Combine Personal Experiences, Stories, and Facts to Warn About Pesticide Harm

My excitement for the sweet little bluebird couple nesting in a box in my front yard is tempered by the ritualistic spring habitat destruction going on all over my neighborhood.

Watching bluebird parents work all day to forage for insects to nourish their babies brings hope and worries.

“Spring clean-up” often means shrubs and trees severely pruned by a third or removed just when nesting season starts. Bluebirds are cavity nesters and benefit from nesting boxes, but other birds such as brown thrashers and cardinals are dependent on shrubs and small tree for nesting spots.

About the only use that the mature non-native shrubs in all the yards around me offer is habitat support for birds to nest in, seek cover, and find shelter, yet every spring many of those shrubs are disfigured or destroyed and put on the curb as yard waste just when nesting season begins.

More troubling is the spring proliferation of fresh pesticide signs from trucks generously spraying poisons and mosquito spraying services creating toxic death zones for insects just starting to emerge to start a family – including the native bumblebees looking for a new place to nest and the solitary ground nesting bees creating a nursery for their young who will emerge next spring. One pesticide “treatment” and they’re gone along with the next insect generation.

A whole generation of bumblebees can be wiped out if the queen bumblebees out looking for a place to start a new nest in the spring is harmed by a pesticide application. This queen bee was in my safe rewilded yard searching carefully for just the right home!

Unfortunately, Atlanta is pesticide central, literally, because the #1 pest control company in North America, Rollins (known by Orkin brand) is headquartered a little more than two miles from my home. They’re so successful they can throw money in all the right places to get a pass to destroy our city and state with poison.

Orkin doesn't just send out trucks to destroy the local ecosystem, they use their influence to greenwash the harm they're doing to our city and the world.

My hope is my rewilded yard and the few yards on my street that aren’t blanketed in poisons are enough to sustain this little bluebird family with insects for their babies as they tirelessly forage from dawn to dusk. I often put out some daily mealworms during nesting season to supplement all the dead yards around me and level the playing field just a tiny bit for them.

So many of the yards where I live are soaked in pesticides that I don't know how any birds are able to find enough insects to feed their babies!

I encourage everyone reading this to not only resolve to not use yard pesticides of any kind (this includes organic pesticides!) but also to step outside their comfort zone and tell others about the harm pesticides are doing in the world right outside their front door. Despite what pest control ads want you to think, there's nothing neighborly about destroying all the insect life in a yard with pesticides when pesticides are one of the top reasons for the 30% bird and insect decline in the last 50 years and directly responsible for the 80% monarch butterfly decline in just the last 20 years. Pesticide use in just one yard affects all the surrounding yards.

There is nothing neighborly about poisoning the neighborhood! The spray from this backpack mosquito blaster filled with poison affects all the yards on the street.

We’ve been culturally conditioned by the industries selling them to be blasé about the poisons liberally applied to yards. When confronted with the harm pesticides cause, there's a natural defensiveness about using them. To counterbalance this a bit, if the opportunity comes up, we need to try to listen to other perspectives about the reasons pesticides are being used to be able to respond to the fears that drive people to use these toxins. When we share our own personal experiences, stories, and facts about how pesticides are affecting wildlife and people we're more likely to be heard if we're low-key, authentic, and as non-judgmental as possible.

Pesticide use just doesn't make logical sense to prevent an infinitesimally small chance of getting a disease, having a harmless insect bite, or of looking at a lawn with unwanted plants growing in it. When someone is intentionally polluting their yard with multiple poisons the cure is much worse than whatever fear is driving the use of them. This is why learning more about the fear can create a stronger common ground for a conversation.

Most people are sincerely surprised when they learn something new about a topic they never gave much thought to. When it comes to pesticide use, it can give them pause to weigh alternatives or become open to the idea that what they’re doing is not ideal. It might mean making small changes or in some way scaling back the scope of destruction they may be causing to the local ecosystem.

When I mention hummingbirds can use the tiny spider webs around our outside windows when making their nest and birds forage for spiders in the webs to feed their babies, it changes the perception of spider webs from annoying to special. I also share how we stopped using a pesticide service years ago because they destroy those webs.

Our brains also needs to hear something multiple times before processing it and acting. My approach is to authentically and consistently work in little snippets of information along with observations from my yard whenever any yard related topic come up. I’m passionate about nature so I honestly can’t help myself! The stories that seem to get the most attention and give pause are the ones that clear up common misconceptions and illustrate how pesticides affect the most beloved creatures in our yards including butterflies, hummingbirds, bluebirds, fireflies, and even our own canine fur babies!

We don't get many monarchs in Atlanta so the gulf fritillary is a more accessible butterfly to illustrate the imperative to have a pesticide free yard with native host plants. My small rewilded yard is filled with gulf fritillary caterpillars munching away on the native purple passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) in late summer because I let the vines go a little wild in anticipation of the butterflies finding my safe sanctuary to complete their life cycle. (The butterfly in the photo is laying eggs on a passionflower vine growing on my front porch)

• Just about all the birds we see in our yard except goldfinches only feed their babies insects (the number is 96% of terrestrial birds in North America) - so we want to have plenty of insects in our yard. (Most people put out birdseed thinking this is all birds eat)

  

  We want our yard abundant with a diversity of insects! (Photos taken in my small, urban rewilded yard)

• About 80% of a hummingbird's diet is made up of insects - so we want plenty of small insects in our yard. (Most people love hummingbirds and think all they need is nectar)

  

  Hummingbirds need nectar from native plants like coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) for 20% of their diet, but they also need the insects native plants support for 80% of their diet - like the 29 species of moth and butterfly caterpillars that use the coral honeysuckle as a host plant including hummingbird hawk moth caterpillars and other sphinx moth caterpillars.

• Dogs in yards with professional lawn care services have a 70% higher chance of getting canine cancer. This is a deeply personal story for us because we lost our sweet boxer mix Honey at 5 years old to canine lymphoma. She had a cute habit of rubbing her chin on grassy right-of-way strips that in my neighborhood are often bathed in pesticides. Canine lymphoma is the exact cancer noted as related to lawn chemicals – so we want to have a yard safe for dogs.  (Most people willfully want to believe the lawn service company’s promise that these are safe chemicals)

  

  I don't share the story about our sweet Honey and why we're sure losing her was related to lawn chemicals to garner sympathy, but to give a face to the kind of damage these poisons can cause.

• A majority of the flowering plants at big box stores and nurseries have systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids (neonics) in them which can poison butterflies when they sip nectar from the flowers and butterfly caterpillars that eat the leaves – so we want to buy plants from native plant nurseries where neonics aren’t used. (Most people love butterflies and attract them to their yard with flowers)

  

  Ask to be sure, but local native plant nurseries are highly unlikely to sell plants that have been treated with neonicotinoids.

• Mosquito spraying, including organic applications, use an indiscriminate pesticide that kills all soft bodied insects that come in contact with it, including caterpillars that turn into butterflies (Most people love butterflies and don't think much about how they become butterflies)

  

  
  

• Fireflies live in the soil for 1-2 years as larvae and yard chemicals will kill them in addition to killing their food sources such as snails and slugs – so we don’t want to use lawn treatments, chemical fertilizers, or herbicides. (Most people love seeing fireflies, are aware they aren’t as abundant as they once were, but are not aware of their lifecycle)

  

  We only see fireflies for a few weeks of their life - they spend most of it underground!

It's also ideal when I can show and tell about the life in my yard to help make a connection to the benefit of not using pesticides - like the tiny little baby birds in a bluebird box and the thousands of insects needed for them to become fledglings.

These sweet baby bluebirds will need thousands of insects brought to them by their parents before they are ready to fledge. Any pesticides used in the yard will kill the food their parents need to find to nourish them. This includes any lawn chemicals such as weed and feed or fungicides, yard pesticides such as herbicides, mosquito spraying, localized insects fogging, tree treatments, and perimeter pesticide applications.

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