Three percent doesn’t sound like much.
But when that 3% represents 57 different species of birds, chaffinches, blackbirds, blackcaps, suddenly it means something. It means the sky is getting a little fuller. The mornings a little louder. It means maybe, just maybe, we did something right.
In 2018, the European Union banned neonicotinoids. That’s the insecticide farmers had been spraying on crops since the 1990s, the one that gets absorbed into plant leaves and turns them into poison for any insect that takes a bite. Effective? Absolutely. Safe for everything else? Not so much.
The warning signs came early. Bees started dying in France in the early 2000s. Mass die-offs. The kind you can’t ignore. By the next decade, the pressure was mounting. Agricultural producers pushed back hard, but in 2018, the ban went through anyway.
Then came the waiting game.
Would it actually matter? Would the birds come back?
Scientists from the Foundation for Biodiversity Research in France decided to find out. They measured 1.25-mile square plots across 1,900 locations, cropland, meadows, the works. Ornithologists counted birds from 2013 to 2018, then again from 2019 to 2022. Fifty-seven species. Thousands of hours of observation.
The results? A 12% increase in insectivorous birds in the areas studied.
Now, here’s where it gets complicated. The scientists themselves called it a “weak recovery.” That standardized 3% bump could be influenced by other factors, heatwaves, habitat loss, wildfires, all the usual suspects that make life harder for birds. Maybe eating poisoned insects wasn’t the only problem. Maybe it still isn’t.
“It’s a study that shows there may be early signs of weak population recovery but the results are uncertain,” said James Pearce-Higgins from the British Trust for Ornithology. Translation: don’t break out the champagne just yet.
But here’s what Thomas Perrot, who led the study, wants you to know: “Studies on other pesticides like DDT show that most bird populations take 10 to 25 years to fully recover.”
Ten to twenty-five years.
Think about that. We poison the earth for decades, flip the switch, and expect everything to bounce back in five years? Nature doesn’t work on our timeline. Recovery is slow. It’s measured in generations, theirs, not ours.
So yes, 3% is small. But it’s also the beginning. The first sign that when we stop doing harm, life finds its way back.
“Our results clearly point to neonicotinoid bans as an effective conservation measure for insectivorous birds,” Perrot said. And he’s right to be cautious. Science demands more data. More years. More certainty.
But there’s another angle here worth exploring. What if, and stay with me, what if those recovering bird populations start reducing the burden of crop-eating insects naturally? What if farmers discover they don’t need as much insecticide because the birds are doing the work for free?
That would be something. Ecology and economy finding common ground. Farmers and environmentalists on the same side.
It’s happened before with other conservation efforts. Remove the toxins, let the predators return, watch the balance restore itself. Not perfectly. Not quickly. But measurably.
Right now, we’re in that awkward middle phase. The ban is working, probably. The birds are recovering, maybe. The science is promising but incomplete, definitely.
So what do we do? We wait. We watch. We keep counting birds and measuring populations and gathering data. And we remember that three percent, as small as it sounds, represents thousands of individual lives, feathered, singing, soaring lives that might not have existed without that 2018 decision.
Sometimes the most important victories are the quiet ones. The ones that take decades to fully reveal themselves. The ones that don’t make headlines but slowly, steadily, fill the morning sky with song.
The birds are coming back.
Let’s give them time to finish the journey.
