You can't say they didn't warn us. The pesticide company wrote to inform us that property in our neighborhood would be sprayed weekly from March through December. There was no enclosed, stamped, self-addressed envelope in which to mail a response. No form to fill out. "Do you agree?" "Disagree?" "A but not B." "B but not A." "All of the above?"
Barring that and because we have hives, I called the exterminator to ask which pesticides. "Talstar Pro and Astro for ticks and mosquitoes. Provaunt for caterpillars." Pity the butterflies. Pity the bees.
The labels for the first two products contain warnings like Provaunt's. "Do not apply this product or allow it to drift to blooming crops or weeds while bees are foraging in or adjacent to the treatment area."
Well, our bees are free-range and adjacent. Although highly intelligent, they don't have the wits to stick to pesticide-free blooms and foliage. Last year we lost the hive closest to the property in question.
Once teeming with buzz and busyness that hive when opened revealed silence and stillness. You could say the bees had just been minding their own business, going about a bee kind of day before having to "struggle back and die in convulsions in their hive," according to Sue Hubbell's description of pesticide-poisoned bees in "A Book of Bees."
Yeats longed to live "in a bee-loud glade." I understand that desire and also understand our neighbors' desire to be insect-free. Ticks are gross, intimidating, and carriers of debilitating and at times fatal diseases. I'd even go so far as to accuse them of arrogance. I swear the one I removed from my stomach the other night was looking up at me as my tweezers neared. If it had hips and hands, it would have been in that posture. So, no, I don't blame the neighbors.
Our neighborhood and our hive are merely emblematic of a larger disregard for the creatures with which we share this mesh of creation. Will the birds know the difference between edible and poisoned insects? I would guess not, based on the rate at which they are disappearing. Three billion since 1970.
A 1998 report by Britain's Joint Nature Conservation Committee revealed that pesticides "had drastically reduced the populations of several of the [formerly] most common birds . . . tree sparrows by 95 percent. . . ."
"We want to keep common birds common, and we're not even doing that," mourns Pete Marra, former director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and now director of the Georgetown Environment Initiative.
You aren't imagining it when you think fewer juncos are showing up at your feeder (185 million of them are gone), when you wonder if you're hearing less singing from the white-throated sparrow (down by 93 million), fewer whistles from red-winged blackbirds (a decline of 92 million).
We're the only species that thinks we're smart. We strut and swagger with that awareness. The problem is knowledge and desire can confuse each other. No one can blame those who seek to rid the earth of ticks. The trouble is, according to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the incidence of tick-borne diseases is not affected by spraying. The ticks keep returning, sprayed or not. They don't take "no" for an answer. And the ticks shall inherit the earth.
Now that we've swaggered our way into biblical references, I know you're itching to quote Genesis. That old "let them have dominion over" argument. Enough already. According to Ellen Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns distinguished professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, "dominion" doesn't mean we get to be the boss of everything. That we get to be bullies. It does mean that we are charged with being guardians of creation. She translates the Hebrew not as "dominion over" but "skilled mastery with" all that crawl and creep and swim.
Or as Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner observe in "The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament," "the basic meaning . . . is not to rule; the word actually denotes the traveling around of the shepherd with his flock."
It requires no small amount of work to live up to that dictate.
One could lose heart as bee and bird populations decline, but no good has ever come of heartlessness. And no good has ever come of ignorance. More often than not the harm we cause one another and the creatures with which we share this web of creation is not the result of malfeasance but of ignorance.
Our neighbors aren't arriving under cloak of darkness to spray Talstar into the hives, and onto a few birds while they're at it. Absolutely not. I am quite certain that if they knew the extent of the damage caused by their attempts at a more congenial environment, they would find alternative methods.
For instance, Dr. George Dempsey, the award-winning medical director of East Hampton Family Medicine, who has dedicated more than 20 years to researching, diagnosing, and treating tick-borne illness, asserts that if you want to avoid ticks and mosquitoes, it is more effective to spray oneself than the yard: "Spray your clothes and shoes with permethrin."
In addition, I would be happy to share "our" birds that consume at least 60 insects an hour. Per bird. Happy to send over "our" dragonflies to eat their mosquitoes — 30 consumed on a slow night, hundreds when business is brisk. Per dragonfly. Happy to share these migrant workers that incur no travel expenses, that toil free of charge, and whistle while they work. That ask nothing of us in return.
All that Genesis asks of us is that we cause no harm. That we share creation, not bully it into extinction.
Barbara Ascher's most recent book is "Ghosting: A Widow's Voyage Out." She lives in Springs.