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.
I actually like pelicans but the blue cranes are my fave. We have a boat in Ventura and I love it when someone who’s never been there before is walking down the dock with me after dark and I spot a pelican....and they don’t. Lol. The pelicans wait til you’re right up on them then squawk and take off. Always scares the crap out of my guests. Rofl.
Also prodigious producers of guano, But they do have a place in nature. The same can be said of at least half of Freepers!
If the DDT was hurting the pelicans, and pelicans were eating fish, how did the pelicans get it? Was it washing off into the waterways and then polluting the fish? Seems to me that fishing industry ought to have been up in arms about the issue.
Also curious what the fish ate. Could the DDT have been hurting the fish population by hurting the fishes’ diet?
Seems like a problem of excessive spraying to me. There shouldn’t have been any reason for DDT to be getting near the pelicans.
Until you see a flock of several to a dozen in a line "surfing" the air currents above breaking waves with what looks like zero effort.