How you can help birds, bees, and butterflies

“Look at all the fireflies in your garden,” I said to my daughter one recent evening. “It’s the most I’ve seen in a while,” She agreed. “But I’ve hardly seen any bees this year.” Sadly, no one else is seeing bees either unless they’re beekeepers with…

The majority of the world’s agricultural land is contaminated by multiple pesticides, a landmark global study has recently revealed. “Multiple” means 11 or more pesticides currently contaminate 68% of food producing lands in Europe and 58% in North…

Welcome to the web version of Need to Know: Science & Insight, a new form of personal journalism that looks at what we Need-to-Know at this time of pandemic, existential crisis of climate change and unravelling of nature’s life supports. Learn…

The world's most widely used insecticide has been linked to the dramatic decline in songbirds in North America. A first ever study of birds in the wild found that a migrating songbird that ate the equivalent of one or two seeds treated with a…

America’s agricultural landscape is now 48 times more toxic to honeybees, and likely other insects, than it was 25 years ago, almost entirely due to widespread use of so-called neonicotinoid pesticides, according to a new study published today in the…

The European Union plans to ban the world’s most widely used insecticides in an effort to protect bees and other valuable pollinator insects. The ban, approved by member countries Friday, targets insecticide compounds known as neonicotinoids (also…

First the collapse of bee populations and now the stunning decline in bird numbers in North America and Europe are being linked to a new generation of insecticides called neonicotinoids, a poison 5,000-10,000 times more toxic than DDT. It turns out…

The same insecticide nerve poison that is contributing to the shocking declines in bees and other pollinators is also behind the sharp declines in many other insect species, along with insect-eating birds and bats. Even important creatures like…