After All the Rain...

We feel very blessed to have not gotten the amount of rain our neighbors to the west experienced that was associated with Hurricane Harvey.  The destruction and flooding in Southeast Texas is overwhelming and our prayers are with the poor people that had their lives turned upside down by this terrible storm.

Over the six day period that bands of storms came through our area, I measured 10.6 inches of rainfall in the rain gauge.  Spread out over that period of time, the water easily drained and did not become a problem.  The real problem for us came 48 hours after the storm blew through.  Then the mosquito eggs laid in the standing water turned to larvae, matured and then flew in clouds to search for blood.

The "maringouin" or mosquitoes in French are terrible around here right now.  Just walking outside and they swarm around your head, light on your neck, arms and legs and have a feast.  Part of our property taxes go toward paying our Parish Mosquito Control to try to keep the mosquito population down.  They do this with a mosquito fogging truck that goes down every driveway spraying pesticide. Mosquito abatement also has a plane that flies overhead spraying to try to kill mosquitoes. We heard it overhead last night and figured we would have relief this morning. Well...

Not so fast!  The mosquitoes coating the walls in the garage by my rubber boots this morning must have been immune to whatever the plane was spraying.  I swatted this monster off of my leg (and you can see the shadow of another on the far left side of the photo.  Two observations:

• #1 I think that this mosquito stole enough of my blood that I won't be able to donate blood for the next 8 weeks until my body can produce enough to replenish it. 
• #2 This mosquito was so large, I think I could have battered it and deep-fried it and had a nice meal. 

It makes it awful hard to get any work done in the yard and garden while slapping mosquitoes, so I built a big fire and began making biochar.  The smoke kept the mosquitoes at bay for a while.  Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for gardening!

The State Bird of Louisiana

If April showers bring May flowers, what do August rains bring?  Well, they bring mosquitoes.  Lots and lots of mosquitoes.  One positive thing about a very dry June and July was that there was no water nearby for mosquitoes to lay their eggs, and that meant that although it was hot and dry, you could walk around outside and not be carried away by mosquitoes.  Not anymore.

If you look in the water buckets we have along the drip line of the roof in the back yard to catch rain water, you will see hundreds and hundreds of mosquito larvae swimming around.  According to This Link a single female mosquito can lay between 100 - 300 eggs.  Those eggs hatch and turn into the larvae you see in my bucket below.  Then in 4 to 14 days, depending on water temperature, they go through the full life cycle.

A mosquito can lay between 100 - 300 eggs at one time and between 1,000 to 3,000 eggs in her lifetime.  Although they live for only 2 -3 weeks, they can do a lot of mischief in that short span of time.  I walked through the pasture this afternoon swatting non-stop as clouds of mosquitoes surrounded me, covering my legs as I had shorts on.  Big mistake.  It didn't take long for them to fill with blood.  Only the female mosquitoes bite as they need the blood to develop the eggs.  Darned females! Of course I'd never say any disparaging remarks about human females...

OUCH!

Our local taxes pay the Mosquito Control Board to fly an airplane at night dispensing poison to kill the mosquitoes along with a truck that drives up and down every driveway spraying poison.  This helps keep them in check, but it is theorized that this could be killing some beneficial insects as well as honeybees. Sometimes the most effective thing is just to slap them.

That old girl was full of my blood

Sometimes even when they don't bite you, they'll just annoy you.  There are times when one (or several) will buzz around in our bedroom at night.  You can hear them, but can't see them and you can't go to sleep because you're anticipated them landing on you and biting you.  Some people around here joke and say that the State Bird of Louisiana is the Mosquito, but it is actually the Brown Pelican.  

They're really no joking matter, though, as they carry West Nile Virus and have been known to get so numerous that they'll choke cows and horses.  I have a bug zapper in the barn to combat this when their populations get large, but I'm unsure of how effective it is.  Fortunately, the cows have tails that they use to constantly swat them away.

Getting Rid of Undesirables in the Barn

The other night we were watching an episode of The Waltons where the Mom and Dad were going on a trip and left Grandma and Grandpa to watch all the kids.  At some point a skunk somehow got into the house and sprayed and the whole family had to sleep in the barn.

The next scene showed the family comfortably nestled in an impeccably clean barn.  The cows and chickens were in there with them, but amazingly, there were no cow pies or chicken poop.  Nor were the animals urinating on the hay.  I didn't see any spider webs or dust in the Walton's barn.  No rats, either.  What's up with that?  Tricia looked at me and said, "If a skunk got in our house, I don't think we could sleep in our barn.  Too many critters out there!"

She's right.  Currently there is a plague of mosquitoes of Biblical proportions around our place.  In the barn they are ferocious.  As we try to milk, they attack and bite our ankles, driving us crazy.  They land on the cows, suck their blood and then fall into the milking bucket.  The muslin rag catches them prior to falling in the milk, but you still must be VERY careful not to burst the mosquitoes as you remove them.  We do position a couple of box fans to blow them away while we're milking, but that is a temporary fix.  Below you can see the mosquitoes covering the wall.  If you'd slap them, they'd leave a big red mark as most are filled with blood.

A wall of mosquitoes

Unlike the Waltons, we do have cobwebs in our barn.  Although the photo of the spider web below is blurry, you can still see that the spider that spun that web is not going hungry any time soon with all the mosquitoes in it.  This was just one of many webs in our barn, so spiders are doing their part to help out.

A meal for the spiders

We decided that we'd give the spiders a little help and I plugged in a 'Bug Zapper' in the barn to kill mosquitoes.  Unfortunately, the sheer magnitude of mosquitoes overwhelmed the zapper.  If you look closely, you can see all the electrocuted mosquitoes cooked onto the lamp.  No more mosquitoes could be zapped because it was so filled up with dead ones.  I had to get the leaf blower to blow them off so we could zap a bunch more the next night.

Clogged up bug zapper

Mosquitoes aren't the only undesirables, though.  We've got rats in the barn, too.  Benjamin and I have been going out every night with a .22 loaded with rat shot.  We've got a long way to go, but we're putting a dent in the rat population.  Below you can see a poor male rat that suffered an untimely bout with 'lead poisoning.'

You dirty rat!

Even though we're slowly getting rid of the critters in our barn, we're a long way from being able to sleep in there.