This is going to be a story rather than an argument, and we want to say upfront: we are not going to scold anyone. Most people who use lawn-care products use them because their neighborhood expects a certain look, or because they don't want to deal with crabgrass, or because their lawn-care company sprays without asking, or because they grew up in households where this was just what you did in April. None of these are bad people. Most of them have never been told what the spraying actually does. The information has been kept from them quite deliberately.
So this is a story, not a sermon. Here's the morning we stopped.
We had been using a standard lawn-care service for about three years. The kind that comes by every six weeks and applies a "treatment." We didn't know what was in the treatment. We never asked. The lawn was green and uniform, which had been the goal. The truck would show up, the technician would walk around with the sprayer for fifteen minutes, the truck would leave. There was a small yellow flag on the lawn for twenty-four hours that said something about keeping pets and children off until the chemicals dried. We complied with the flag and otherwise didn't think about it.
One morning in late April, two days after a treatment, we walked out the back door to get the mail. There was a robin in the middle of the lawn. The robin was not flying. It was sitting on the grass, its wings half-spread, breathing fast. We approached it and it didn't move. Its eyes were open. It looked at us.
We stood there for a long minute. Then we went back inside, and we got a small box, and we put a soft towel in it, and we went back out and gently picked up the robin and put it in the box. The robin didn't fight. It let itself be picked up. We took the box inside and put it in a quiet corner of the kitchen and we called a wildlife rehabilitator who was about twenty minutes away.
The robin died in the box, in our kitchen, before the rehabilitator could get there. It took about thirty-five minutes. We sat with it.
The rehabilitator, when she arrived, looked at the bird and at our lawn and asked us what we treated with. We told her. She said, very gently, that this happens. The robin had probably eaten earthworms that had absorbed some of what was in the soil. The chemicals in question were not, technically, supposed to kill birds. They were supposed to kill grubs and broadleaf weeds. The bird was incidental.
She didn't lecture us. She mostly told the truth quietly. The standard lawn treatments do not announce, in their advertising, the secondary effects: that earthworms accumulate the chemicals, that birds eat earthworms, that the songbirds who live on or near treated lawns have measurably higher mortality and lower reproductive success than birds in untreated areas. None of this is in the truck-side advertisement. It is, however, well-documented in scientific literature. The lawn-care company knows. They are simply not required to tell you.
That afternoon we cancelled the service. The technician we cancelled with was kind about it. He had clearly had this conversation before. He didn't try to talk us out of it. He just said okay, marked the account closed, and wished us a good summer.
The lawn, that summer, was fine. There were dandelions for a few weeks in May. Some clover came in, which we discovered the bumblebees love. The grass got slightly less perfectly uniform. By August it looked like a normal lawn rather than a magazine lawn. No one in the neighborhood said anything.
Three years later, we have measurably more birds, more bees, more visible wildlife. We have not seen another robin die on the back lawn. We saved, we calculated, about six hundred dollars a year by cancelling the service. The lawn is fine.
This is the story. It is not a guide to stopping. There is no perfect way to stop, and stopping is harder if you have a homeowners' association, or a particularly judgmental neighborhood, or a child who's allergic to bees. We're not telling anyone what to do.
What we will say is this: nobody told us about the robin until it was in our kitchen. We are now the kind of household that tells the next person, before the next person finds out the way we did. That's the whole reason we wrote this down.
— The editors