By DOTTY DECOSTER

When I first moved to Seattle in the late '50s, there were very few songbirds in the city.

Why? Because the swampy land, both private and public, was regularly sprayed with pesticides to kill "the bugs."

Without bugs, the birds didn't have enough food. There weren't many frogs, either, or nearly as many local fish as there had been before killing the bugs.

Today, I can watch the swallows return each year to the huge lombardy poplars in my neighbors' yards swooping across our backyard munching bugs on the fly. And I can hear birdsong every morning and evening from a variety of seasonal songbird visitors. I can also count on having a few bug bites each year because I don't bother to put screens on my windows and I sleep with them open.

There were many reasons for the original blitz of pesticides. One was that "bugs" came to be associated with germs. Malaria, which is carried by a specific kind of mosquito, was much more prevalent in the earlier part of the century. Other fevers also are carried by mosquitoes and people who came from parts of the world where similar diseases were prevalent were very worried about the bugs.

Sometimes, even today, people say they've "been bit by a bug" whatever the source of a disease. There was a lot of confusion about which diseases were actually carried by which bugs. Medical science has helped us learn to discriminate more carefully these days, and we now know that very few species of bugs are vectors for disease in humans and other animals. We've also learned how to use new treatments and created vaccines for many diseases since 1950.

Currently, public agencies and private citizens are using pesticides more sparingly and the pesticide manufacturing industry is creating different kinds of pesticides and herbicides (bug killers and plant killers) that target specific species and/or provide temporary rather than long-term results. A major public street tree-planting effort was conducted during the late 1950s and early 1960s and the trend to plant trees and make gardens has continued ever since. Birds now have food to eat and places to rest and nest.

While many birds have returned, we're still short on frogs and fish in local creeks and lakes. There are a great many reasons for this, some of them have to do with gardening.

Local creeks and lakes are fed by rain, both the rain that comes out of the sky and the rain that washes the land and flows through our yards, ditches, pipes, creeks, rivers and lakes.

When we use pesticides or herbicides in our own gardens, some of these substances are washed "down the drain" whether or not the drain is a pipe or along a drainage ditch. The chemicals persist and combine and end up being part of the diet of anything that drinks the water.

While water is the universal solvent, the sheer amount of chemicals washed into local watercourses and waterbodies may be too much for it to "wash out."

So each time each one of us decides whether or not to use a poison to kill the bugs or the weeds we add to the burden carried by the water and contribute to the diet of local wildlife.

In other words, the results of how we garden show both in our gardens and downstream. How we plant and care for our plants, whether indoors or outdoors, influences whether there are birds, fish and frogs nearby. It's all a matter of drainage.

Question: I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building last weekend pulling weeds out of our planting strip. A neighbor came by and asked me why I didn't use a weed killer. I explained. She asked "do you know of an evergreen ground cover?" I said no. She said she'd continue to use the weed killer. Can you answer her question?

DottyD2@aol.com. We'll publish the results.