- no spray signs
(Dear State of Massachusetts, If I had to post these cheesy paper plate signs in order to avoid getting sprayed, you really didn’t think that I’d stop at just “no spray”, did you?)
I miss toads. When I moved here, and for years afterwards, they were so plentiful that when I mowed the lawn, I had to mow slowly and carefully, looking for the small brown flick of a toad moving out of the way at the last minute. I was always worried about the ones that I didn’t see and worried that I might have reduced the population just by mowing.
By midsummer, they would have matured and staked out their territory in one flower bed or the other. As I worked, I’d learn which beds were their homes for the season. I’d keep a sheltered place and a source of water handy to encourage them.
But something has happened and it happened in the same timeframe that the town joined the mosquito spraying program that Massachusetts sponsors. As soon as I heard about it, I put myself on the no-spray list because people who have asthma are at some risk when they are spraying. But I also did some web searches on the pesticides that they use and found they will kill bees, birds and amphibians, among others. The logic seems to be that the risk to human lives from mosquito born diseases is worth the cost. And they try to minimize the benefit/cost ratio by spraying right at sundown, when mosquitos are most active and maybe those victim species are not.
While maybe sound in theory, the practice is not so simple to apply. First, the trucks run for several hours a night and sundown is a very short window. Bees maybe inactive but I’ve got shots of them spending the night in flowers; any in flowers or shrubs by the road are goners? And then there are the cardinal nests in the multiflora rose that grows up along the street.
And what are the risks to humans, really? Ted Williams, writing for Audubon magazine, compares West Nile Virus to the flu, both can kill, but he goes on to talk about evaluating the program in Grafton, MA, and finding that the incidence of the problem was nill, zip, nothing. No one had evidenced the disease in the spraying area. His excellent article can be read here.
In Information Security we measure risk as impact times probability. The impact that someone could die from a mosquito bite if the mosquito were carrying one of the target diseases may be a fair assertion but if the probability is zero, or even very low, it’s still low risk.
In our community, a further issue is our wetlands. The rules say don’t spray in lakes but wetlands are evidently fair game. At least I’ve seen them spraying along the road in mine. However, the spraying programs only reach a strip along roadways, or people’s yards, if they are invited to spray there. If a person is concerned about the risk of a mosquito bite, this near to the wetlands, they should take other precautions, anyway. Spraying program or no, if you don’t dress right or spray your body, you’re gonna get a mosquito bite if you hang about in my yard, early morning, late at night or some times of year, just in the shade. So it doesn’t even substantially reduce the risk for some of us.
And one can argue how much, but it absolutely does reduce the predators of mosquitos, most of whom cannot repopulate as quickly as the mosquito. If we MUST do this, there should be before and after counts taken of non-target species that we know are sensitive to the pesticides when these programs are implemented so that we have real data about what we are doing to the natural controls in our environment.
There is strong anecdotal evidence, including my observations, that it upsets the balance that I rely upon to keep my use of chemical controls at a minimum. Mosquitos are not my only pests and I rely on the same predators to keep down ticks, aphids, flea beetles, japanese beetles, slugs and many other pests that would destroy my ornamentals and food garden. I have never had to treat for slugs before this year; while they are always about, they’ve never had the numbers to completely destroy crops before. As I was trying to figure what changed, I realized that it was probably the little brown friends of mine that kept the populations down. I haven’t seen a single toad this year.
I miss toads.
Very well said. And thanks! Mass. Mosquito control is sold to naïve towns via brazen lies. While some species of mosquitoes do carry disease, the spraying and larvaciding does not target them. In fact, in those extremely rare cases when health authorities spray for disease control routine nuisance mosquito “control” impedes the effectiveness because the disease carrier,s have built immunity. Further, there is ample evidence that routine spraying and larvaciding kills mosquito predators such as dragonflies, thereby making the nuisance problem worse. In our town–Grafton, Mass.–the Mosquito Control District shows up about once a decade, putting on a frontier medicine show in an effort to sell us its quack elixirs. A few naïve townspeople believe the BS, but the majority invariably runs them out of town on a rail.
On a rail. (grin) Would like to see that.