It is the 4th of July, & I gaze into my crystal ball. . .
(From the Three Rivers Avian Center Newsletter)
By Ron Perrone
I see America grilling; I like grilling. Actually, I like fire. Anyone who knows me knows this, but that's another story. Yes, the American idyll. The grill, the burger, the perfectly green lawn, the ... hold it right there! Ok buster lets check this lawn out. Hmmm. Just as I suspected. This lawn has been chem-sprayed! Bad, bad, bad! You'd think people would get tired of stories about gasping asthmatic children and dead dogs & cats. But, well into the summer of 1999, here we are again at TRAC, getting poisoned birds. I detest whining about this. But I detest the sight of convulsing birds even more. So for those of you who missed it last time, here's the news.
Poisoning our world for the sake of a perfect lawn is vain, stupid, shortsighted, ignorant and callous
.Pesticides and herbicides are by their fundamental nature, POISON. When they are sprayed on the ground they get walked on, tracked in the house, eaten, slept in, dug up and washed on down the line by rain. They also biomagnify on up the food chain. A mouse eats a little, but mice and other rodents are the bottom of the food chain. Year after year predators who eat mice build up poison in their bodies from eating them. Now a new wrinkle has appeared. The rodents of the world are becoming resistant to common chemicals, which allows them to carry larger toxic loads in their bodies, which is forcing people to invent even meaner chemicals to kill the rodents which the hawks, owls and pussycats eat. A study in Great Britain has shown that over the last ten years, the proportion of Barn Owls carrying rodenticides in their livers has jumped from 5% to 36%. That's biomagnification. If you or someone you know has rodent problems get snap traps and a cat named Jenny.
How about moles. People hate moles because they make our lawns lumpy. So people poison moles. Stupid people! Moles eat grubs (which eat your lawn). If you know someone being traumatized by mole hills, get them mole traps. Yes, you do have to dispose of the bodies, but that's life. Life is icky at times.
Know someone trying to cope with too many bugs on the lawn? Put up as many bird feeders and bird houses as you can handle. Almost all birds eat bugs, the more birds around your place the fewer bugs. And ditch that bug zapper. A truly remarkable flim-flam if there ever was one. Ultra violet light bug zappers are almost useless for killing those CO2 sniffers or body heat seeking (infrared end of the light spectrum) biting bugs that bother and bite.
And another thing, the agribusiness gene splicers are cutting and pasting pesticides into the genes of plants. Wow! That beats spraying?? Now anything that eats those plants gets dosed. And so will the beneficial bugs that eat the plant eating bugs, and the mice that eat them, and the cats that eat the mice. And there is evidence that such genetic traits migrate through cross fertilization to related wild plants and spread to plants, insects, and animal communities for which the pesticide was never intended.
A "perfect" lawn is really a biological desert. It is a monoculture devoid of the diversity which makes a given patch of earth its power to cope with environmental problems. It is dependent upon the water hose and poison sprayer to keep the natural world at bay! It is fundamentally unnatural! Insect infestations, disease and drought will smash a monoculture lawn faster that a complex of several grasses, forbs and shrubs attended by its entourage of bugs and birds.
We have the perfect lawn. It has a few mole hills, ant hills, some bare spots and a few pricklers. We also have all kinds of flowers, weeds, shrubs, very few biting bugs, an occasional mouse or chipmunk, a family of toads, several frogs, a black snake, birds galore, fireflies, butterflies and yes, a grill.
Contact the Three Rivers Avian Center at HC 74, Box 279, Brooks, WV 25951; 1-800-721-5252. Web page: www.trrc.org