Environmental Justice

Association to Preserve Cape Cod offers us a lot to learn from and I often find myself emailing them my thanks for a new project or a great newsletter. This week’s newsletter included an article about chickadees and caterpillars that I’m sharing with you with their permission.

Spare the Spray
By Andrew Gottlieb, Executive Director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod

“I spent some time the other day watching a pair of birds taking turns feeding their chicks. Back and forth they went bringing soft caterpillars to drop in hungry mouths making more than 150 feeding trips a day for a few weeks before their hungry chicks fledge from the nests. Watching it was a lesson in parenting instincts, but it was also a lesson to the rest of us.
Raising baby birds relies on an ample supply of soft and easily digested caterpillars. Some estimates indicate that Black Capped Chickadees, the state bird of Massachusetts, require 6,000-9,000 caterpillars to raise their young. That is a caterpillar every three minutes every day for 2-3 weeks. That’s a lot of caterpillars required in small space.
Maybe this interests you, but you might be wondering about the punch line. Well, here is it. How you view caterpillars is subjective. Caterpillars need to eat plants to survive, and we have a whole yard care industry with a financial incentive to convince you that the caterpillars who much on leaves in your yard are a pest that must be exterminated. For a fee they will spray to kill them with the promise of leaving you a picturesque yard free of pests.
That’s great is you are a fan of silent movies. The yard with the perfect leaves is also a yard with fewer songbirds bringing life and beauty because the spray killed the nearby food sources and forced mommy and daddy bird to fly farther to find food. Distance equals time and, with hungry mouth to feed, time kills. Killing off the food source of fledgling birds means a world with fewer birds.
Before signing on for spraying service this year or buying spray from the local store, ask yourself what you want, a silent yard with perfect leaves or a yard full of life with maybe a few holes in your leaves. Lay off the spraying, let the birds live and go outside and enjoy what you allowed to flourish in your yard.”