Reviving the Ozark Chinquapin: A Journey of Preservation and Restoration
The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Steve Bost, the president and founder of the Ozark Chinkapin Foundation. We chat about the complex history of this plant, the research and breeding work they're doing, and so much more around the complex history of this plant, the research and breeding work they're doing, and so much more.
Andy:
Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Please tell us a little bit about your work and the origins of the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation.
Stephen Bost:
Okay, well, thank you, Andy, first of all, for inviting me on. The information is absolutely powerful, so I thank you. The trees can't talk, so thank you for them, though.
But a little bit back to your question, though, about the origin of it. Ozark chinkapin has been around. If you go by the DNA tests that are being done, all of them keep pointing the same way that it's not the relic American chestnut species. That's the oldest; it's the Ozark chinkapins. The range of it was widespread. It thrived in really well-drained areas, whether it be rocky or sandy soil, all the way from East Texas and Oklahoma and even Kansas, all the way across, even to Illinois. I think that's where you're at, correct.
Andy:
I'm out in New England, but I know it's been found in Delaware, which we can talk about in a little bit.
Stephen Bost:
Yes, and so they extend all the way out to the Atlantic coast. And so if you look at modern tree books, it shows a very small range and it's so obscure now most people don't even know anything about it. And so to understand the Ozark chinkapin, you have to first of all understand what happened to the American chestnut. So the Ozark chinkapin, you know, their range extended all the way into where the American chestnuts have, and so you know we've got.
You know some people say 3.7 or 4 billion American chestnuts were killed from the chestnut blight. You know Cryphonectria parasitica that came from Asia, and so as it spread and killed the trees, there are places where you have American chestnut. There are also naturally occurring Ozark chinkapin trees, and some people get hung up on the name. Basically, to make it easier, if you look at what they were saying over 100 years ago, they said there are chinkapin bushes, and there are chinkapin trees, and so further east, they probably weren't quite as abundant, but they were actually there. And so as the blight spread further to the west, it also was killing the Ozark chinkapins.
It would eventually reach the western part of the range in Texas and Oklahoma by the 1960s, decimating them.
And so what was once a very important tree, and more so here in the Ozarks, we don't have natural American chestnuts here west of the Mississippi River; we have the Ozark Chinquapin, and so they were a lot more abundant, probably more widespread, and much more common here.
But if you talk to people today, they don't understand what you're talking about, and so we had to do a lot to actually prove it with historic records and old newspaper articles from all over the native range of the tree. So it's been a lot of work on a lot of population scattered, and we're doing a very large DNA and molecular study through Missouri Botanical Garden, and so so far I've collected samples from Delaware, Georgia, there's some in Virginia, but I don't have enough time, we've got a short window. I don't have enough time, we've got a short window, and we've got some from Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, you know, all of the native range of the tree, and so I'm really excited about this study. It'll let us know several things. First of all, if there's any foreign Castanea actually mixed in with the genetics that we're looking at, it will also help us with populations that are probably a little bit different because of geographic areas than other chinkapin trees throughout the native range.
Andy:
Yeah, that's great. It's always really interesting to think about how quickly so many species can get lost just within, you know, the lifespan of a human right. So we're talking about trees that were very common on the landscape 75, 100 years ago, and within a generation, two generations, they've basically become this thing that, for folks like yourself, you have to tell people that they were once here, despite them being so common, and that's really frightening in a lot of ways.
But also, it does speak to how the way the ecosystem evolves on a scale that is so difficult for us as humans to really fully appreciate and understand. I mean, I don't know about where you are, but where I am, we have, like I'm sure you have, the same issue of invasives, and it's a lot of those species that become so normalized that people don't realize what's missing, what's lost because of those invasive species just moving in and displacing everything else.
Now, the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation doesn't just do research in this very scientific way. You guys also have a lot of applied science that you do, looking at the ways these trees have been used historically and, I'm assuming, also, in some ways, using them as an analog for how the American chestnut was also used. I know you guys do like bow making or have at least tried doing bow making and making bowls and all these other things that you know you need big trees to exist to do it, and if there's a big American chestnut, you're not going to cut it down to make a bow. You know what I mean Exactly. I don't know if you could speak a little bit about that before we kind of get into some of the more nuanced stuff about these trees; you bring up a couple of really insightful things going on that we have to deal with.
Stephen Bost:
And you know, you go back in time, you know, three or four decades. The problem with the invasives is not like it is now, and I've worked just a little over 26 years with Missouri State Parks, and of the last, I guess, four years or so there, my marching orders 20 hours of my 40-hour work week was getting rid of invasives. And you know when you're dealing with invasives you know they have the advantage of. You know they green up sooner, they stay green longer, and they're pushing our natives out of the way. And whenever you go into an area that's overrun with non-natives and you clear them out, you see some pretty amazing things happen.
As long as you can keep those invasives out, in a short period of time, you see things like insects you've never seen before show up because now there are native plants, you know there's native wildflowers and different grasses that pop up, and then there's a whole plethora of insects and birds and amphibians that depend on those and evolve with the native species. In fact, they did one study in Missouri here a few years back, and you're probably familiar with bush honeysuckle, so they found out that it actually takes over a forest. You can look out through it all through the lower canopy, and there's talk that they even emit a chemical that will keep other plants that are native from growing when you remove those. There's nothing there.
They found out that the red berries because the natives aren't there, like a lot of our native, like wild cherry or the grapes, you know, or spicebush, so now there's the red berries off these invasive plants, you know, of this bush honeysuckle, bush honeysuckle. So a lot of woodpeckers and birds, like cedar waxwings, eat so much of those berries it actually changes the color of their plumage. So guess what? The females don't want to mate with them because they aren't the right color. So, color for birds, you know, they're really focused on specific colors.
So populations are declining because of that, because of the new food source they're eating, and so there's little bitty things like that that tie into it. That's why growing native is the way to go. These animals, these insects have evolved with them, and so when you put that back in place again, then you see some pretty amazing things take place. So the invasives is a big component that everyone deals with and you go along the road and you look on both sides of the road and today I'm going to say roughly 50% or more of what you see along roadsides are not native, they're invasive plants. They're not native.
Andy:
The scary thing with bush honeysuckle that we see here with hardy kiwi as well is most of the invasives, like you were just saying, tend to stay in those early succession spaces, whereas when you start dealing with these shade-tolerant invasives, it's a whole other animal. It really is, yes, because usually, it's like, well, bring in the natives, they can crowd them out, and otherwise, when you can't crowd them out, it becomes a totally different battle.
Stephen Bost:
I'm glad we're having this conversation. This is a very interesting thing, you know, with the proliferation of trade and travel, we're the reason why these invasives are here, whether it's invasive insects or plants, and but we also have the power to do something about it. One really amazing thing that I see, and I'm glad to see this is awakening and people understanding that we need to restore our native plant species and also rare ecosystems that depend on those. And when you do, some pretty amazing things take place and happen. But there's a lot of people now that have the mindset that you know, I'm not going to buy this or plant this because it's not native. I'm going to go with something that's native, and so that mindset is really important, I think, in overcoming the return of any species and bringing it back.
Andy:
Now, the Ozark chinkapin is, while I was saying earlier, you know, in a lot of ways, it does fulfill in an ecosystem a lot of things that chestnut might because they're so closely related in terms of what they can support for pollinators and caterpillars and so on. What's really interesting is that, as you said before, they tend to occupy a slightly different place in the landscape and have always kind of existed kind of on the periphery of the forest, in those drier settings. So it's in that unique kind of like post-oak, white oak, drier, you know, an area where there's not as much competition, diversity and so on, and I feel like that's probably something that's going to benefit the tree in the long run.
With climate change and all the things that are happening right now with our, you know, the climate, you know, the weather patterns, all these things that just seem to be rapidly shifting, even with our best models, it doesn't seem like we're able to fully capture what's happening. And you know, you see these charts that'll say, you know, in 50 years for here, the northeast is going to be wetter, it's going to be warmer, and you know, up until this year, we've had a drought for the last three or four years. So even if on a longer scale it is wetter, that is not a consistent thing where it's wetter every year or every month or anything like that. So, having these trees that can handle these bigger extremes, I think, is going to be more and more valuable moving forward.
Stephen Bost:
Yes, good point. And who knows what we're in for? No doubt about it, we affect the world around us. Then, sometimes Mother Nature comes in, and you'll have a mini ice age. I mean, have a mini ice age. I mean, you know, it happened in 1816, no summer, and so it snowed in June, July, and August, and, you know, in parts of the US. So sometimes Mother Nature reminds us that we don't have all the control we think we do sometimes.
But yeah, and it's something to be aware of and it's something that we need to be mindful of. But at the same time, too, though, with something like this, you have to move forward. If you look in areas of the range of this tree just this year, down in Texas, Louisiana, southern Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, even parts of Georgia, we've got some places where we're having, like down in southern Mississippi, where there are even, you know, oaks and pines and even hickories dying. And I just talked to a gentleman yesterday, and he told me that in Texas, this was the driest year, at least for them, that he had seen since 1957. And so you know, there, you know we could talk a lot on that whole topic, but you're exactly right though.
Andy:
Yeah, the chinkapin, I think, is going to be more and more important, these trees that can handle those kinds of conditions. I'm curious. So you've been doing a lot of research on the chinkapin, obviously looking for the Ozark, but historically speaking, if you look at older documentation from colonists up until about the 18th, early 19th century, there had been, I believe, depending on where you look, between like seven and nine different chinkapins that were identified and then later on they all became part of one chinkapin and now they're real re-realizing that there was actually some understanding that there are these different varieties. Now, with all the knowledge that you have and experience you have, right now there's three-ish, if you recognize the Alabama chinkapin I'm curious about your thoughts if there's more or if there's more nuance to even the Ozark itself. S
Stephen Bost:
Well, at one time, I believe, they had as many as 12 different varieties. And again, to make it easier, I don't get really hung up on that I go back in time. The way they used to talk about them. You know, they said there's a chinkapin bush, and then there's a chinkapin tree, and an old book from 1908 actually had a picture, and it talks about the chinkapin being a bush. It says, however, that sometimes they can attain heights around 60 to 70 feet tall. They had a picture of them in this book, which is rare for the turn of the century, and they went on to say that. You know, usually they make a bush.
As time goes on, we're able to look at more and more markers. It changes what we know about them. And to summarize this, this whole conversation we're having about this, my daughter hit it really well. She does our website, she does our backtesting, and she's a really good researcher. And she said something really profound. She said the only thing that has changed about the Ozark chinkapin tree is our understanding of it. It's always been the same and with this study that we're doing, we'll get more information about them that'll help us and so, as far as trying to dissect them.
I got in some samples just here recently from Georgia, and there's a lot more mixing. It seems like the further east you go of foreign Castanea, whether it be European chestnut or Chinese chestnut or even Japanese, and clearly what I got that they thought was an Ozark was a Chinese, or at least it had some mixing in it, and you run into that. If you look at old articles from the 1930s and 40s, when the chestnut was declining, they talk about different imports that they liked. No worries about it; we've got you covered.
We have Chinese chestnuts that'll make large nuts, just like the American chestnut will, so there's a lot of people that are actually planting those, trying to, you know, in some way deal with the loss of the American chestnut, and then, as the blight moves further west, you see a similar thing happen, not on such a wide scale, but you see it take place on the west side of the Mississippi River as well too, and so it's just people, you know, well-intentioned, trying to do something to make a difference.
That's not what we're doing today, though, but we have to deal with it. We have to keep our radar open, and when we have studies done, you know, whether it be a molecular study or DNA study, and try to glean from that information well, is this pure? Is there any foreign castanea in it? And so what we're trying to do is make sure that we're number one, making sure it's North American, and there may be some natural ad mixing going on. You know that's not hybridization. That's where you'd have the same common parent. That may be thousands of years ago, and so we're. You know, we're real sensitive to geographic areas, trying to make sure, as much as we can, that we restore something that actually came from that area.
Andy:
Yeah, it didn't even occur to me that you'd have that mixing like you do with American chestnut. You know, trying to save the American chestnut or replace the American chestnut or hybridize the American chestnut to be more resistant, and what the consequences could be for the chinkapin didn't even occur to me. But yeah, that's a big deal, and it makes sense that it was primarily the East Coast, where those efforts were mostly driven by researchers on the East Coast.
Stephen Bost:
Yeah, ultimately, the blight first showed up and was noticed too, and I think now it's even before the Bronx Zoo in 1904. They're thinking it could be here as late as the 1800s, but it was not noticed until then that would make sense.
Andy:
I mean, there's so much travel happening in the late 19th century, I mean it was bound to come one time or another. There's no way around that, unfortunately. I think, and now we're experiencing it with basically all of our keystone species. I think, and now we're experiencing it with basically all of our keystone species. I mean, you name a keystone tree, and it's got some kind of major issue to deal with, whether it's a beech or, you know, you go through the list, unfortunately. In terms of the Ozark chinkapin, I'm curious about your thoughts on whether or not it can return back to the landscape. I know it's more resistant to blight, and you guys are working on that. I'm really interested in the kind of where you see the Ozark 20, 50 years from now.
Stephen Bost:
In fact, we have blight resistance. It's taken 17 years to get where we're at now, and so, through the blot testing that we've done, we actually at one time had about 9 to 11 percent, better than Chinese chestnut, and right now we're pushing around 28 to 30, 31 percent on some of our parent trees on resistance. And it's taken a lot of work. So we will take one surviving tree, and we will cross, pollinate it to another one, and then we will outplant those. And then, you know, out of just ballpark figure, roughly 60 percent of the trees are produced by doing what I just described with controlled pollination.
They'll be like the parent tree, they'll have good resistance, like both parent trees will, and then 20 percent of them may have less resistance than the parent trees, but then another 20% may have higher resistance than either parent tree did. And so those are the ones that we focus on for the next crosses and we repeat it again. And so you know, we've got some trees, you know, two and a half, three years, we start getting nuts off of them, and these things sometimes will grow very quickly depending on the habitat where we put them at.
Some of them may only grow a few inches or a foot. Some will grow two or three feet in one year. Some of them, with just a little bit of care, will grow four feet or even five, and some of them the second year they'll make pollen. Third year they'll make nuts, and not all of them. The second year they'll make pollen. Third year they'll make nuts, and not all of them do that, but some of them will, sure, and so that turnaround really helps us. So what we look at is, and kind of going back to our earlier conversation, um, we've got blight resistance now. So the next big one that we're really focusing on, with all these droughts that we've been dealing with, is trees that have greater drought tolerance. That's the next big thing we're working on now. So we've been doing experiments and we've been not watering trees on some of these restoration and research plantings that we're doing to see what happens. That's awesome.
And we've had some surprises. We've had some trees die, and some of them actually thrive and grow better than trees that we're watering. In fact, right now, as we speak, we've got at Hobbs State Park, which is in Arkansas. The naturalist Steve Churchill, and the volunteers give a shout-out to them. They actually had a drought-killed tree, and they're actually carefully doing an archaeological dig, excavating all the roots, and they're finding out some pretty amazing things about how these things can survive drought. We don't have all the end results on it right now, but it's pretty amazing information they're coming across. It's never been published or found out before and so little things like that.
Knowing about the trees helps us be more successful in trying to bring them back. In our breeding program, you know we look for number one, which is the highest blot resistance. Then, number two would be drought tolerance. Right with it would be early nut production, real rugged, fast-growing, and tolerance to a lot of other things.
And we deal, you know, talking about invasives. These trees have to deal with Asiatic gall wasp, which has decimated a lot of chestnut trees, and we're actually immune to it. Dr. Sandra Anagnostakis did a study and found out that the Chinese chestnut and the Ozark chinkapin were immune to gall wasp damage, so we've got that on our side. Then another bad one that we all have to deal with any chestnuts and this is the invasive Asiatic oak weaver. And so, even though they attack oaks, they love chestnuts, and they really go after them. So when we plant these trees and put them in wild settings, it's real minimal care given. We want them to be able to make it at home, and we found out that once the trees get roughly 10 feet tall, there's no problem with the Asiatic oak weevils eating the leaves. We found out we've got a helper.
The helpers that we have are neotropical birds, particularly the northern perula. They will actually glean every insect off the leaves of those chinquapins from about 10 feet up, and so it's incredible, you know when you bring something back. So these are a boon for a lot of populations of birds like neotropicals, and particularly whip-poor-wills as well. So just another little thing we found out in the last couple of years.
Andy:
Yeah, you know, that really points to the fact that when we lose trees that long ago, like the American chestnut or the chestnuts in general, from the landscape, we don't really fully have a full picture of how the ecosystem worked before those trees were gone. Like, we have very rough, you know, descriptions and things like that, but we didn't have the resources to to fully catalog things the way we can today. So it's going to be really interesting to see what comes out of, you know, reintroducing these trees back into the landscape.
Stephen Bost:
We may never know. I've got a picture of John James Audubon painted in the 1800s, sometime before 1850. And he's got a yellow trout warbler and a chinkapin tree. And I've got a picture that we took actually this spring, I guess in May, of one today and one. So it's kind of like the return.
Interestingly, too, talking about all this stuff, there was a bee that was thought extinct and tied into the American chestnut. I may not be saying the scientific nomenclature correctly, but anyhow, this bee had not been seen since the loss of pretty much all the American chestnuts.
Well, about, I guess, over two years ago, three years, something like that. One of the head entomologists that studies bees actually found that bee in Connecticut, and it was not on an American chestnut, it was on an Ozark chinkapin, and they thought this thing was gone, and so we had again.
It wasn't documented, but this was one that was. And then there's a butterfly called the King's Hairstreak butterfly, and I don't know if there may be 30, give or take samples of those found since the loss of the American chestnut, but this particular butterfly, though, unlike the bee, though actually specialized in chestnuts, and so where we're at the west of the Mississippi River, natively, occurring in part of Louisiana, and that butterfly was found in Mount Magazine, Arkansas, and so there's a lot that we don't know.
There are a lot of pages waiting to be filled on the restoration of this tree, and it doesn't have to do just with the nuts. You know they're good to eat, wildlife loves them too, and they have a significant impact on the forest because they make nuts every year. But there are a lot of empty pages waiting to be filled on the story of this tree and its comeback.
Andy:
Yeah. So, are you eating any of those nuts, or do you save them all?
Stephen Bost:
I eat some. I use them. The ones that we generally eat are the ones on the trees that don't have as high resistance. That's the way we decide which ones we will and which ones we want. And they're really sweet. They have a unique flavor. They're like a real sweet kind of almond peanutty flavor and the neatest aftertaste I've ever tasted. And they're packed full of protein a little over 15% protein and right at 61% carbohydrates, and if you compare that the protein is roughly double the American chestnut. They run 5% to 8% in protein. So you're looking at a nut that is making, you know, over three times the protein of a white oak acorn, and so that's pretty significant.
Andy:
Yeah, that's pretty similar to, I think, a hickory, but also, it's much easier to process. Is there any difference in flavor profile between the Ozark and the Allegheny?
Stephen Bost:
Both of those are really sweet. I can't tell much of a difference in them. I've read before that the Allegheny is sweeter. I've eaten a lot more of the Ozark so I don't have a real good handle on that one. Here in Missouri, we don't have any naturally occurring Allegheny chinkapins here. It's a little bit different where you're at. You've got to get further down into Arkansas to find the upland Allegheny. But there's a second variety of Allegheny, you know, Castanea pumila. That's a coastal variety. It thrives better on wetter areas from like Texas coast all the way down to Florida and all the way up to New Jersey, and I've eaten a few of them, but not many, not enough to really get a good answer for you on that. But I know they're definitely good, too, the ones I've eaten.
Andy:
Yeah, I was always curious. I've had a couple. I've ordered them because I've never found any wild chinkapins around here. They're very, very rare in New England other than the ones you plant.
The profile that you described is very similar to how I would describe them. So I was just curious. So maybe you could, if there was a nuance to them if you could describe them because if you've had them, you're probably a handful of people that have had both of them and knew that they were from different cultivars. So that'd be an interesting comparison.
There’s also an interesting history of historical Ozark chinkapins in Delaware, way outside of the, as you said, the historical range of the Ozark, or at least how we think of the historical range of the Ozark, but also like the, the implications it has that a tree was moved that far from its, again, that natural habitat origin, whatever you want to call it. From what I've heard, you did go to Delaware, or at least you were invited there. I'm not sure if you've been there, but I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit.
Stephen Bost:
Yeah, I had to cancel one of my trips out east. I've been in conversations with folks all over the eastern US, and I will be going out there too, though. But it's kind of interesting: If you were to ask someone going along those lines what the native range of the American buffalo or bison, whichever you prefer to call it, would be, what would your answer be?
Andy:
Because of the research I do, my answer is probably not normal compared to most people's, but I think most people would assume the Midwest.
Stephen Bost:
The Midwest, ok, and I invite you to watch a special by Ken Burns put out on October 18th called the American Buffalo; I know this from historical research. I've got a degree in history and one in science, and so I love this stuff and dig into it. So they were actually all the way out to the Eastern US American buffalo, American bison, whichever you choose to call them. So if you ask most people that, they would say no, they were, like you said, in the Midwest, or they were out west.
Native Americans traveled out west to hunt them, and that's not the story. They were here, and in great numbers, the Native Americans. They burned to encourage more production of nut-bearing trees and grasslands for hooved animals, and so in archaeological digs, they see this, and the evidence is there. And so the reason I use the American buffalo as a comparison is that those are chinkapins about the same way, too.
It may well be that that's not a population separated from the rest of them. Their population extended all the way out there. If you look at the evidence from archaeological digs and radiocarbon 14 dating, if you go back 400 years before the present or 6,000 years before the present, Native Americans were utilizing them, and that goes all the way out to the Atlantic coast. So we keep finding more information.
I don't have a good answer for you if those were all by themselves, but I'm thinking, since we have pictures and information and articles and newspapers, you know, from the late 1800s talking about Chinquapins being in Maryland, talking about them being in Virginia and some of these other states, North Carolina, it makes you wonder just how great the range actually was. So the same thing like if you ask someone like American bison, where was the range at, people say no way were they in New York, no way were they about where the District of Columbia is at today.
But if you look at historical records and accounts and you accept the fact that these people aren't making this up, it happened, and when you research this, you find some more really interesting information.
A lot of people wouldn't believe that in the original 13 colonies, some of them outlawed deer hunting because the deer population was declining so much because of overhunting. And the same thing happened to the American buffalo. And so a lot of times when you go back, and you really dig and look at this information, and then you look at the evidence and archaeological digs and trash pits, it will change what you actually think.
And I want to say, and I can't find it, but I think somewhere in National Geographic, they did a thing about animal populations based on trash pits and Native Americans. And it was really interesting what they were finding, not just randomly but enough, where they were pretty confident about saying the populations of a lot of species, like the American buffalo, had larger ranges than what we today think. You know, and I think the Ozark chinquapin fits right in with those buffalo too.
Andy:
The funny thing is, you know, we talked about these native species that start to spring up when you return these trees to the landscape. The inverse also happens with the buffalo. I know Dr. Natalie Mueller had done some work with buffalo being rematriated with the landscape outside of New Orleans, somewhere in Louisiana, and what they found was when the buffalo would work through the landscape, suddenly, for whatever reason, the way the buffalo were working with the land rolling in the ground and on all these different things, they started to see new native species kind of come back that their seeds must have been in the seed bank, but they needed something specific to happen in the landscape. That, for whatever reason, the buffalo, the bison was that piece, that kind of whatever had to happen to those seeds happened, and they started seeing this rebirth of really rare native grasses and things like that, which is just really beautiful and a reminder that the landscape can recover if we allow it to.
Stephen Bost:
That's the key word, if we allow it to. You're exactly right. That's encouraging to hear information like that. If you think about it, one of the biggest tragedies besides the loss of, like, American chestnut and Ozark chinkapin is the loss of all that real fertile prairie soil. That took thousands of years of Tall grass growing on it. Their roots go way down deep. Some people find it hard to believe, but some of them are 12 feet, 14, and 16 feet deep, and so the buffalo played an important part in that. And so it didn't matter if you had a burn if you had frozen, whatever it was that real deep root base they would survive those droughts and they would come back.
So along we come, you know, in the 1900s, we plow everything up, destroy the prairie sod and basically destroy all but just less than 100 wild roaming buffalo. And then along comes drought, and then we plant wheat and corn on the ground, and it blows away all that topsoil.
If you talk to people that went through the Dust Bowl here in the 30s, it was incredible about how much damage was done, and that soil is never, you know, it's never grown back. You know it's gone. But it's up to us, like you said, we can actually do something today to restore that and make a big difference in it. And it's encouraging when I hear stories like what you talked about, the reintroduction of them, and I know Native Americans are going in, and they're actually introducing buffalo to their different reservation lands, and you know, at one time, it was an important food source for them and for thousands of years this happened, and they coexisted with it and co-edited with it, and I think there's a big lesson for us to learn from Native Americans. You know, they were in the business of doing conservation burns long before we got the bright idea, and they coexisted and then over-utilized populations, and so a lot to be learned there from it.
And we work with the Cherokee Nation, and you know, on restoration, they do a lot of work on ethnobotany plants that were one time important to the Cherokee Nation, and it's really inspiring and encouraging to see them bring back these native plants like gills or chink of them, and they had many names for that tree. One name that they have for it is the bread tree because they would crush up the nuts, make like a high protein type of um, a flour with it, you know, to cook with, and so it's, uh, it's encouraging to see all this happen.
Andy:
I do feel similarly that we're kind of at the early stages of relearning how to respect and care about our landscape, but that process is really slow. In conversations like this, the biggest challenge is always finding out the things you don't know. You don't know what you don't know, so how do you get there to learn those things? And that's kind of been a lot of what this whole project has been about, and you guys are doing really great work.
What we do typically is we have an episode, and it's paired with a research episode, which is fact-based, and then a conversational piece like this, and the research-based episode a lot of the research. I did end up using stuff that you guys have on the Ozark Chinkapin Foundation website because you guys have an incredible catalog, especially of news articles and things like that, which are really fascinating to read because it's really interesting to see how news reporting has changed, and it becomes very obvious when you start reading these old newspapers that'll have one paragraph about a tree and the way they describe the tree. It's like you can't read it and not smile when you see those types of things and, um, that, that is the little, the only thing I'm going to give to the audience so that they have to go to the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation website because it's really cool.
Stephen Bost:
Yeah, we have one of our board members that will type in and you're in which state right now.
Andy:
I'm in Massachusetts.
Stephen Bost:
Okay, Massachusetts, okay, very good; he will take a state like Massachusetts and type in Chinquapin and let it scan back and see what he can find in it, and we glean all kinds of really good information. I love it, really surprising, and? But if you want to get something done, though, take a lot of different people like working on this tree to give you an example that has a resolve to bring this tree back. You know, they've heard stories about it, they've seen it, they know, and you can't put a price of money on it, and you have different backgrounds of people that are involved in it, looking at it from different angles and different ideas.
We’ve got technology on research, and then you got boots on the ground. You know where you get out there and are doing something with it, and you get a group of people together like that, and you can get huge things accomplished. And it's just amazing what we've done in a relatively short period of time. And on the science part of it, just the cutting edge technology we're doing with the, the cutting-edge technology we're doing with the block testing has pushed us ahead easily 10 years, and maybe even 15 years, from the old way that we're going to do it, so we are way, way ahead of where I thought we'd even be at this time, and so it's really, really a good thing to do.
And then, on the other side of the coin, too, something else that's happening that I'm really glad to see. I just came back from a program that was done, and it was a forced walk where they had different characters along the way, dressed in costumes like blight and like a chinkapin tree and a squirrel and a woodpecker and even someone from the past, and along the way, I was amazed at the five and six-year-old, eight-year-old children that understood completely about what this meant and how important it was, and so it's really inspiring to see younger people really involved in this effort and volunteering, wanting to make a difference in it, and I think that's something that we leave behind.
It's important to know that what we're doing is something not just the wildlife will inherit, but also our children and future generations will inherit. When you have something like that going on, it strengthens your resolve about what you're actually trying to do.
Andy:
I think this pulls back into the Ozark Chinkapin Foundation and what you guys are doing, and I will plug that. I am a member donor to the Ozark Chinkapin Foundation. One of the cool things is that you guys are a nonprofit, so donations are tax-deductible for people interested in listening and wanting to donate. You guys and I haven't gotten mine yet, but you also give away Ozark chinkapin nuts, so I don't know if you could talk a little bit about that.
Stephen Bost:
We're not in the business of trying to make money. We're in the business of trying to restore species, but we need the money desperately. But what we're trying to do is make it affordable. So when you joined, you spent $30 unless you decided to donate more. we usually give five seeds out to people, and there are no guarantees. But they came from parents that tested really good blight resistance and so you know you could have some that are even better than their parents.
It could be some less, it could be about the same. And so these are ones that we have field tested. They are rugged, they're survivors, and so we're trying to allow people on their own. And it's interesting because we work with agencies like US Forest Service, like departments of agriculture, we work with universities, we work with different other organizations Cherokee Nation National Park Service I was out planting trees with them on November 1. And so we work with all these different agencies.
But it is people like you and people that have maybe a backyard, a back 40, or they have some other wild property, and if they have suitable habitat and they want to try to grow them, then we encourage them to do it. We're trying to make it easy for them to do it. At just $30, you get five seeds, and we're going to have to have the first price increase we've ever had, probably at the beginning of the new year. We've held the prices down, but shipping keeps going up, and we use that money to help us perpetuate our work. You know, and that's what we go by in donations, and, as you said, we're a nonprofit, so when somebody donates to us, it goes directly to this. We have no rent; we have no electric bills, no heating bills.
You know, we all donate our effort from where we live at, you know, we spend money on gas, rebar, and grow tubes, and we do research and testing, and everything goes directly into that, and we try to be real resourceful with our money and our time. And by all means, though, we appreciate donations. But these seeds, though, are a way for people to actually do their own restoration, and sometimes we have people say, well, you know, we don't want seed, but we want to make a donation to try to help you, and there's something for everyone. Some people, just by telling other people about it, can make a difference. Some people we've had say, well, I want to make a bigger donation to make a difference.
Some people can say, well, I want to volunteer and help, you know. I want to help you find trees, and I want to help you water them. I want to go in Massachusetts and I want to look for trees I think I may know where there's some at. Everyone can make a difference in this. At the same time, everyone can make a difference in this, and at the same time, you're not just bringing back species, you're also returning a rare ecosystem you know that's been missing from or, you know, anywhere from 60 to maybe 120 years or more, and so everybody can be a part of it. And I appreciate that plug on it, but it takes all of us working together.
It may be somebody that just looks at, maybe, historical records of surveys and say, hey, you know what, when they first surveyed this part of Massachusetts, the species, we had species here that aren't here now. You know, I see where the beech trees were here. Well, guess what? You know, 94 percent of them are gone now. Or they may say, well, you know, we had a certain species of pine or any number of things, and so knowing that they were there at one time helps us, and it helps you understand what it was like before.
You know that we changed everything. We do have the ability to go in and work with each other and try to reverse some of this before it's too late. And some species are teetering on the edge right now. So there's a sense of urgency, especially with what we're doing with the Ozark chinkapin. We're losing trees every year, you know, remnants of them, and even though we're restoring them, we're still losing more than we're restoring back, and so there's that thing that we've got to do what we can, and sadly there are some trees we didn't get to in time to save the genetics on, and so that's what we're trying to do is find these rare surviving trees, whether they be in New England or North Florida or wherever they may be at, or, you know, in Indiana or Illinois, it doesn't matter, and they're still out there.
We've got historical records of them all the way across to the Atlantic Ocean, and just because we don't see them today like the American buffalo, that doesn't mean they weren't here at one time. You know, you have to kind of think of it in those terms.
Andy:
Steve, this has been really insightful. I'm really hopeful for the work you guys are doing. I think the more people that know about the Ozark Chinkepin, the better we're all going to be. So I appreciate the work you're doing, and hopefully, everyone listening also goes and checks out your website. So, if people want to go, check out the Ozark Ozark Chinquapin Foundation. Steve, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on.
Stephen Bost:
If I could say one last word, I'm just the leader of the group, but we've had so many people, like our board directors and volunteers and even people years ago, like the LED Foundation in Missouri, who believed in what we were doing and supplied the land to help us do this restoration work. So it's a pleasure talking to all of you. Thank you for being part of the restoration, and thank you for spreading the word.
To listen to this interview, tune into episode #185 of the Poor Proles Almanac.