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Martins and mosquitoes
- To: carolinabirds@duke.edu
- Subject: Martins and mosquitoes
- From: Clyde Sorenson <clyde_sorenson@ncsu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 08:52:20 -0400
- Sender: carolinabirds-owner@acpub.duke.edu
- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020512 Netscape/7.0b1
All,
Martins don't eat large numbers of mosquitoes; the bugs are primarily
nocturnal, the birds diurnal. Bats are our greatest vertebrate allies in
the war on adult mosquitoes, although most of them would probably
actually prefer a nice juicy beetle or moth. Fish, feeding on larvae,
pupae, and eggs, are probably far more important vertebrate mosquito
predators; other insects, disease organisms, and the vagaries of the
weather ultimately have the greatest imapct on their populations. In
your yards, the best thing you can do is identify and drain any small,
fish-free pools of water (especially things like flower pot saucers,
gutters, cans or buckets, and water-holding tree holes). it only takes
about a cup of water persisting for less than two weeks to kick out
enough mosquitoes to be really annoying.
If you didn't catch it on the news, one of my colleagues here at NCSU,
Dr. Mike Roe, has discovered a highly efficacious, safer, alternative
to DEET for repelling skeeters and other biting arthropods. The chemical
is a natural product of a wild tomato I worked on for my Master's
program many, many years ago; this chemical is already used in cosmetics
and other products so the mammalian toxicity is well understood.. The
expectation is that repellent products containing this material may be
available as soon as a year from now.
All this being said, I wish like *#@#& the doggone martins would take up
in my backyard martin house! (unocupied for 6 years and counting- in
spite of the pond and lovely white house in close proximity.)
And so it goes.
Take care,
Clyde
Clayton and Raleigh, NC
clyde_sorenson@ncsu.edu