Thank you for sharing your concerns. I've always believed birds are the best at natural pest control. I've posted your Call-to-Action for everyone to think about their yard and if what they are adding in to environment is really necessary:
This is summer time, and it means babies, babies, and more babies for our beloved birds. At the same time it means gardening and lawn maintenance.
Most people want to have lush, green lawn, a carpet of thick
grass. Unfortunately it means that we use fertilizers and pesticides.
It is very good and generous to feed wild birds year round,
but it is not enough. Most song birds have to feed insects to their young to
raise them successfully. And there are beautiful birds people tend to forget:
swallows, purple martins, and swifts. These birds are aerial insectivores, they
catch insects in flight, and they are strictly insectivorous.
In recent years lawn maintenance businesses became quite
aggressive in promotion of mosquito spray. Offers to protect a lawn from mosquitoes are very numerous, flyers come in mail and are tucked to the front
doors.
As much as I dislike to be mosquito dinner, or to get some
virus from a mosquito bite, there is a bigger issue to consider. There is no
such thing as ‘mosquito spray’ that
kills only mosquitoes. Mosquito spray is an insecticide that kills all the other
insects as well. The pesticides used to kill mosquitoes end in the ground water,
and, eventually, in marshes, ponds, rivers and all other bodies of water. If
this ‘mosquito war’ continues we will start loosing our birds, they will not be
able to raise their young. Or the new generations will be too weak to survive
the winter or migration, even with the support of bird feeders.
The birds that we do not see on our bird feeders actually
suffer the most. Recent research shows[1] that aerial
insectivores require a diet of aquatic and/or semiaquatic insects (insects that
spend the larva stage of their life in water) for proper function and to raise
healthy chicks. Aquatic and semiaquatic insects provide these birds with
long–chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA), fatty acids absent in
terrestrial insects. Bodies of these birds are poorly equipped to metabolise
fatty acids present in terrestrial insects. If the chicks of these birds do not
have enough LCPUFA in their diet, their growth is stunted, immune and nervous systems are compromised.
The widespread use of insecticides leads to disappearance of
the number of aquatic and semiaquatic insects. Not only mosquitoes disappear, but
dragonflies, mayflies, lacewings, and many more insects as well.
Considering the fact that the cumulative area of private,
corporate and municipal lawns in the US is almost equal to the area taken by
agriculture, we have a looming environmental disaster, disappearance of number
of birds if we do not stop killing insects.
I would like to ask all bird lovers to make their lawns
no–spray lawns, and use personal mosquito protection instead of ‘mosquito
spray’, and encourage their neighbors to do the same.
[1] Omega-3
long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids support aerial insectivore performance
more than food quantity. Cornelia W. Twininga,1, J. Thomas Brennab, Peter
Lawrenceb, J. Ryan Shipleya, Troy N. Tollefsonc, and David W. Winkler aDepartment
of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853;bDivision
of Nutrition, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 148 and cResearch and Development,
Mazuri Exotic Animal Nutrition, Purina Mills LLC, Gray Summit, MO 63039
Related Articles:
Concern about fertilizers and bluebirds' health http://lansingwbu.blogspot.com/2013/09/concern-about-fertilizers-and-bluebirds.html
The Chemical-Free Lawn is Bird Friendly http://lansingwbu.blogspot.com/2012/02/chemical-free-lawn-is-bird-friendly.html
Natural predators of ticks http://lansingwbu.blogspot.com/2017/06/natural-predators-of-ticks.html