Out of Control

But sometimes birds are killed directly. The EPA permits Florida mosquito controllers to bomb the state with fenthion, an organophosphate so toxic to birds that it's actually registered as an avicide and sold worldwide; one formulation used to be called Rid-a-Bird. To deliver this and other poisons, Florida mosquito controllers deploy a fleet of aircraft larger than most Third World air forces. Lee County alone uses 10 helicopters and 6 DC-3s.

When the Collier Mosquito Control District, which has five helicopters, three turbo-prop Sky Vans, and a DC-3, was criticized for killing fiddler crabs, it began spraying fenthion in "ultra-low volume." But though the dose was reduced, it was delivered in finer drops that hung in the air far longer, drifting as far as five miles. Four years ago Ted Below, the biologist at Audubon's Rookery Bay Sanctuary, on Marco Island, began finding large numbers of dead birds on a sandbar off Tiger Tail Beach, designated critical habitat for shorebirds. Since then there have been at least 12 separate die-offs. Victims have included western sandpipers, least sandpipers, dunlins, sanderlings, short-billed dowitchers, willets, snowy plovers, snowy egrets, cattle egrets, little blue herons, black skimmers, sandwich terns, fish crows, ring-billed gulls, laughing gulls, threatened least terns, and one endangered piping plover. About 500 carcasses have been recovered, but because Marco Island is surrounded on three sides by mangroves, this doubtless represents only a tiny fraction of the birds killed. After finding fenthion on and in the dead birds, the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a criminal investigation into apparent violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Twenty or more piping plovers feed on the sandbar, about 10 of which wear bands that identify them as part of the Great Lakes population, now down to 30 pairs. "We've been in contact with Audubon people around the Great Lakes who are enraged by this, because they post guards on these birds' nests," says Linda Farley of the American Bird Conservancy. "The dead piping plover was from this population."

The mosquito-control district, says Below, "is always raising the specter of mosquito-borne disease. Now they're talking about West Nile virus." So is Louisiana, which plans to use fenthion as a defense. According to the pesticide's manufacturer (Bayer), Texas and California are also interested.

"The Keys have the worst mosquitoes in Florida, so how are they able to get along without fenthion?" Farley demands. It's a good question, one that Collier Mosquito Control district director Frank Van Essen, who vows to continue spraying fenthion, couldn't answer. Not that mosquito control in the Keys is any model of enlightenment. "I'd say they're the sickest ecosystem in the United States," remarks Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association. "It's like walking into a wasteland. There you are, in what should be this tropical paradise, but it's eerily silent. You hear no crickets, no grasshoppers. You spend the whole day at a place that ought to be filled with butterflies, and maybe you see one cloudless sulfur. There's a whole host of butterflies--species, not just subspecies--that are on the verge of extinction largely because of spraying for mosquitoes. We've petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Miami blue. It used to be common throughout all of southern Florida in the 1950s. In the 1980s it was hard to find anywhere. Then, in the 1990s, nobody saw one. Finally, we discovered a colony on the Keys a year ago. And mosquito control is spraying it."

By working with native ecosystems rather than attempting to kill off undesirable parts, a few mosquito controllers actually control mosquitoes. No state program is more effective than Connecticut's, which didn't buy into the regional hysteria or take up the CDC's battle cry of "Fire, ready, aim." Instead, it sprayed only where it found mosquitoes infected with West Nile virus. Because adulticiding for nuisance mosquitoes doesn't work, Connecticut doesn't do it. And because the greatest mosquito breeders are wetlands that have been trashed by humans, Connecticut restores them.

So enlightened has been the approach of the Essex County (Massachusetts) Mosquito Control District that its superintendent, Walter Montgomery, got the state legislature to change the district's name to the Northeast Massachusetts Mosquito Control and Wetlands Management District. Montgomery and his staff have been involved in virtually every salt-marsh restoration project from Boston to the New Hampshire border. Even the Fish and Wildlife Service hired them, to restore the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. Before the district restored 1,500 acres of Rumney Marsh, just north of Boston, the neighbors would phone in about 40 mosquito complaints per summer day. When I toured the marsh with Montgomery in 1996, I saw new tide channels and ponds of the sort that used to be part of natural salt marshes before old-school mosquito controllers dewatered them with useless grid ditches. Shoals of mummichog minnows, a mosquito larva's worst nightmare, dimpled over new glasswort. Herons stalked the mummichogs. Waterfowl dabbled in new widgeon grass, and shorebirds scampered over reborn mudflats. Now there are hardly any mosquito complaints, and instead of a festering phragmites monoculture, the neighbors get a healthy, diverse marsh teeming with fish, birds, and mammals. (See "What Good Is a Wetland?" Audubon, November-December 1996.)

This doesn't mean that the neighbors aren't bitten by mosquitoes. After all the wetlands have been restored, all the bottles, cans, and tires picked up, all the rain gutters cleaned, all the garden ponds stocked with goldfish, and all the birdbaths changed, even after you've marinated yourself in repellent, mosquitoes will still feast on your blood. Grin and bear it. The more you get bitten, the less you will itch. If your children complain about mosquitoes, tell them they are part of wild, wet places where frogs, turtles, and trout abide, part of staying up late, part of summer.

In the AMCA's March-April 2001 newsletter there's a photo of a kid named Bobby Wilson, age 10, I would guess, who lists mosquitoes first among "summertime nuisance[s]." I submit that when American boys are more offended by mosquitoes than, say, summer reading, Mark Twain is blanching and Teddy Roosevelt isn't saying "Bully" for them or us. And I submit that the future for wasteful, destructive, ineffective mosquito control is even brighter than when West Nile virus hit New York City.