
visit it. Where in Georgia is it.
Speaker 3: It's in South Georgia, north, just north of the the
state line between Florida and Georgia.
Speaker 1: Really what town is it near?
Speaker 3: Like kind of near maybe like I don't know, I
can't remember exactly. I know it's just north of like
tom near Thomasville kind of. I guess.
Speaker 1: I don't know where that is.
Speaker 3: But if you want to to come down and might.
Speaker 1: Be able to get Yeah, that would be nice to
check it out. One day. I've got to go speak
at Kullowe in July, so I was I was gonna
just drive there from Chicago and then just do a
bunch of stops along the way and maybe i'll come
through Georgia's God, it's gonna suck. It's gonna be a
long drive. There'll be a bunch of nice stuff to see, though,
I'll get ash rush again. I get staff when it's
all sweaty, when it's all hot and muggy, it's nasty.
You gotta get.
Speaker 3: You gotta like you gotta slightweight hiking pants.
Speaker 1: That you make fun of me, color hexiting or something.
We're short shorts. Yeah yeah, but then but then you
got how you protect your leggs from insects though, See
that's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I always wear pants.
Speaker 1: That's why I wear pants too.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: That was a thing that a lot of ranchers were
doing back then, or just anyone, any like a grarian,
anyone raising cattle, they'd always bring in invasive grasses. Why
was it?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 1: Why do you think that was just because it was
easy and it's what they knew and they could re
see it. That's just what you did. Like why was
it not enough to let them just let the cattle eat?
Speaker 3: The majority of it is like, oh, that's just.
Speaker 1: What we do, right at least like what we do.
It's just the ws always bad.
Speaker 3: What you get cattle? You got to play behea.
Speaker 1: Where's behea from?
Speaker 3: I don't know. You can look at up past below, notatum.
Speaker 1: Past ballum, Yeah, it's past blum got all all the
grasses that were brought in for cattle suck. They're all horrible.
They just take over and smother everything. It's a nice
sunset at least. Yeah. Look at these woods, MANU, it's
just a dense wall. Fuck. Who wants to go in there?
I do. I don't want to go in there, not
until they burn it. Look at that. It's just a.
Speaker 3: Lot of these woods out here. I mean a lot
of them are fire suppressed, but a lot of them
had mature canopies that would shade out a lot of
the understory. So once you go this looks like a
green wall on the side, but once you walk into
some of these areas, it's more open because it's the shade.
Speaker 1: I just the whole East Coast is such a fucking
nightmare for ecology in my opinion, from what you know,
I'm an outsider, but I get scared. There's fucking ticks
and sugars on everything. Two hundred years of fire suppression,
deer jumping out everywhere.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like there's the deer like bed bugs. Man in
a fucking roach motel. Seriously, they're everywhere. They come out
of the they come out of the fucking I mean, you've.
Speaker 3: Got deers all over Texas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, but that's a lot. But there's not even
as many as when you go to the East coast
or like Chicago. God damn the woods near Chicago, the
little forest preserves. You step off trail, you're covered in thicks,
same fucking thing. They won't burn it either. They'll go masticate,
but they won't burn it. You gonna get those those
tender Midwesterners used to some fire. I just want to
burn everything I get in landscapes like this, where you
get such high rainfall and it causes so much vegetative growth,
and I just want to fucking burn everything. That's all
I think about.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you have to take into consideration the
this species and whether they're like actually adapted.
Speaker 1: You gotta make up for lost time. You got two
centuries of this ship. You gotta Jerry, Jerry, I know
you can, I know, I know. But Jerry Wilhelm, the
guy that wrote Flora of the Chicago Region, which is
a wonderful tone. It's written really well, like ah, like
there's really it's it's not like that dry autistic shiitis.
It's like he you know, he's got like he's passionate
about the plants, so he writes his own little notes
descriptions about the genera. You know, it wouldn't be because
we fun You know, you meet those people sometimes who
are just like it's usually like males, you know, they're
just like reciting oh yeah, and then it was this,
and they're just reciting shit. And it sounds like when
they're talking about plants too, they could they might as
well just be collecting fucking pokemons or something like. There's
no passion. They just read reciting shit that they read.
Speaker 3: It doesn't it doesn't speak to a real familiarity with
the species.
Speaker 1: No, it's just spectrum memorization. It's it's the void. Well,
how does it make you feel? What have you noticed?
What have been your personal observations when you're out in
the field, you know, getting stabbed by mosquitoes and whatever
feeling that went on your face and you're observing these things,
and what are the.
Speaker 3: Species that are similar and how do you differentiate them?
Speaker 1: That day and the whole air smells like a fart.
You didn't cut one, did you know what that is? No?
It wasn't me. I didn't cut one either. It's so
where we are. It's fucking North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: Look at that pastel sun or sunset. Yeah, it really does.
It's look and it's coming. It's following us too, it's
going through that Oh boy, I should wow. It'sh those
Trader Joe's tackis. It's those knockoff tackis speaking of which
I gotta get some of those. If you got the
green tea, what a fucking angel. Look at that? Thank you.
I want to crack open a forty of green tea
right now. Anyway, Jerry Wilhelm burns his fucking suburban yard
every every other fault.
Speaker 3: I burn my little my little grass I would do.
Speaker 1: Man. That's fucking great man.
Speaker 3: It's fun burn that shit. It's also great to burn.
I mean, I highly recommend a flame leader. I mean,
you need to know what you're doing, don't. People out there.
You shouldn't just buy whatever you want it, You've got to.
I've participated on many prescribed fires, so I have an
idea of what burns and how quickly it burns, and
how flammable it is, and what conditions to burn in
like I have not. I've wanted to burn my yard
this spring but I haven't been able to because it's
been so dry. And what I one of the precautionary
measures I take is I wet a whole ring all
around the area that I'm burning, so that I know
it's not gonna like jump to anything. But yeah, it's
super safe if you're doing it correct well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if it's not windy and it's like it's
not like it is out West like when I was.
When I lived out West, I couldn't imagine doing controlled burns,
especially at this frequency. But of course that was a different,
completely different climate. When it's this human and you get
sixty inches a rainy year, man, it's like you you're
not getting away without burning, right. You can. You can
masticate all you want, you can mow whatever, it's you
gotta burn. I just got to pick the right time.
But it's you know, that's the thing that drives me nuts.
And these fucking I made the mistake of looking at
a fucking Reddit post someone had made about my yard
because I showed a photo. I showed a photo my
front yard and like that wild Ones presentation, I did, Yeah,
and they were there, and you know a lot of people,
there were a lot of positive comments, you know how
I am. I'llc ninety positive comments, I see one, I
see one negative one. I'm like a flight of shit.
I'm yeah, and I saw it, and it was, you know,
as people being like, oh, I can't imagine the ticks.
You know, what the fuck are the tick's gonna come
Where the fuck are the tick's gonna come from, you
fucking moron. Where they're gonna They're gonna parachute in how
the fuck they're gonna you know, they're gonna come up.
They're gonna come up through the sewer. There's no ticks.
I live in a fuck you've seen where I live.
It's like fucking dead. It's like and it's one hundred
and five degrees for ten months out of the year.
But its just that fear, you know, It's like you
just you don't even know, you're like the prop the landscape.
You don't even know the landscape you're talking about. And
these we're supposed to like native plant people. It's not
like a native plant for them. But you know how,
it just blows my mind to how many people live
in the eastern half of the United States and they
see bad tics. They don't realize what causes it. It's
the fire suppression and the overpopulation and there I mean
the fire suppression alone would cause a huge because you're
just letting them live. There's nothing keeping them in check.
Of course, there's gonna be millions of ticks, but also
how the do you live on a How do you
live in a region and not know what an important
part of that landscape fire was for thousands of years before.
Speaker 3: How do you live in a region and not know
what ecosystems are surround you? What about don't know any
of those things?
Speaker 1: It's your favorite Chick fil an.
Speaker 3: Even more importantly, they don't know what they're missing. They
don't know how much poorer and sad their life is
without that.
Speaker 1: They don't know they're fucking cruelist. They're lost in the woods, yead.
Speaker 3: It's like you want to shake people and be like, look.
Speaker 1: Is there still Arby's? Is that's still around her? The
go out of business? Do you ever think there's been
a doctor Phil Glorihole at Arby's the doctor Phil Glorial.
It's like a trademark. Now it's not just the Glorial,
it's a doctor Phil.
Speaker 2: Well it all.
Speaker 1: Brought have you ever listened to any advice said doctor
Phil has for young people? Does he he's did he
do an episode of Scared Straight? Too?
Speaker 3: I do think I remember watching him. His show was
always on when I got home from school when I
was a kid. I remember watching.
Speaker 1: He's a guiding light for America's teams. Yeah, holy doctor
fool God, damn do what I say it not what
I do, Doctor Phil. And then he's like on a
campaign trail for pedophiles and shit, like some fucking chit
bag right wing like anyway, Yeah, okay, well that's enough
for that. We won't we won't. We won't mention the
worst Doctor Phil and Glory whole one more time in
the next ten minutes. But uh but yeah, man, I
don't know the tick thing really. I just it just
sucks to see people so afraid of quote nature, yeah,
of like other lights, and that's all they can think of,
Like that's all they think of when.
Speaker 3: They seem neatly illogical. I mean, when you think about
the actual threats to your your life and to your
safety like that, it's not coming from ticks and snakes
and alligators.
Speaker 1: I mean, ticks are worth being afraid of in some cases.
Speaker 3: But that ticks are really the one thing that I'm
actually am kind of afraid of in the woods.
Speaker 1: And I'm you've got guns.
Speaker 3: Right, I don't usually carrying out. I'm considering it, but
I don't carry. I would only carry for humans, you know,
I wouldn't carry for animals, well, for.
Speaker 1: Hogs, for feral hogs. Is this where we're getting off? Though?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Where the fuck are we don't even know where we are.
I haven't seen any billboards. You need to give me
the direction to that the Best Western. I can say
the word the Best Western, because by the time this
podcast comes out, there's not going We're not going to
beat it no more. So, you know, anybody who I've
pissed off can't come looking for me at the Best Western.
You know, some of these carnivorous plant nerds are going
to be pissed at me, you think so they might
be pissed at me too, Why? Oh, because you you
light them up for poaching shit or something or what?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I tell people that, you know, if you
love carnivorous plants, then you should leave them where they
are and not collect them like an obsessive.
Speaker 1: I told you about that guy in a South Texas nursery.
I don't even want to blow him up because he's
not a bit I mean whatever, yeah, well actually fuck him.
He's kind of doubling down now. But there was a
South Texas nursery that was just straight up poaching plants.
They were just hidding up landowners and being like, can
we just come dig some plants? We'll pay you money.
Can we some dig up? Can we come dig up
some plants to sell?
Speaker 3: Very fine double edged sword is that you want people
to know about the plants and love them. But the
only way that we have been taught how to love
things is through possession.
Speaker 1: Well it's like a collector thing to a place in
the whole primate hoarding complex and like poke up collecting pokemons.
But also, I will say, you know, my opinion, My
opinion on digging plants change when I move to Texas
because I saw so much habitat get destroyed. In California,
it's like a big no no. In Arizona, it's a
big no because there's actual public land out there and
it's seen as kind of belonging to everybody and you
don't do it. But in Texas, so much shit gets fucked,
and there's no protections for plants. So like, I know
people who've dug plants solely for the sake of preserving them,
not to sell, but.
Speaker 3: About to be when the habitat is being degraded.
Speaker 1: To propagate them and dirt.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, or if you really know what you're doing.
Speaker 1: But but no, this dude was this guy was digging
off Texas per Simmons Diasporas Texas Ana and he wanted
to he was looking for Nowalia Hype Luca, the you know,
the chumunke, like these like slow growing, like if you
see one, they're mostly Mexican plants too, like they're from
higher elevations in math, they're climates in Mexico. And then
they're just kind of they're only in South Texas because
of the price of scene. I think it's kind of
getting too hot for them, at least the chumnkes and
you know, and someone sent me an email and they
were like, yeah, this dude, this guy hit me up
and he wanted to buy some you know, like come
on my land and pay me the digum and then
sell them. And he's selling them for a fucking lot
of money, Like he's making a lot of money, yeah,
you know, and so what's to stop him from continuing
to do that?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Like, oh, there's so many, and you know, the landowner said,
because it's that's right. It's Texas, so it's it's private property.
You could do with it what you want. I'm not
breaking any laws. Well no, but it's kind of slimy
and it's unethical. And what's to stop you from taking everything?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: If you you know, you go out to a fucking
parcel of land, there's you know, a huge, huge, huge
population of pitcher plants out there. Yes, I'm just gonna
take one or two, but they always I'm just gonna
take one or two, and then someone's offering you one
hundred bucks for one yeah, like well okay, well it's
a hundred bucks. Yea, Well, there's so many out there,
I'm gonna go take a couple more. I mean, there's plenty.
They'll come back, they'll regenerate, and next thing you know,
there's fucking pock mark with holes.
Speaker 3: And they're fifty one hundred, two hundred people thinking the
same fucking thing that month, you know, and it's so
it's just so sad, and I have to say, I
don't think it's just First of all, primates don't hoard
and collect things. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think this is an evolutionary complex.
Speaker 3: I don't think cultural thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it certainly is, there's a lot of play, But
I think neurologically it's a primate. It's like the same
with greed, like like a chipmunk stashing it's fucking acorns
for the winter. Like. That's where the root of the
neurology evolutionary.
Speaker 3: Response to lack and scarcity live in such a constant
state of black.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But I'm just saying that the neurology probably started, you
know that way right there was some sort of adaptive
benefit and it wasn't geared towards things. It was geared
towards you know, edible resources and whatever. And so that's
why it stayed in the gene pool. But now it's
to the point where it's going. You can just cross
over there.
Speaker 3: Where we get off here, because this is where the best.
Speaker 1: You saw a waffle house you wanted to have You
ever been kicked out of a waffle house? You can't
really get kicked out of It's like you can't get
kicked out of an AA meeting. Oh yeah, you can really. Yeah,
I've seen some fun up. I've seen that those motherfuckers
tolerate a lot though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but not sexual assault, No, that's fucked up.
Speaker 1: But I've seen like people screaming, having like crack. Yeah,
have you seen people smoke? Cracking? And am this is
a wholesome botanical You know you don't want to let
the kids listen to this, right, this is what we're
talking about. All kind of different stuff in here. It's
not even about plants half the time.
Speaker 3: What is that?
Speaker 1: What's the D stand for you?
Speaker 3: Mariatt with the D.
Speaker 1: Fucking Kernersville, God damn it, I'm scared of the holy
East Coast scares me. I just want to get in
and get out. I couldn't live out of here. Why
because it's just this is where all it all started. Man, No,
nothing like that. The culture, it's all fucking this word
all started.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: I need to be out west where there's open land
in public land. Texas is fucking killing me. But I'm
on a mission in Texas. Where's the public land on
the east coast? There around eighty percent of the land
on the east of the Mississippi's private.
Speaker 3: I mean they're not smell.
Speaker 1: Fuck I can smell this ship coming out of that
knom scart. Who you go wrap your car around the tree,
you fucking douche. Where's he gonna go to with this charger?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Get up there, you're you're fucking simple thing. There's a man.
I do want to eat some mask go go, go go,
you got it, you gotta yellow. I do want to
eat some nasty ship at a waffle house. Nasty ship
you get like a fucking greasy you know, you know
you're gonna you know, you're gonna feel bad after it,
but it tastes so good. Yeah, they got hash browns
and some eggs. You get like a nice plate of waffles.
Speaker 3: Is this it?
Speaker 1: Are we here already? Durry?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Maybe it was? God, Look at this. Look at this
commercial strip. It's disgusting. Jesus Christ, Welcome to Darryl Seafood
or is it a steakhouse? See? This is why I
couldn't live in most of the East Coast because it
looks like this.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, this everywhere looks like this.
Speaker 1: Everywhere. Yeah, because everywhere on the East Coast looks like this.
Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Everywhere out west looks like this too.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you're talking.
Speaker 1: Where there's population centers, but it's much less dense. Population.
Population is so dense out here. Here's the best Western
this is. Okay, we'll continue this in a little bit. Okay,
we're a couple of days later and over here we
got we got someone new joining joining the podcast right now,
weighing in at one hundred and seventy pounds at a
height of roughly six to two. In the corner we
have the graminoid Wizard. Loves to suck, loves to fuck,
loves to get fucked. Scott Ward, Hello, Scott, Hey, how
are you so great? To have you here?
Speaker 2: Doing great? All of the things you just said are falls.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, don't be bashful. It's okay. We
can be honest here. So what tell us what we're
doing now? Where we're going. We're in the coastal plains.
We come down out of the Piedmont. Tell everybody with
the Piedmont is.
Speaker 2: The Piedmont broad eco provincial area. That's not the mountains,
not the coastal plains. So it's sort of the middle
of the state and typical Piedmont elsewhere involves actual small mountains.
So the Piedmont is sort of a collective term for
the broad rolling terrain before you get to the fall line. Anyways,
we spent time in the fall Line sand Hills in
Richmond Hope Fall. The fall line is historically would have
been where the boats coming up river would have had
to stop because the ripple would have been too much.
So there's enough elevation change from the Piedmont to the
coastal plain that you actually have rivers that are, you know,
a bit more turbulent, so you couldn't get ships up them.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, the ripples, the rapids, the rabbits.
Speaker 2: So that's why you have a lot of fall line cities.
Raleigh's kind of one rocky mount all the way down
to the Piedmont. You get these fay Avilion, you have
all these fall line cities.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you specialize in gramminoids, but you also specialize
I mean, we've been talking about fire a lot lately.
I filmed the little patch of woods near Kernersville that
you know is the Shitty Woods. That's, of course, not
any specific place on the East Coast that is a status.
It's a state of being. The Shitty Woods. Explain to
people what the shitty woods would be.
Speaker 2: So you were in Kernersville, which if you go a
little further north you can see some really interesting Piedmont remnants.
You can see sore Town mountains hanging out in state park.
Pilot Knob is the most prominent feature of that, and
there's awesome fire ecology there too. There was a wildfire
like two or three years ago there and it's just
opened up quite a bit. You get some rare species
on those rocky kind of uplands. But where you were,
you basically, you know, if you took something beautiful and
then cut it down to it, you know, a tenth
of its size, and then sort of threw in a
bunch of troublesome species, that's what that's where you're at.
Speaker 1: So invasive species and also just stop burning.
Speaker 2: And also fire suppression. Yeah, and so that those lots
most others are just getting developed in parts of the Piedmont.
But if you were really ambitious you could thin them out,
open them up, and reintroduce fire.
Speaker 1: You would need to manually thin them first with chain
saws and shit, because it's too dense at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be like a tinderbox going up if
you tried to burn it. Plus some of them don't
burn because there's such thick litter. And yeah, there's just
a lot of dynamics that have changed when that habitat
has been fire for suppress.
Speaker 1: When I put that video, it's crazy because someone, I mean,
I'm in North Carolina. I filmed that, but I had
people all throughout the Eastern Seaboard being like, damn, that
looks like where I live. Yeah, and it sucks and
the ticks are terrible, and it's it's just wild to
me how many people aren't aware of fire collegy because
it's so dominant here. Again, you have sixty inches of
rain a year, You've got lots of vegetative growth. The
return intervals on fire here are much shorter than they
would be in a drier place like the West coast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fire, So fire is almost divisive out west, but
in the East, where the argument is more about when
and how often things should burn, we know that fire
is an integral component of the Southeast, even parts of
the Northeast too. You would have had o kickory forest
and like the southern tier of New York, those would
burn maybe on a seven fifteen fri so like, yeah,
you have too much variation to consider for just a
simple summary thing. But in general, if you're in the
coastal plane, you're just gonna have such such such a
higher incidence of fire natural fire. The only problem is
we had major periods of fire suppression, so you can't
always just reintroduce fire to some sites. Right, Fire won't
carry through a thick ass four like the one you're in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it takes you got to manually thin first.
Speaker 2: But but where you were, but where you were in
the sandhills, you can tell that that is an area
that would not look the way that it does without fire.
I mean just now, yeah, where we were.
Speaker 1: Where we were, where's the good woods not the shitty woods?
R Right, it was open, it was beautiful, it was
long leaf. And then for that of diversity in the
understory scrub oaks, et.
Speaker 2: Cetera, well for the record too. So one of the
issues in the reason why we're unsure about fire in
the in the east, we don't have a lot of
public backing behind that. We also just to have some
ignorance too. Some people just aren't aware. But part of
it does come with the terminology. So if we think
about eastern forests, we think about the eastern deciduous forest biome, right,
that's basically all of eastern US. Well, it's not just
all forest. We have these woodlands and savannahs, and these
are similar to forests, but they have a lot sparser canopy.
So when you have an open oak, hickory woodland, when
you have an open long leaf pine, sand hill or savannah,
you have much most of your diversity in the understory.
So the minute like that, the woodland in Kernersville, I'm
not sure what it was historically, but oh shit, you
got rollers. They're checking people getting out looking for hemorrocalis.
But anyways, so when you change the perception of what
the dominant vegetation probably was in the southeast, you realize
that it opens up a lot of doors in your
mind to just accepting fire and then not just accepting it,
but thinking about what the best type of fire can right.
Speaker 1: And there's a nuance too. It's not a blanket approach.
It's not as simple as just light shit up there.
And there's a lot of other things that daffic factors
thin soils.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even just soils in general like that. So where
we were. The sands are super coarse, so you know,
historically you couldn't grow crops on those. It is basically
like desert soils. And the sands are just so much
more coarse than some of the places we're going to
see in the outer or middle coastal plain today, and
those loamier soils often support a richer flora in the understory.
But yeah, so there's a ton of factors. We know,
there's some grasslands that really persist because of thin soils.
They don't really need fire, they don't need mega herbivores, right,
they probably had those things periodically, but more often they
just have soils that are so thin you actually get
tree death. You know, you'll get a small tree that
will completely die in a drought year. Well, those are
the factors that keep that habitat of over.
Speaker 1: But where we I mean, where we were today, I
mean it was nice to when we were leaving in
beautiful Richmond County, we were driving out, you could see
the different stages recently burned, not burned in a few years,
not burned in ten years, and then the really long
you know, if they're fifteen years without a burn like
that last one we saw where it's starting. The forest
floor is starting to get dark. It's too dark for
the arist that had to grow the wire grass. It
looks like shit, it's not inviting. It's a lot denser.
There's probably a lot of ticks right in places like
that because it hasn't burned in a while. It was
nice you could see, you know, the stages that it
goes through, like you can see it start to fill in.
And how you end up with the trademark shitty woods.
Speaker 2: Well, you had this idea too that there was this
climax community for a while. And I know you're big
into climaxing in general, so let me kind of get
into this line. Oh so you had this idea that
the climax community and a lot of those were a
filled in forest, broad leaf deciduous deciduous forests. Well, actually,
you when you fire suppress, that's more of a disturbance.
You know, you actually are disrupting that ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So the climax sturbans dependence.
Speaker 2: These are grassland. These are old growth grasslands. Really, they're
old growth savannas, old growth grass and they have been
a volt They have evolved for thousands of years to
withstand periodic fire. You look at the plants there, you
look at like further south in lit kind of stomping
grounds like sarah noa salpameaino. It's a geophyt right, it's
like specifically evolved to just immediately resprout after correct.
Speaker 1: You see that the plants themselves in their traits betraying
evidence of you know, evolutionary fire history.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: And same thing in California too. You got the same
thing in South Africa, and same thing in plenty of
places all over the world. There are also fired depend
in Australia as well. You have plants that won't germinate
unless they're exposed to smoke. You have woody liigno tubers,
you have resprout mechanisms. You have infractescencis cones that light
up just like banksia or hespero ciprus in California, Banksia
proteac in Australia.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: And so when people say, how do you know that
this is was a thing, Well, the fucking plants tell
us when you look at them, and they wouldn't. Why
would you have seeds that don't germinate unless they're exposed
to smoke? You know, if if there wasn't a fucking fire,
things don't evolve that out of chance. So but yeah,
the disturbances are especially disturbance dependent ecosystems, right, and if
they don't get it, so there, So what are you
saying about climax, because there is no climax.
Speaker 2: Really, really, the climax is a long leaf savannah. It's
sparse pine canopy and a soup a super rich ground flora,
and so that is the climax in that case. And
same with grasslands. It's like, no, the climax is not
a woodland, it's not a forest, it is a grassland.
How is it maintained that way with frequent disturbance? What's
the disturbance fire?
Speaker 1: So grasslands are so much dope wher than force in
my opinion most We'll.
Speaker 2: Think about floodplains too, that's another example, like those are
periodically disturbed. Those plants need to be able to.
Speaker 1: Or in the very high cloud force of Mexico, the
room based landslides, they're they're the same thing in parts
of Chile, parts of Ecuador, high end these same ship
there's these fucking we get heard of. To stop saying it,
you know, if people can get past the frequent cursing
and the toilet and we're Scott. I think they're gonna
get some wonderful info out of this this conversation.
Speaker 2: Yep, I'll try to hold back.
Speaker 1: Oh please don't please let it out? Okay?
Speaker 2: Anyway, So, so, yeah, so what blew your mind the
most about those ails? I mean, what is it? Like?
What's the first plants?
Speaker 1: The sleepy at amplexic call is uh well, and also
the the convergent evolutionary forces at play causing things like
intensely hairy plants like that les padiza, I mean the yeah,
the roofs macho. I that's a what is it federally threatened?
It's endangered endangered, Yeah, federally endangered plant. Yeah. So this
is you know, really intensely tomentos sumac that you know
is colony forming, doesn't which the tallest that gets like
three feet.
Speaker 2: It doesn't get I've never seen it much taller than
like near or hip hepe.
Speaker 1: But so like what we saw in it.
Speaker 2: Also think about the zenobia that has you'll see a
lot of those super glaucus leaves that a lot of
those are, in my opinion, adaptations to high sun environments.
They have good, good soil moisture, but you still, you know,
don't want to damage your photosynthetic material in your leaves.
So yeah, you put a glaucus bluem on it, boom.
Speaker 1: And you put hairs on it, and it's it's sunny.
But there's also dappled shade occasionally too, as the sun
moves across the sky and the shadows of the long
leaves moved too. It's a really it's a really inviting
human you know, inviting habitat for humans to hang out.
You've got sun, you've got dappled shade, really lovely at
night it's open. Yeah, lots of fucking wonderful fireflies. And
then you've got these creeks and fens there too, like
the fen with the Saracenias in it. We saw three
different Saracenia species purporescence, rubra, and flava. And then there
was I got to see taxicodendron. Vernex made a comment about,
you know, flagulating my scroll them with it.
Speaker 2: You did say that, Yeah, it's a wonderful.
Speaker 1: Species to see. I love I love the u rush
all containing ration inducing plants.
Speaker 2: And quick shout out to poison sumac. It almost always
is in high quality wetlands.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't tolerate anything.
Speaker 2: It doesn't do quite as well with areas that have
been disturbed by humans. But when you see it as
there's often good stuff around it well.
Speaker 1: Because it needs it likes wet feet, but it also
likes sun.
Speaker 2: You were saying, Yeah, it really is an obligate wetland
plant and needs some open sun. So you'll see it
in some dapple kind of overgrown fins. But yeah, all
the way from Canada to Florida, you see it in
these interesting little seepitch eco tones and the habitats always
a little different, but the basic requirements are the same.
And that's what's you know, we're going to see that
today too with Calmia bucks of Folia. There's just so
many interesting case studies to think about evolution, and plants
always make a good model system for that. Insects I
always thought were great for that too, Like here's an
organism specifically designed to withstand attacks from other insects, super
hot temperatures. You know, plants are no different. But what
we'll see with Kalmia as an example, is it grows.
Speaker 1: In these.
Speaker 2: These distinct, disjunk parts of North Carolina, where the habitats
are pretty different. The provinces are different, right, The mountains
of North Carolina, far western North Carolina are quite different
than the low coastal plain, Right, but their habitat uplands,
dry soils, acidic, nutrient poor, stressful are the same. And
so it begs the question where was this plant?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: It used to probably be all over and now it's
only these three little patches. So there's lots of fun
questions to think about. But it's fun to just get
feed on the ground and just see these things and
compare them. I mean, it's you know, any number of
species that you could be interested in in.
Speaker 1: The Kalmia bucksifolia, this is the one you were saying
would do grade along the highways, but instead we get daililies.
Speaker 2: Well, I think, yeah, we could. We could. We could
have little sort of rare habitat highway gardens and we
could throw in a few hemorhocallis too, for the you know,
the normies.
Speaker 1: For the members in a square community. God, I fucking
hate daililies. Dailies are like the crape myrtle. Though you
do get crape myrtle, they're like the crape myrtle of
the east or the southeast.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's all dick. We're driving by a bunch of
dick scab right now, dicanthelium scab or eusculum.
Speaker 1: That's the one that goes up.
Speaker 2: Yep, it's super tall, super fire, super fire, that's right,
that's right, super super flammable vege. Another another indication of
pyrogenic regions. So the West, I don't know. I don't
know enough about Western fire, but I know in.
Speaker 1: The East there's longer intervals, just dryers.
Speaker 2: And so much elevation based too. But in the East
it's it's relative. But in the East, I think we
just have we've had such a such a greater incidents
of frequent fire. And we know this from people like
Jane Huffman, who is a pyrodendrocronologist and studied tree ring
cores in lots of long leaf stumps throughout the South.
She found as much as as much of a one
to two year return in some of these super open
savannahs and dry prairie landscapes in Florida. So yeah, we
have evidence. And not only do we have evidence of
the frequency, but she tended to see that a lot
of the fire fires were occurring in the April through
June period, so what they call in Florida the transition season.
So veg super dried out, right, the temps are drying,
temps are getting higher, Vege is drying out, and then
you start getting things like lightning strikes. Right, you can
start to get those early lightning strikes in early summer,
but you don't always get a bunch of rain. Sometimes
you get a lightning strike, it hits a stump. That
stump smolders for days and it lights things up once
things dry out again. So there is actual scientific evidence.
This isn't just saying yes, it seems like it's a
paratige community. No, it's we have fire scar data going
back three or four hundred years, and not only is
it telling us it was fire was occurring frequently, but
often within a particular season. So those are the two
big debates. Yeah, that frequency season how.
Speaker 1: West, I mean how west because it's it's less rainfall
and the hottest seasons also the driest. You've also got
different seasonality to the rains, you know, winter wet, summer dry,
especially in that chaparral and a lot of maritime chaparral
even around places like Santa Cruz, East Bay Hills down
into southern California. All the Arctostaphalos there's like, you know,
ninety different species and subspecies there are. At least half
of them are fire dependent. Like the seeds build up
in the seed bank and they won't germinate until a
fire or disturbance comes through. Sometimes if a place gets
like bladed mode or mechanically you know, the bulldozer goes
through scrapes that that can get them to germinate too.
But like around the Santa Cruz area, like ben Lamond, etcetera.
There's some really credible Bonnie Dune fire dependent.
Speaker 2: Actually stopped at Bonnie doing less a cruise cypress.
Speaker 1: Man, those cones stay closed for years until well, what
the fire melts the resident. Same thing. Knob Cone pine too,
same thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's what's the species am on Knobcone?
Speaker 1: Is it? It's not miracata, it's a tenuata I think
atten eighty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that one, that one's a stand replacement after fire.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and they walk off Spindley and even age stands.
You see areas of McNab cypress, you know, like near
Chico area and serpentine sils are the same thing. McNab.
Speaker 2: It's effectively it's like the sand pine. It's like the
sand pine or Virginia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they're all and they smell incredible, and they're
filled with this really pleasant smelling resin to holy shit.
The Santa Cruz and pig Maya cypresses smell kind of
like lemon. Tacaate smells like a sugary kind of frosty lemon.
And then you know the Mcnabiyana and Baker Eye smell
like some sort of like fancy cologna. Actually, it's like
they're really pleasant. They grow and you know the inland.
Speaker 2: Northern we saw something there. We saw a couple of
artistahlos there. This was in like October. But what what
amazed me about the Bonnie dunefire was the amount of
sand and general lack of vegetation between the big pines.
So it was interesting to me how well that fire
must have carried through there. It must have just had tons.
Speaker 1: Fright, yeahs fuel does, and that's why if it builds
up you get these bad fires and then you get
the Santa Ana winds in the early fall, late summer
as well. That's why it can be so bad. It's
because it becomes the air becomes like a blowtorch. It's
blowing laterally and everything's on fire and it just moves fast.
You know.
Speaker 2: It's like that song Babylon Sisters by Steely Dan.
Speaker 1: I don't know that one.
Speaker 2: Here, here come those Santa Ana wins again.
Speaker 1: Okay, right, well I believe you.
Speaker 2: But anyway, so so wait, Lily, have you met Geen Huffman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's a good friend of mine. She's the one
who did the research on the fire scars on the
really old pines a long leaf across Florida, and she
proved that the uplands, the majority of the uplands in Florida,
burned on a like one point five year return intervals,
so almost every single year they burned.
Speaker 2: Was she and was she meeting up with Nicole at all?
When Nicole was doing her tree ring stuff for long week? Youmember?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Nicole met up with her, and Jean worked
with Nicole.
Speaker 1: So this was controversial when this was coming out, I
mean like twenty or thirty years ago or oh longer
ago or what did Gen Huffman do? Well?
Speaker 2: Fire has always been Gene opened up our mind to
the frequency and the seasonality of fire. I mean, in
Florida is pretty different than a lot of the Southeast.
It has a really defined wet and dry season, so
you can't always compare it to the rest of the South.
But there were botanists that, in my opinion, were ahead
of their time that still didn't understand fire. In the
early nineteen hundreds, for example, John Counkle Small, he was,
without a doubt, I mean he was at MIYBG. He
was a Yankee botanist, but without a doubt, one of
the most important Southeastern botanists. Even though you know he
wasn't living in the South, he was coming to Florida
almost every year. He was documenting Florida on its very
last sort of run before a lot of changes happened
in that state, and so before it really got fucked
before it really got fucked up, and so you know,
kind of the nineteen twenties after Lake Okeachobe major changes
in the canals and hydrology of that lake. So that
sort of marks the beginning of an era when South
Florida changed dramatically. But John Counkle's small what you could
see him almost figuring out pyrogenic plant species live like
in his floras, he'll you know, or in his publications
he writes about these tiny little herbs that are maybe
six inches tall a foot long, and they have these
tubers that are like massive. So tiny little herbs even
have like these sort of geozilic stations they keep all
that's right, They keep a lot of their biomass underground.
So anyways, johnkos Small really was not a fan of
fire at the time because he was seeing a lot
of habitats get catastrophic fire, like wet wetter hammocks and
salt floter that probably shouldn't have had catastrophic fires. He
was seeing them burnt to a crisp and so he
had a bad taste in his mouth about fire. When
he was seeing the central Florida dry prairies burn, you
could tell that he wasn't looking at it in the
same light. But he also just didn't know what we
know now, right, And there wasn't a gene huffman back
then to tell us, oh, here's the evidence for this, like.
Speaker 1: This, this is happening because there hasn't been low intensity
fires for a while, and fuels accumulate and then she
gets out of control and then places burn that wouldn't
normally burn right right in intensity, they wouldn't normally there.
Speaker 2: And they're seeing that in the pantanol in the past
few years. Where South America, it's like it's like this
massive tropical swamp forest that has had a lot of
fire encroach into it from the Serato, from the nearby
savannah's because they're they're really dry seasonally, and so yeah,
you have ecosystems there that are on a much super
super infrequent fire return that are now getting savannahs sort
of encroached on them, or the savannah is expanding into
some of those habitats. But there's lots of there's lots
of other problems there too.
Speaker 1: But Saho and Brazil is some of my favorite fucking
habitat I've ever been in. It's so cool.
Speaker 2: Actually it's pronounced Serato.
Speaker 1: Oh it's not, because it's Portuguese. I didn't want to
come out and correct you in front of everybody. Okay,
you know, but this it's just we're already there and
doing it. Okay.
Speaker 2: The other one is, uh, what's the one? What's the
plant west of what's the common name for folk folk?
We are electric that's right, that's the one I was thinking.
Speaker 1: Electric.
Speaker 2: So yeah, fire is fire is less controversial, and Florida,
interestingly kind of leads this leads the state and acres burned,
which is one of the few things that Florida actually
leads the state in. That's a good thing.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of fucking's burning. Now, that was
very impressed.
Speaker 2: Wait did you not like that, Lily?
Speaker 3: What No, I was just gonna say. It's also Florida
has the highest like rate of fire or sorry, of
lightning strikes in North America. Besides just one spot in
Mexico has a slightly higher rate of lightning strikes. So,
but one of the reasons why our our ecosystems are
so pyrogetic is because of those high rate of lightning.
Speaker 1: They're sure run on three sites by water. You got
a lot of by warm waters, so you've got a
lot of storms going on there.
Speaker 2: Oh well, yeah, so Florida has this crazy thing. We
could do a whole episode about Florida and you know,
cultural just we could do episode just on the culture,
the rich culture of efflash. Yeah, but anyways, the uh see,
now I'm distracted when you do that. What were we
talking about well, yeah, we went. The dry and wet
season in Florida is driven by these convective currents that
come off the coast in summer. So the reason why
you get those daily thunderstorms. Well, the Panhandle though, does
get some influence from that, Like Eglenn, you'll get you'll
get daily thunderstorms.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of burning though. Man. When you
go to Lake Whales Ridge and you see I mean
there's like there's you know, who was it who's stay
with Alan? And uh what's his wife's name? Fuck? I forget?
Yeah they no, no, no, not Brett, no the fire.
They were fire starters. They were pyroat.
Speaker 2: Colleges, Allen and Alicia.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah about you know, and they
have all these stickers, you know, talking about fires and
fired at all the toolboxes and stuff, you know, on
the doors on a fridge yep, right back of the cars,
like there's it's a thing like it's.
Speaker 2: Did you see their skull collection? Well oh wait no,
that's wait sorry, that's uh that's Dustin. He's the he's
at Archbolt. Alan and Alisha are great. They they want
me to come to their new house because they have
a bunch of rare endemics in their lawn.
Speaker 1: They got they got that pygmy. Yeah, it was nice.
They have air blows cold throughout that trailer. Oh yeah,
you're very comfortable. Didn't they have dogs, dude, don't they
have a sweet dog or something?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they have a little nice dog forget oh
h shuey or something. Yeah, it's like a little uh,
it's a good sized dog.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So Alan and Alisha are pretty ecologically woke.
A lot of people in Central Florida aren't aware of
what they have, and so I would like to see
a lot more support of you know, these scrub communities
in their lawns. We see zir escaping in the air
at Southwest, why don't we see scrub scaping in Central Florida.
Speaker 1: They got a backyard that they it's like they have
a restored stuff. Yeah, they're just taking care of what
they got that they're talking about putting stuff in the front.
Speaker 2: But well, Nancy, Nancy Bisset, she's really one of the
og native plant people in Florida, and she has shown
that it is really easy to recreate Florida ecology in
your yards.
Speaker 1: And you can make scarguard from getting taken over by
not all grass and all the invasive bullshit.
Speaker 2: That that's a hard part.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, that is That's what Alicia is dealing with
in her yard, is the natal grass and that that
new long gone the tanglehead. What's that genus?
Speaker 2: Oh, chrysopogon No.
Speaker 1: I remember you remember you talking about Yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: Has super long on, yeah, super long gone. Anyhow, it's
it's becoming beautiful, dense colonies, very difficult to eradicate except
with herbicides, and that's really the only way they've been
able to manage them as herbicides.
Speaker 2: Most well, most most of those lawns are already like uh,
Augustine or maybe bermuda.
Speaker 1: So I've imagine you have that plant community which is
so incredibly cool, and you plant fucking horticultural atrocities. Man,
you should be tarred and feathered. I'm sorry, man, that's just.
Speaker 3: Like the Saint Augustine is actually a native species though,
that's that is the one thing. But of course it
would not have occurred inland, and it would not have
occurred in the quantities that it does because of our song.
Speaker 1: But I'm even talking about that, I'm talking about I'm
talking just about all the ship that you see planted
in Florida and here just like this fucking garbage, like
the Laurel pedalum we saw everywhere, hedged into little with
the red leaves to drill the eye in and hedged
in the lolly popul this wax shit. Yeah, oh, it's
just vomited a can.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like Edward Scissors scissor Hands never let
his grip off of American horticultural trends, like I see
these Edward Scissors scissor Hands landscaping all landscapes all the time.
And I saw one of my favorites the other week.
It was it was literally someone had had pruned two
separate hedge species into each other, and one of them
was one of the non native azalias. And so every
other like two feet on this this whole hedge along
this laundromat, every other two feet was a bunch of
pink flowers.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: It looked it looked like, you know, some wild sort
of thing going on.
Speaker 1: But anyway, okay, speaking of rhododendron, so with anthrodote to
the nausea, the Rhododendron atlanticum, Yeah, we saw last night.
That was a fucking stunner, a little super fragrant. Yeah, man,
I mean, although, what was the amalok here albavada or something?
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 1: Wait?
Speaker 2: Which one?
Speaker 1: That dwarf amaloch here there's oh alba alis. Yeah, in
the understory of God the fucking long leaf pine forest
at dusk. Man, that was just like, yeah, we got there.
My eyes lit up. That Lionia mariana. It was a
cool host of different Vaccinium. Yeah, Galasacia species.
Speaker 2: Well, you you got a good sense too of how
you have your upland wiregrass, long leaf. You have your
lowest stream head vegetation, which is where the actual streams
are originating right in the landscape, and then they'll flow
into actual streams. But you know in there you have
smile ex lower folio. You have some of these more
wet adapted plants. Well you have that strip between them.
That's where the good stuff is. That's where we were
seeing the saracenia. That's where seeing a lot of the
rare plants that are monitored by folks like NCA Heritage, right,
so natural heritage, so they specifically target those ecotones. So
I showed you one case of we're looking at the ecotone,
and I showed you that in some states they'll put
a fire lane right there, and they do it for
a couple of reasons. Sometimes they don't want peak fires
to last for days if it's really drying happen. But
that those fire lanes do quite a number on a
lot of those rare plants. So going over that critical
going over that critical ecotone. Yeah, so I'd like to
see a little less ecotne fire lane conversion in the South.
But sometimes managers, you know, have some reason for that,
some reasoning for doing that. Plus not not every single
ecotone is gonna be suitable for those types of species.
But we know Shwallby American American chafts seed only occurs
in those sand hill seat but gicotones, So you have
to target those areas of hell.
Speaker 1: Every buddy White because I already mentioned this plant a
few times, everybody, why you're excited about.
Speaker 2: This one SCHWALBYA is you know it's it's a little
yeah oorbank case, it's I don't know if it's a
heavy parasite. It is likely a lot of oor banks
are at least heami parasitic and it probably is a
heavy parasite on various yeah, grasses and forbes. But anyways,
it looks cool. It's different than a lot of our plants.
But what it really needs is fire. It will not
it will not flower without fire, and you're gonna have
a hard time finding it if the site hasn't burned
in a while. If you look at the original distribution
map of Schwalbia, it often it was pretty widespread in
a number of counties all the way up into the northeast,
and if you look at its current extant distribution now
it's in far less counties. It's basically been wiped off
the map because of fire suppression and habitat.
Speaker 1: Beautiful plant with those red flowers.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, And really.
Speaker 1: The corollas are like they got like tricombes.
Speaker 2: And they're super like they're like a weird sort of
magenta purple red or something. But anyways, it's a really
it's become a lot rarer than it would have been historically.
But even historically it would have not persisted on the
landscape without fire. They found it. Well, that's a little
story about Shoulbia. They've refound it after like sixty years
of being historical. I think in Massachusetts after a burn.
Speaker 1: Oh it may have.
Speaker 2: Even been a little bit more than that. But they've
refound it in an area hadn't been seen in that long,
so it can it can be rediscovered in a lot
of the South.
Speaker 1: So fire was even calming up in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, it was everywhere. Fire scrub fire has
been the dominant global disturbance for a lot of the
recent history in Earth time. I mean, it is the
dominant disturbance. It's touched every well, I don't know about Antarctica,
but it's touched every major continent. It is the dominant
force behind why so much of the trustrial part portions
that we're playing, look the way they do. It's the
reason why we're having problems like the Palisades fires. Right,
it's the reason we're seeing massive wildfire is now occurring
because if you build up that match box long enough
and then spark it, it's gonna go up in flames.
Speaker 1: Right, You're gonna have fire either way. What do you want?
You want you want low intensity fires that are periodic,
or do you want fire suppression for a long time
and then a massive, you know, inferno that destroys homes, And.
Speaker 2: I know, Joey, you are you kind of like that
idea of massive inferno.
Speaker 1: I'm a bit of a catastrophist. That mean, it depends
where we are, you know, like the for Worth area
needs some sort of catastrophe. Probably a large part of
Texas does at this. But I'm just kidding. So so, Lily,
you don't want to offend people.
Speaker 2: Lily had a funny story. Can you share this with
us about the shwaby you pictured years You took pictures
of years ago.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so I had never seen shwamby before. I
thought i'd never had and then I was going through photos,
old photos of mine for some reason, and I saw
that I saw it maybe like fifteen years ago, and
had no idea what it was and I saw it
and then completely forgot it. And yeah, that's my story.
Speaker 2: Wait wait can we hear that again. I'm just kid.
Speaker 1: How long did you see it fifteen years ago? And
how did you were just going through photos and you
were like, oh shit, yeah, yeah that's happened to me
before me. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: That is definitely. I mean, you look, if you don't
know anything about plant families, you wouldn't even like you
wouldn't even be able to get it to Morobank Hasey.
You'd have to understand that it's some sort of weird
oro bank because to mention something that rare that hasn't
been seen a lot in recent decades, yeah, few people.
Fewer people are gonna know what it looks like.
Speaker 1: But but fire suppression directly attributed to its declining popular
Where you saw.
Speaker 2: It and it just burned, yeah, it had it's it's
it's another, it's another. It's another one of those plants
too that when you see it on scorched earth, it
really pops. Like another great example, strongly pyrogenic plant species,
Calipogan multi florus. It only flowers about two weeks after fire.
And so you're walking on this scorched earth and like
some scrubby flatwoods or flat wood pund flat woods, and
you'll see this beautiful it's super super dark purpleish pink.
It's really amazing. But it's like the only thing you
see come up and it's the only thing flowering that
soon after fire. That's you know, again, one of those
dead ringers for pyrogenic Southeast is plant species only flowering
after fire. Well, they probably need fire to persist. Why
would they be here if they didn't need it?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, Yeah, it's it's crazy how people get severed
from the land that they live, you know, just from
any knowledge or awareness of the land. That could be anywhere, right,
That's that's what the Daily at least teaches. You could
be You could be up in Connecticut, you could be
in fucking Kentucky, you could be in Florida, doesn't matter.
You're in a highway ramp somewhere. It all looks the same.
Who gives a shit about regionality, about ecological context, about
millions of years spent evolving in a place. It's the
same as any other. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Well, you know about the theories behind why plant blindness
is more of a prevalent occurrence than animal blindness. There's
like theories about this shit. You can read papers. There's
like I just learned about some of them. But there's like, okay,
so if it's not within your eye height, so if
it's like you know, wate tight or lower, less less relatability,
if it's not it doesn't have eyes, if it's not
like a moving thing. So there's all these theories on
why plants have been really given the sho short shaft
of attention.
Speaker 1: I think it's just it's they're only going to be
as prevalent as the culture that you're a part of
makes makes them.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, they're the same people who are plant blind
often are also animal blind. So it's not like, you know,
they're only but a lot of plants.
Speaker 1: But a lot of it's horticultural atrocities. Right when plants
are supposed to have variegated leaves or flower all the time,
and that's what they're known for. If they're not medicinal
or edible, right, then they need to be they damn
well better be seen as conventionally attractive. Which what does
that mean, right, like for the lowest common denominator. Shit, Right,
I've got a big flower and it's showy or it's
got fucking very I fucking hate variegated. Shit, they fucking
hate verygated.
Speaker 2: I like seeing naturally variegated for modeling. A little modeling
never hurt. But yeah, I think it's corny when it's
like the garden section.
Speaker 1: Man, it's so lame.
Speaker 3: The thing that irks me is because native plants, you
can't patent them unless you do something to them. Right,
and they make money off of these horticultural atrocities by
patenting them.
Speaker 1: And we're making cult of ours. You can do the
same with natives.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and that's what they do to all of
our natives that become popular. It's like that redbud that
is with the deep dark leaves, and they tend to
not be very healthy or thriving plants when you select these,
you know, highly selected cultivars that are just why can't
we just have some natives and we need seed grown,
we need that genetic diversity. That's so critically important because.
Speaker 1: You're select because again that's just European gardening model, right,
you're selecting for esthetic. That's all that matters, right, the
context ecology it is not important.
Speaker 2: Well, the thing too is if you get if you
get a tree with a short bloom period, then I
think some people think, well, if we have like a
showy foliage, it's show yer year round. My argument is,
have enough diversity so you always have color going on
in your garden. And how can you accomplish that with
native plants.
Speaker 1: Let's see for Illinois banning, it was.
Speaker 2: Just gonna say put on some motivational music after that or.
Speaker 1: Illinois, Illinois banning Bradford pairs, which the thing, Oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, trees yep. Uh So wait, I was there was
one other thing I was gonna mention.
Speaker 1: Oh uh talking about pyrogenics.
Speaker 2: So pyrogenics is kind of like eugenics. Are you in
the eugenics at all?
Speaker 1: What is it new tropics? Is that? Like?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of so I put in my youth
through in it.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, it's kind of like that, except not without
the earther It's kind of like, yeah, supplements and it's
apocalypse ready. So if you want to survive the apocalypse
and you also want to build muscle.
Speaker 1: Masks, I can't think. Yeah, I don't know what this
guy's talk about it. I can't listen to this stuff. Mark, Well,
that's that's that you talk about all kind of goofy stuff.
You don't know what are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And then we have eugenics gen x that's like what
you're doing to me when you don't wear a mask
and you like come in the same space that I'm.
Speaker 2: At, Okay, And then there's pyrogenics. So so fire producing
generating fire, and what produces what generates more fire than wiregrass?
Then draw biomass. So yeah, I mean we could talk.
Speaker 1: You could talk some species. That's why you were saying this,
why the risk that is strict? The right is such
an important understory species in the long leaf sand hills.
Speaker 2: I do have I do have a random botany thought too.
I just thought of so we've we've debated this a
few times, and I'm curious what your thoughts are, and
maybe Lily to us some thoughts. What the maximum number
of species that a botanist can know? And I think
you can compare it to like the they do these
face studies again, this other recent paper.
Speaker 1: I've mean like just be able to like verbally describe, well,
this so stems all that, or just like be aware
of well.
Speaker 2: Okay, if we take the human example, if we say,
how many humans can you think of? Or can you
number my face?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And think about like I graduated with about three hundred people,
and I can remember almost every single one of those
people and their face and maybe even what class I
went to.
Speaker 1: Right, it's so long.
Speaker 2: Isn't that weird? But like it's you know, it's something
I think about the plants. Okay, I haven't seen this
plan fifteen years or I've seen a kalmia before, but
I've never seen buxifolia or you know, so there's all
these criteria right.
Speaker 1: Right, genius, I get things down to genus a lot.
I've stopped remembering species because I just don't have the
bandwidth for it. That's what ininad is for, what my
ad record is for. I can look stuff up, get
myself a refresher on I'm going through it.
Speaker 2: That's right. But that's what the armchair botan is are for. Yeah,
the arm chair.
Speaker 1: What do you mean the guys that's sitting in the
offices and just we're there for what? How would they.
Speaker 2: Assugst Yeah, like those those guys that work for Baria
and stuff.
Speaker 1: Actually they're gonna come they flagulate you.
Speaker 2: What were you saying, Lily.
Speaker 3: I just want to encourage people to get to know
their local flora because you don't have to know everything.
You don't have to know everything, but falling in love
with your local flora and getting to know the names
and the families that are common in your area.
Speaker 1: He saw he saw a men's room. This is but
he knows that well, okay, it's a public men's room.
That's his public mensrum so sorry.
Speaker 2: I know it's weird that they put it right there
on the highway, but we're gonna tur around so we
don't miss.
Speaker 3: Return, all right. But it's like getting to know your
it's a community, your neighbors, your friends, and then you
know there you begin to know their names, you begin
to become very familiar with them, and you can recognize
them at all stages of their growth.
Speaker 1: That should be taught in grade school.
Speaker 3: You should, yes, and you should know the ethnobotanical uses
for all your local native plants. Like I want people
to really fall in love with their native flora instead
of salivating over the flora of somewhere else necessarily. I mean,
it's cool to do that, but if you if you
focus on what is around you or what used to
be around you, I think that's much more useful to
the long term sustainability of the human space.