If it's growing in Alabama, this is red ring milkweed Kyle Liebarger has to know what it is. If I saw a plant I didn't know what it was, they would just bug the mess out of him until I figured out what species it was. The professional forester has taken his love of plants and grasses to social media. A couple years ago when I stopped on the side of the road to gather some butterfly milkweed seed pods. Where he's amassed more than half a million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. And while they may be drawn to his unassuming manner, his message is about conservation. Well, in my part of Alabama and most of the southeast, we had prairies. Kyle wants to protect natural grasslands and the plants that often go with them. Our goal is to make sure that these populations don't keep declining. I mean, our prairies, we've lost 99.9% of our prairies in Alabama. You can't find them anymore. And it used to be the dominant ecosystem. One of Kyle's most cherished discoveries is on this privately owned land in Edawa County. Soon he plans to help remove many of the fast growing trees here. In another five years, there won't be any grasses or wildfires growing in here. Unless we get in there and bring fire back and remove some of those. That's really the story of the entire state. We had so many savannas and they've all become close canopy to where there's too much shade for any native plant diversity in the understory. Those plants include this, the only known population of purple milkweed in the entire state. Preserving their beauty is only part of it, he says. Every plant, including the milkweed species, has a part to play in nature. If you don't have this one type of plant, a milkweed, you don't have a modern butterfly. It's that simple. Without plants, without native plants, we lose native wildlife. Everything, every species of wildlife, either eats native plants or it eats something that eats native plants or eats insects that depend on native plants. It's the foundation. Kyle hopes by educating others he can build a community who seeks to preserve that foundation. So what could you do to help? I asked him. As homeowners and average person, the best thing you could do is make sure you're landscaping's native. And at the very least, make sure you're not planting invasive plants that will escape the wild and outcompete these plants. Kyle has also created the native habitat project, which provides property and forestry consultations, performs prescribed burns and native plantings. It's now become his full-time job. It just feels like the right thing to do. I mean, you go to garden centers and you look around and 99.9% of the plants there are from Asia or Europe. And I'm like, where's all the American plants? Where are the plants from Alabama? Because these are the ones we really should be planting. Whether it's on a piece of private property or on the side of an interstate, this young father says he wants to preserve a part of Alabama's past for its future. That's a lot of it, trying to make sure this stuff stays around for them to be able to see. Because I mean, even just our grandparents used to talk about having quail everywhere. We don't have that anymore. The live auger tells me he plans to make and sell t-shirts and also use crowdsource funding to help continue his mission.