The Duggan Sisters

Congratulations to the next generation of Q Brothers!

Merz Apothecary ❤️❤️❤️

An 11-year-old Chicago rapper known as JJQ is stepping into the spotlight after a dinosaur-themed rap at Austin City Limits drew 10 million views.

Yay for Illinois! We just became the first state in American history to pass a Rewilding Law. Bison are coming back. Beavers are coming back. Wetlands are getting legal protection they have never had. And if you read this carefully, you'll understand why what just happened in Illinois is unlike anything this country has ever actually done before.

Most environmental laws in the United States are defensive. That's the honest truth of it. They protect what still exists. They slow the rate of loss. They draw lines around what's left and say this far, no further. They are, at their core, about managing decline more carefully. They are not about reversal. They are not about going back to get what was lost.
Illinois just passed something different.
The 2026 Rewilding Law prioritizes not just protecting existing natural areas but actively restoring them. Wetland protection with real legal teeth. Reintroduction of native species that were driven out of this landscape generations ago — bison and beavers specifically, two animals that didn't just live here before they were removed. They built this landscape. They shaped it. They made it what it was.

You need to understand what beavers actually do to a landscape, because it's not what most people expect. A single beaver family can take a degraded, eroded stream and transform it into a fully functioning wetland — creating standing water, slowing flood damage, filtering agricultural runoff, and producing the kind of complex, layered habitat that supports insects, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals at a scale and cost that no human restoration crew can come close to matching. Beavers do it for free. They do it constantly. They do it because it's what they are built to do. You just have to let them back in.

Bison do something similar at a grassland scale. Their grazing patterns — heavy in some places, light in others, constantly shifting — created the diversity of the tallgrass prairie that once made Illinois and the surrounding Midwest one of the most ecologically productive landscapes on earth. That prairie is nearly gone now. The bison disappeared first, and the prairie followed. The science on what happens when bison come back to degraded grassland is consistent and striking — the diversity returns, the soil health improves, the insects come back, and the birds follow the insects.

Illinois looked at that science and passed a law that takes it seriously enough to act on it.
Look at that photo. The wetland. The open water reflecting the sky. The tall native grasses. The bison grazing quietly in the middle of it. That is not a fantasy image of some distant wilderness. That is what Illinois is legislating into existence — not as a museum exhibit, not as a tourist destination, but as a functioning ecosystem that cleans water, controls floods, stores carbon, and makes the land around it more resilient to everything that's coming.

This is what conservation looks like when it stops being purely defensive and decides to be genuinely ambitious. Illinois drew a line in 2026 and said: we're not just protecting what's left. We're going back to get what we lost.

🎩

We have two native Burr Oaks in our yard thanks to the squirrels! 🐿️ Do you have a favorite native tree? Have you planted any? Or did the squirrels gift you any?

You watched him again this morning.

Same squirrel.
Same feeder.
Same sunflower seeds scattered onto the ground while you stood at the window wondering how something so small could empty a feeder so fast.

But the strange part isn’t what he’s eating.

It’s what he keeps doing after.

He grabs one seed…
runs ten yards…
stops…
digs…
covers the hole…
and then leaves it behind.

He doesn’t eat it.

And he does this over and over.
All day.

Last October, that same squirrel spent six weeks running across your yard carrying acorns, walnuts, and hickory nuts one at a time.

Not to a pile.

To thousands of different places.

Each nut goes into its own hole.
About 1–2 inches deep.
Carefully covered.
Then he leaves.

He remembers many of them.

But not most.

An Eastern Gray Squirrel buries between 3,000 and 10,000 nuts every fall.

And he forgets about three quarters of them.

That means one squirrel accidentally plants thousands of trees every year.

The math looks like this:

10,000 nuts buried
× 74% forgotten
= about 7,400 planted trees and shrubs

And your neighborhood doesn’t have one squirrel.

It has many.

Across a single acre of suburbia, squirrels collectively bury tens of thousands of seeds every autumn.
Some get eaten by other animals.

Some rot.

But many survive winter.

And those become the young oaks, walnuts, and hickories you see appearing along fence lines, parks, and empty lots.

He’s not just hiding food.

He’s designing the future forest.

Squirrels are scatter-hoarders.
They deliberately separate each nut so no other animal can find them all at once.
The side effect is something important: trees don’t grow in neat human rows. They grow where the healthiest seeds ended up.

Squirrels even reject damaged nuts — they can detect hollow or worm-filled seeds by smell and weight — which means the seeds they bury are usually viable.

While digging, they also loosen compacted soil, letting water and oxygen enter ground that lawn grass sealed tight.

All winter, mice, chipmunks, and birds survive off the caches he never comes back for.

You installed a squirrel-proof feeder to stop him.

But what he’s actually doing is the same work professional reforestation crews do — planting individual seeds across huge areas so forests can regenerate naturally.

Except he works every day.

And he doesn’t charge anything.

The trees on your street didn’t start in a nursery.

They started as a nut a squirrel forgot.

Love is. ❤️🐾. Tasha, one of our amazing UPS delivery folks, left Peanut a treat along with our early morning essential oil delivery today. This should have been a video so you could get the full tail wag excitement of him discovering it!

Peanut has learned that our UPS drivers are an essential part of our small business Team Duggan! We’re off to make the stinksticks!

Apparently we have to start getting in line to use the office treadmill. 🐾🐾🐾 Peanut has dibs today! 🤣🤣🤣

Apparently, Annie has been cracking Clare up since 1969. 🤣Life doesn’t stink with super sisters by your side. Whether you were born into their family or chose them along the way . Post a pic with your special sibling…

How’s your Thanksgiving going? One bonus of skipping turkey this year is enjoying a big brunch: green beans with vegan parsley almond pesto, topped with a soft boiled egg, with hot gluten-free cheddar biscuits right out of the oven. We enjoyed it all with a hot cup of and a yummy fruit salad.

So grateful for the healthy food on the table. What surprises did your table have?

Dear Duggan Sisters Family,

At this stage of my life, Thanksgiving Day is every day, or at least I aspire to that enlightened state.

I’ve loosened my grip and my youthful fantasies of creating the perfect Norman Rockwell holiday moment, opting instead for a more flexible and easy-going approach. I know I am not alone.

A dear friend recently shared with me that as the next generation assumes hosting responsibilities for her clan, they’ve announced that nine chickens will be roasted to replace the traditional turkey because, to quote them, TURKEY SUCKS. We shared a laugh. We let it go. We gave thanks.

Fraught politics, a fractured history, and ever more complex and diverse eating styles are being expressed in vegan cook-alikes, and, in our family, gluten-free everything. And it’s all good as we gather around the table and give thanks that we’re still alive, even as we tearfully remember loved ones who’ve gone before us.

Last year, we did it up right,.. click to read Mary's message: https://duggansisters.com/blogs/life-blog/thanksgiving-day-is-every-day

Let the holidays begin!!! The Duggan Sisters are out and about at the first holiday event of the season, joining our dear friends at Greenwood Archer Capital - our amazing microlender - for oodles of good news in the year to come. Enjoy your holidays, folks. It’s the most wonderful time of the year - for small businesses in Chicago, the Duggan Sisters, and hopefully all of you.