That would be an interesting thing, and a lot more beneficial. The “official” story (Scientific American, which tends to be very trendy, e.g. supporting the global warming scare) is that the modern pyrethrin pesticides and DDT are about equally good. I don’t know to that depth. I think DDT got more of a bum rap than it deserved. It probably starved birds of their insect food when applied too broadly in nature, hence thinner eggshells and the like. There are places where insects are good, and it is silly to bug bomb those places. But that shouldn’t have ever kept it from being used in human dwellings. Sometimes the effects of these bans are very hard on people in the third world today.
While I think that there are some good uses for DDT, I lived on the Northern California coast before and just after the DDT ban.
I saw with my own eyes, pelicans come back from being a once per week sighting, maybe, to several groups of 3 to 5 adult birds several times per day. The comeback was so fast and so pronounced that it surely seems there was a direct causality.
BTW, Pelicans eat fish, not insects.
They are not one of my favorite birds. They are not really very graceful fliers, and they are ugly up close. Also prodigious producers of guano. But, they do have a place in nature.
Pyrethrin is supposedly toxic to cats.