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Gary brings up a good point about some of our decisions about habitat, its restoration, and modifications.
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Early in my career I read an article by a WDG Wildlife Biologist. He described a situation (probably made up) of a corner of his yard overrun with blackberries. A song Sparrow nested there. In honor of his European roots, he annually "collected" a bird or two to eat. Every year the sparrows nested and produced young. Then, he decided to clean up the yard, install a gazebo and fire pit, and make the yard neater. No more sparrow nesting, no more sparrow eating. He had converted a piece of land from supporting Song Sparrow to essentially reducing the world population by a pair and their young. Like putting up those barriers instead of blackberry.
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The second was in conversations with an entomologist regarding proposals to replace (exotic) stands of eucalyptus in coastal CA with native shrubs and such. This would remove the trees in which Monarchs wintered and not replace them (Monarchs have site fidelity) for decades at the minimum.
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There are times when exotic species may be providing ecological services that the native plants don't/didn't. Not saying that we should keep all the exotics but perhaps a deeper dive into the services they provide and how the loss of them will be mitigated.
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<span class="signature-truncate"><span class="signature-truncate">Hal Michael<br><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Board of Directors, </span><a style="font-size: 12pt;" href="http://ecowb.org/">Ecologists Without Borders</a></span></span>
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<span class="signature-truncate">Olympia WA<br>360-459-4005<br>360-791-7702 (C)<br>ucd880@comcast.net</span>
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On 08/15/2025 5:48 AM PDT Gary Bletsch via Tweeters <tweeters@u.washington.edu> wrote:
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Dear Tweeters,
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Although I favor native plants in a passive sort of way, I will never bad-mouth the Himalayan Blackberry--if that is still the right name. I owe my life to Himalayan Blackberries.
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In December of 1990, my 1971 Dodge Dart started sliding and spinning, doing 360's all over Interstate 5 in Tukwila. I'd hit black ice. After bouncing off a little subcompact, the car went careening toward a semi, which I somehow missed. I distinctly remember saying goodbye to what had seemed like a pretty darned good life up to that point. A moment later, I was sitting in the driver's seat, utterly unharmed. The bulb of a huge freeway light pole was slowly swinging back and forth right, a cubit from my window. I had clipped the pole, which landed on my roof, denting it only slightly. The front of the car had plunged into a huge patch of blackberries, which absorbed the impact of a 3000-pound Mopar going 60 mph. The frame was not bent; I just needed a new radiator and a few dents hammered out.
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Today there is a line of concrete barriers where that blackberry patch used to be. If I had hit that, I would almost certainly have died, or at least suffered serious injury.
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At my old place in the Skagit Valley, we had huge, long thickets of blackberries. The goats and I had our work cut out for us, keeping it under control.
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White-crowned Sparrows and several other species nested in there. I don't remember exactly what birds ate the fruits, but many did, certainly including Starlings, Towhees, and Robins. In winter, I'd have all sorts of interesting birds sheltering in those thickets, including White-throated Sparrows almost every winter.
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Besides being my goats' absolute favorite food, the blackberries provided an enormous bounty of fruit, and blackberry pie was a major feature of our late-summer diet every year.
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Yours truly,
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Gary Bletsch
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PS I did a birding trip in the foothills of the Himalayas a few years ago, visiting India and Bhutan. While I saw <em>Cannabis sativa </em>growing wild all over the place, I never saw a blackberry. Maybe "Armenian Blackberry" would be a better name. The <em>Wikipedia </em>article states that the plant is native to Armenia and northern Iran.
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