The worst in 15+ years

I'm not a wus.  I'm an outdoorsy / gardening type person and there isn't a day that goes by when I'm not bitten by something... fire ants, midges, mosquitoes, spiders, who knows what else.  So if I'm complaining repeatedly about being bitten, it's a serious situation.

And so it is.  Galveston County officials have said that this is the worst mosquito outbreak in 10 to 15 years.  It's so bad that they almost had to stand down the sprayer airplane because the pilot couldn't see properly through the windshield for the thickness of the mosquitoes. 

This is the worst I've experienced in an urbanized upper Texas coast area ever, and I've been here for most of the last 25 years.

Eight new mosquito bites in three minutes in a skin surface area only 3" x 3" in size.  My child yesterday, just from walking a block from home to the school bus stop.  She was so thoroughly occupied with keeping mosquitoes from biting her arms and face that she forgot about their ability to sting through her shirt beneath the bottom edge of her backpack. 

It got me to thinking... is this the worst outbreak I've ever seen in my half-century of life?

Not even in east Texas swamps have I seen the likes of this.

Turkey Creek Unit (TCU), Big Thicket National Preserve, taken on a backcountry camping trip a few years ago.  Conditions like this are near-optimal for mosquitoes, but they were manageable during this trip because they were intrinsic mosquitoes - they didn't include the kind of far-ranging tidal hatch-outs we're dealing with now.     

I ended up concluding that there was one other occasion which I can declare a tie for severity.  In November 2006, after much of greater Houston had received about ten inches of rain in the few weeks preceding, I went to Lake Houston Park (which I still tend to refer to as Lake Houston State Park) to photograph the mushrooms.  Conditions were utterly ideal for mushrooms and fungi and I had to try a photo shoot.  (Coincidentally, those were some of the same ten inches of rain that also caused the flooding seen in Above the Aether's photo in yesterday's post). 

When I got to the park office, the clerk looked at me like I was utterly crazy for even walking through the door.  She said, "The mosquitoes are bad".

I said, "I know.  I put on lots of repellant before I left my car."

She said, "No.  You're not understanding the gravity of your circumstances.  You don't need to 'put on repellant'.  You need to take the whole can with you."

She was right.  I not only took the whole can with me on that hike, but I emptied the whole can onto myself inside 45 minutes. 

And my resulting photos still sucked.  Even with an entire eight ounces of Off on me, I literally couldn't breathe, couldn't concentrate.  My frames, depths of field, etc. were all screwed up, and most of my photos have blurry splotches in them because of the clouds of mosquitoes hovering in front of the camera lens. 

It would have been a wonderful photo op, if it had been physically survivable. 

But alas, it simply wasn't meant to be. 

This, too, shall pass.  But nobody will be very happy until it does.  

Mosquito mayhem: League City core left out

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but sometimes I have to raise a wider bit of hell and I need pictures to do it because it makes for more effective URL-emailing.

The "urban" core of League City, including Centerpointe, has reportedly not yet been sprayed for mosquitoes, whereas most of the rest of the city has.  And in the case of west LC, not once, but twice. 

This is a screengrab of the map published for August 31. 

This is a screengrab of the map published for September 3. 

Just a damned minute here... is this for real?!  West League City and Friendswood got sprayed twice, and us zero times?  What is up with that? 

Furthermore, the schedule is not looking promising for us right now.  Neither is it via the recorded message of spray schedule. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

I've never given this much thought before now, but if you were to compare assessed property values vs. likelihood of getting a timely mosquito spray, I think you might see a bit of a positive correlation here.  All except for us (the red-headed suburban stepchild of the urban center), and Mar Bella to the extreme east (do they maybe hire their own private service?)

Sorry for getting into a crappy tone over this issue, but I just opened my refrigerator to get a snack, and I swear to God, a mosquito flew out of it.  I've killed four mosquitoes at my desk just in the writing of this one blog post.  My husband has Mosquito Control on speed dial and sits in his chair thumb-punching repeated requests.  I can't even begin to count the number of mosquito bites we are getting inside of our home every day at this point.  And I can't go outside without a bandana wrapped around my nose and mouth and safety goggles on my eyes.  I'm not kidding. 

So tomorrow I'll call Mosquito Control and ask them that question:  "Have you chosen to exclude central League City because you think it's Old Town and only lower-income people live here?  Do property values have anything to do with why you've sprayed west LC and Friendswood twice already??"  Yes, that's stooping low, but desperate times call for desperate measures. 

Updated September 5, 2013:  Just to underscore the seriousness of the perspective I'm trying to convey here, I had my teenager count the number of new mosquito bites she received this morning.  It's only 7 a.m. as I write this, and so far today, she has gotten sixteen new bites - five when she let the dog out to do her morning business, and eleven more going from home to school bus and from school bus into the school.  That's not 16 total bites - that's 16 new bites just in the first hour of today. 

And that's on a child who was highly motivated to minimize the number she's receiving.  If she hadn't been actively working to combat the mosquitoes, she wouldn't have gotten 16 - she would have gotten 160. 

Nearby areas in which properties like these are found don't seem to be much of a priority at the moment. 

But you're in luck if instead you happen to live in South Shore, Tuscan Lakes, or Westover.  The first digit on your sales price wouldn't be the same as these, however. 

Random active listing screengrabs from HAR.

How to avoid mosquitoes in Houston

Answer:  Schedule yourself around them.  Plan your life so that you intentionally capitalize on those significant intervals during which mosquitoes are not present in our outdoor environment.  Conversely, plan indoor and out-of-town activities for those times when you know they will be at a peak.

Hell on wings.  Screengrabbed from Wikipedia. 

I'm serious.  The mosquito management mistake that greater Houstonians often make is to assume that there's a way to make the mosquitoes bend to their schedule.  We humans (at least, those of us who live in western cultures) assume that we can engineer everything at will, of course. 

But in this case, folks would be better off if they could simply side-step the whole issue.  All the aerial and ground-based spraying in the world isn't going to get us where we need to be, from a quality-of-life perspective.  Our public mosquito control methods may improve the situation somewhat, but they don't make the problem go away.  Not even close. 

Let me emphasize this point in a very practical way.  Do you know what this is??

It's a photo of the sun rising over my suburban neighborhood yesterday morning (Saturday April 13, 2013). 

Why was I outside watching the sun come up yesterday instead of snoozing a weekend sleep-in?  Because several related reasons illustrate why the time to be outside is now:

1. The weather is extraordinary.  Low humidity and highs in the 70's.  It doesn't get any better than this.  Ever.
2. We have not yet had our first mosquito outbreak of the spring season, in part because we've been in yet another drought phase. 
3. A few days ago, the League City area got about 2 inches of rain.  This was our first significant rainfall since December 2012.  What this means is that we are probably about T minus one week away from our first major mosquito swarm.  I saw the sun come up and spent about ten hours outdoors yesterday because there's an excellent chance that a repeat performance will not be possible for me next weekend due to the mosquitoes that will come. 

The next time you hear someone bitching and moaning about Houston's heat and mosquitoes, ask them what they did to capitalize on the last mosquito-free period which, in 2013, happened to have been the period between January 1 and approximately April 20 (wow - almost a four-month mosquito-free period!).  Chances are they'll reply, "Well, not much".  And you can say, "Well, there you go!!  You have to take your opportunities when they come, because they're not going to be there on demand."

Ask them, "Did you do anything with yourselves in the month of March 2013, bubbas??  Because there wasn't a single friggin' mosquito on the wing during the entire month.  And we had no bad weather, either."

Screengrab of historical treatment schedule from Galveston County Mosquito Control. 

This is just the essential nature of Houston.  We have, indeed, been lucky in this respect this year.  Last year, Houston Chronicle was publishing stories about how our first mosquito wave descended by the beginning of March.   Holy crap!  The beginning of March!  And here we are April 14 and there's not a single one of them in sight - not around Centerpointe, anyway.

Happy Sunday.  It looks like it's largely going to be a repeat of yesterday's splendor, weather-wise.  Enjoy the hell out of it while you still can. 

I ain't lyin'.  Here's a screengrab of Galveston County Mosquito Control's current treatment schedule.  As in, there still isn't one. 

West Nile virus in League City

A rumor reached me yesterday and the rumor said that West Nile virus was recently detected in League City. 

Mosquito close-up photo.
Nasty, nasty, nasty.
From Wikipedia (here).

However, I haven't been able to substantiate this rumor.  Of course, West Nile has been detected in League City in the past, because it has been detected just about everywhere by this time.   

Distribution of West Nile in North America,
from Wikipedia (this page).

But the news reports I'm finding are all old (e.g., this one from GCDN in 2004).  If anyone knows of any such source of alleged recent information, please contact me via centerpointe dot blog at gmail.

One thing we can do is take a look at what is known about West Nile prevalence at the present time.  Oddly enough, much of the current monitoring is communicated through the United States Geological Survey.  Mosquitoes are not really a subject of geology, but USGS does produce maps, afterall. 

Screengrab from this page.
Most of the current human infections are occurring in the DFW area.
This source was showing NO confirmed West Nile cases this year in Galveston County, at least not as of two days ago.

Galveston County Mosquito Control corroborates the information above, having posted this statement to their homepage:

We have had no West Nile Virus positives in our mosquito pools or sentinel flocks within the county. We do test for arboviruses weekly. We understand that Harris County has seen some positives and there are some concerns by our citizens.

By "mosquito pools" and "sentinel flocks", they mean the non-human testing that they monitor for distant early warnings of the re-arrival of the virus.  "Sentinel flocks" is often a fancy way of saying "chickens". 

USGS reports no West Nile cases in any sentinels anywhere in the state, as of two days ago.  But Mosquito Control is saying that now cases are emerging to the north of us.  Perhaps the rumor I heard pertained to those emerging cases for Harris County. 

HERE'S ANOTHER THING WE CAN DO: ENCOURAGE MOSQUITO CONTROL TO SPRAY CENTERPOINTE, BECAUSE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD WAS SKIPPED DURING THE JULY 23 EAST LEAGUE CITY SPRAY-A-THON. 

I don't know why this omission occurred, but I did email Mosquito Control asking about it, and they confirmed via a response email that we were not among those areas of League City that were covered the other day.  That evening, my husband and I heard their truck go down either Walker Street or Centerpointe Drive, but it never went through the neighborhood.  We are outdoorsy people and usually pay strict attention to where the truck is (you can hear the sound of its pesticide diffuser quite some distance away and can usually follow the truck's path with your ears).   We have never heard it skip Centerpointe before this most recent time.

Please keep their telephone ringing, and thanks for your help.

Mosquito madness

The bad news:  Anyone with a pulse in Galveston County realizes that we are now into the worst mosquito outbreak that we've had in months.

Here's how bad it is right now:
We keep a dedicated can of repellant at the door.  The procedure is to first crack the door open about three inches.  Grab can, stick arm outside, spray liberally, then slam door shut again and wait inside for about 30 more seconds.  Then open door, exit, and run like hell to wherever it is you need to go (your car, shed, dog kennel, trash cans, etc), taking the repellant can with you.  Repeat door spray-down procedure before re-entering your house, or else you will drag two dozen mosquitoes in with you each time you enter. 

Note that if you have a really nice door, you might want to be careful about the application of spray because the chemicals in some sprays might damage a door's finish.

The good news:  Galveston County Mosquito Control is aware of the severity of the problem.

Homepage screengrab from this morning, courtesy of
http://www.co.galveston.tx.us/mosquito_control/index.htm

Here's a cartoon screengrab of one of their
maniacal little animated bloodsuckers,
just to enhance this blog post mood.

The other good news is that Mosquito Control has a pretty sophisticated website and is very good about keeping folks up-to-date on their activities.  Given the spray distribution that I see on their current set of maps, I bet they will be spraying east League City (i.e., our area) within the next couple of days. 

The other bad news:  Centerpointe has more than one issue with mosquitoes right now.  The primary issue is that a large hatch-out did occur due to recent rain and tides.  But an aggravating factor is that we are currently surrounded by un-mowed weed fields.  As I noted in a post about four months ago, mosquitoes do not breed in high grass, but various references on the internet suggest that high grass allows them to attain good protective cover.  High grass provides them with a home that encourages them to congregate in an area, especially allowing them to take shelter during the heat of the day.  If anyone has information to the contrary on this point, please email me, but that's the understanding that I have.

Here's a screengrab from that previous post.

Current cases in point for us:

South of Centerpointe Section 9, next to the new Shell gas station that's being built.  Grass, grass, and more grass.

Adjacent east of Centerpointe.  Not as high as the area to our south, but getting there.

Also adjacent east of Centerpointe.

Note that, for two of those shots above, I included the sales signs so that you can call those sellers' realtors and encourage them to ask their clients to cut the grass on their properties.  I didn't get out and measure it, but we have a 12-inch weed ordinance in this city, and it looks like these properties are bumping up against that.  For sure the tract of land south of Section 9, and these eastern tracts are getting up there, too. 

References:
http://leaguecity.com/index.aspx?NID=254
http://library.municode.com/index.aspx?clientId=10947&stateId=43&stateName=Texas 

If I manage to get a contact phone number for the south property owner, I'll follow up with a comment here.  And I'll also forward this post link to the POA for their consideration.  As always, thanks for reading.