With the Water, Came the War

With the water, came the war: the war on mosquitoes.
They have been unbelievable. There were swarms, day and night. We could not go from the vehicles to the house without them jumping on us. We could not get in the doors fast enough without letting them in the vehicles and in the house. We had to stop walking around the block because they were so awful. (So my weight gain is due to mosquitoes!)

First we dealt with any standing water and I called the county and they sent out a spray truck. I bought what Ace Hardware recommended and B sprayed around the house and  yard. I bought fly tape and we hung the strips around the doors. 

Wondering if the goldfish and mosquito fish in our little pond were keeping up with eating their fair share of the larvae, I bought more goldfish-- just in case. 

We cheered on the banana spider that had set up camp near the screen porch door.

Finally, last weekend we read on the news that aerial spraying had been set up for our end of the county. We thought we might have heard the plane overhead on Sunday night. But events took a strange turn on Monday morning: toads. Hundreds of tiny toads. Our yard was moving as the tiny toads hopped around. The first ones I saw were under  my bedroom window. There was a migration towards the bird feeder, ironically enough.

When B walked through the grass in the front, though, it was crazy to see them all. It was hard to walk on the pavement and even in the garage without stepping on them. Our son suggested they were sprayed out from the airplane to help deal with the mosquitoes!

The mosquitoes are better and the toads are less numerous, too, but it was starting to look like the summer of plagues for a while. I figured the snakes would be next.