WHO'S KILLING ALL THE BIRDS AND BUGS

Inspiration for this post comes from the latest post by My Thai Friend,about birds and dogs .I have always loved birds as long as I can remember, altho some of my memories or not from just seeing them and taking pictures as I do today .My first memory comes from as a five year old kid growing up in rural South Carolina, in the 40's . My dad was always teaching my Brother and me about life and living, every occasion he got , this time he was showing us how to make a sling shot from a tree branch and rubber from a old tire inter tube, he made a good one and to show us how it worked he said" see that bird in that tree" ,he shot a rock and Bonk, he hit the bird and killed it , now another lesson in life comes quickly , and "remember that whatever you shoot and kill you have to eat" well we ate that little bird after Mom cooked it , and cried the whole time . But needless to say we ate lots of little birds and frogs and squirrels,and rabbits.My brother and our friends loved to play in the woods in our forts and tree houses , and we always had our trusty sling shots with us . When we were teens we moved to Florida for a few years and I can clearly remember early in the morning walking or riding to school ,seeing the power lines just filled with wild parakeets of every color ,I read a few years later, where the last male parakeet that was in captive died ,gone forever. During my adult life I had lived in Oregon for a few years and can remember driving along the country road and seeing ,red winged black birds sitting on all the farm fences, and wild pheasants,running thru the rye grass fields, now they are no more or very few , gone now or soon ,forever.I could talk about memories and birds forever , but then it would be a book and not a post.
Well, you might ask "what happened to all these birds that caused them to disappear",well I have my theory, and here goes > The state road crews used DDT to keep the grass off the sides of the roads and ,farmers use pesticides to kill the bugs from their crops and people use weed killer and pesticides to control the insects and unwanted grass around their house and this has resulted in the killing off off many species of insects, the beautiful butterfly's that used to visit your gardens and flowers and many, many birds.We have a beautiful yard and hundreds of plants and flowers growing , if the grass gets to high or in the flower beds or around the rocks for the walkways , I get off my lazy a-- and pull the weeds and cut the grass with a blade , not a mower to kill lots of bugs and insects in the process and never use any kind of pesticides to control anything , and be careful of all the fertilizers you use these can kill too, but if you use these thing go ahead, but don't cry when no birds come around to sing you a love song and you look up in one of my trees and see a bird nest with a couple little heads sticking out saying " the next worm is mine ",and yours are empty of birds, And you look over and my yard is full of birds , butterfly's , and my pond has frogs and snakes and winged visitors all the time , and I don't even feed them. they eat the bugs if the population gets out of hand , altho they do love some table scraps every once in a while , and you have no visitors to your yard all I can say to you is SOM NAM NA. And stop being one of the problems and save the birds. Here are a few pictures of a couple visitors to our back-yard hope you enjoy them.
"This is my post and I'm sticking by it" as the song goes Malcolm