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Comment by BostonEnginerd | Hacker News Reader

I hope that the insect and bird populations also start to recover. We don’t see that many bugs in the Boston area, and the cities spray mosquito fog every summer because of EEE.

Our birds of prey in Eastern MA are being impacted by rat poison - they eat rats which have been poisoned.

Certainly there are improvements, and we should celebrate those. But we should also recognize that there’s a way to go.

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As someone who lives just outside of 95, I assure you, the bugs are doing just fine.

In Boston I do see a fair number of birds of prey. Most memorably I was biking along the Charles in Cambridgeport and stopped to observe one (a falcon, maybe?) feasting on a squirrel not five feet from the path, unperturbed by the passers-by.

I've seen red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, and peregrine falcons in downtown Boston. One of the coolest things I've seen was a hawk gliding down the bike path about 6 inches from the ground near a large playground, as it tried to sneak up on some squirrels. It did the nap of the earth flight for a couple hundred feet and then pounced on a squirrel. It was utterly unperturbed by the foot traffic around it.

I also lived in a high-rise, and a peregrine falcon used a ledge outside of my son's bedroom window as a perch to launch attacks on pigeons and seagulls.

And then there was that time a coyote was spotted in the North End: https://patch.com/massachusetts/charlestown/coyote-spotted-i...

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