Having had our first tick bites of the season, our thoughts now naturally turn to mosquitoes. Down where I live, within feet of the marsh, the buzz is constant from about the end of May until early October, so bad that a sprint from the car to the front door is the only option if we want to live to see another day.
Once a year, a hotdogging helicopter pilot strafes the marsh with bacillus thuringiensis. If it does anything at all is difficult to say. If it actually does work at reducing their numbers, it’s terrifying to think what it would be like without the treatments. There would be so many mosquitoes that they could not fly because they would get hurt bumping wings with their billion relatives.
When the kids were young, they asked what was even the point of mosquitoes. Fumbling for a satisfactory answer, I would say something about their being food for other creatures. “But couldn’t they just eat something else?” one might say. “Um. Yes. I guess so,” I would reply lamely.
I see swallows here and there around the marsh, but hardly enough to curtail the mosquito horde. Whippoorwills and bats are out there, too, but I see them less regularly. I learned recently that hummingbirds can consume hundreds a day; so much for their supposed angelic disposition flipping among the flowers like Tinker Bell “exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf,” as the great J.M. Barrie put it.
No great fan of chemicals, these are months when I gladly slather up with repellent. Years ago while working on an archaeological dig in coastal Georgia I was introduced to the supposed wonders of Skin-So-Soft, an Avon product that smelled like hell, but seemed to keep mosquitoes away. These days, I try to limit the amount of uncovered skin and use a picaridin insect repellent; Deet is supposed to be bad for you, not that I can say in what way or how valid the concerns might be.
No discussion of mosquitoes for me can omit mention of my favorite mosquito of all, the hapless Manny Mosquitoes, a Mickey Paraskevas character who appeared in his Dan’s Papers cartoons. Honestly, I can scarcely think of the little pests without also thinking of Manny. If you can’t beat them, at least laugh at them, right?