Insectivorous birds are known to provide essential services of pest control in agroecosystems, but they may also prey on arthropods acting as natural enemies, like spiders, leading to an ecosystem disservice derived from intraguild predation. Here, we used DNA-metabarcoding to characterize the diet of different insectivororus bird species in apple orchards in Asturias. We estimated the trade-offs between ecosystem services and disservices associated to arthropod predation. We found that the trophic position of bird species was a negative surrogate of their quality from farmers’ perspective: the species with higher position (i.e. incorporating more meso-predators relative to phytophagous arthropods in their diet) fed on a lower proportion of apple pests relative to their natural enemies. Paradoxically, agronomic quality was lower for the more insectivore species. The qualitative differences across bird species in terms of agronomic quality are, in any case, partially erased by the strong differences in relative abundance between bird species. See the paper in Ornithological Applications!