sports

outdoors ^vith Lou Rodia Mosquitoes No Joke Here or Anywhere

As a lifelong resident of South Jersey and one who has visited a" lot of places in a lifetime. I am tired of the' New Jersey mosquito jokes which plague us. We hear them everywhere we go. And. we are more and more convinced that we get ridden a lot about mosquitoes because our antagonists really want

f to get us on the defensive so o that they will not have to n talk about how bad things e' are in their home areas, s WE IK) HAVE some mos quitoes here in Cape May - County, in case any of you e have any doubts. But, there d are nowhere near as many >t as there used to be. Some of e the improvement comes it from mosquito control pro-

grams. Some improvement comes from clearing a lot of the areas which housed mosquito-breeding propensities and some comes from better drainage. Is it really better? We can't speak for the pre-mid-30's. TTiat's too long ago for us to remember. But we can speak for the times since. We have to dredge up from memory the stories we were told which recounted the mosquito problems that faced our ancestors. MY MOTHER and my aunts told of picking berries "on my grandfather's farm when they were young. They suffered from the mosquitoes of their day without benefit of the better repellants we have to fall back on. There was, and still is, Citronella. It smelled to high heaven and we're not sure it kept mosquitoes away, but it was all we had in the repellant category. We picked berries on the farm as kids and the mosquitoes bit us as well. Nothing seemed to help a lot of days. THERE WAS Flit and the hand-held pump spray guns with a tin reservoir or the ones with the little bottles which had to be filled from the bigger containers. More than once as a kid we went on Mosquito Hunts with the Flit gun in the middle of the night. We made more than one fly swatter by nailing a piece of window screen on a slat from the bottom on a shade. And we then promptly turned the fly swatter into a mosquito killer. Citronella candles supposedly kept the mosquitoes out of the house or the picnic area. They were semieffective at best. OR. WE COULD always make a smudge pot out of some rags set afire in a can and then tapped out so they smoldered. They worked great if you stayed down wind of them and held your breath. If you breathed, you choked. The last smudge pot we remember was one we made as a teenager on a Scolft trip. We were fishing .rvuui ii ip. ..t m.17 nailing

for largemouth bass around Mount Holly on a private lake. The owner had lent our troop his cabin and the boat to use for a weekend outing. THE LAKE looked inviting, since ke kept it posted, and it was supposed to be filled with big bass. It may well be. We never found out. Around dusk, the mosquitoes came out in swarms. Our fishing buddy was unfortunate enough to have seated himself in the middle of the boat and hence had the access to the oars. As we headed for shore, he rowed and I made a smudge pot from my shirt tail. It was somewhat effective. I got a lot of smoke and a few less mosquitoes. And a lot of static from my fishing buddy who had a lot of mosquitoes and no smoke to keep them away. Plus he had both hands busy with the oars and could not even defend himself with swatting. SMUDGE POTS, citronella. fly swatters and Flit were things we had to rely on. They came from our elders who had them to work with and passed them on to us. But for the ladies working in the fields, there was another recourse. They wore long-sleeved, heavy men's shirts and suffered from the heat. They wrapped their legs in newspapers and held the papers in place with their stockings. It took that to get the orops picked in the face of "horrendous mosquito problems. We do not pick berries on those farms anymore, but we do visit there a lot. And. there are a lot fewer mosquitoes there today AS FOR mosquitoes locally, two old-timers who lived on Five Mile Beach when there were still cattle roaming there, told me they really had lots of mosquitoes on the island before the turn of the century. As they told the story, they were playing in the sand dunes one evening just before dark and they saw a plume of black smoke which looked as if it was coming from the water. Since there .were lots of steam boats in the coastal trade back in those days, the boys thought they would run down to the beach to see the ship go by. ON ARRIVAL they found it was not in fact a steamer but a hatch of mosquitoes which was so thick and had so many mosquitoes in it that it looked as if it was a passing boat. That was on the beach. A few minutes later they were back in the sand dunes and heading for home when the swarms of mosquitoes they kicked up in the grass attacked them. The boys, by their Sellings, had over a hundred bites each before they got home. Now. we all know that there are no longer than many mosquitoes on Five Mile Beach or any of the other barrier islands. It is a * lot better today. WE TRIED turkey hunting one year in Florida. The turkey tracks were there, and all signs pointed to a successful hunt. My Florida host bragged up the turkey hunting and I fell for it. We stayed until the mosquitoes found us. They bit anywhere the skin was exposed. They bit

through our clothes. They bit and bit, and some we swore were as big as the turkeys we were hunting. The mosquitoes won. We quit turkey hunting, and never went back. We fished in Canada in early June one year. We were 1.000 miles North and West of Montreal at a remote camp reached only with great travelling difficulty. IN THE MORNINGS there was skim ice on the cove behind the cabin and we had to crack through it to get the boats into the main river. Frost was everywhere when daybreak came each morning. But by 10 or 11 a.m. each day. we had to fish only on the upwind side of most of the islands. If we fished on the lee, the swarms of mosquitoes made short work of us — repellants or not. We tried to portage the boats over a beaver dam . one day and had to quit because of the swarms of mosquitoes. Shore lunches were out unless we found a split of land where there was no vegetation. THE MOSQUITOES were bigger and worse than any we ever encountered here — and they were mild by comparison to the black flies when they hatched on the last day of our Canadian trip. If anyone ever thought the mosquitoes were put here on earth to plague us, you can bet they never met black flies. We were trout fishing in Potter County in Pennsylvania on a creek two and half miles from the nearest road and while we scoffed at the hat with mosquito netting worn by our fishing buddy at first, we soon wished we had one. Repellants were only mildly effective. WE HAVE encountered mosquitoes in Maine, in the Carolinas, in Pennsylvania, in New York and a host of » other places. And they are as bad or worse in a lot of those places than any we have encountered here in New Jersey. We're tired of the Jersey Mosquito Jokes. No longer do we accept stories about waking up to find two mosquitoes arguing about whether to lunch on us on the spot or take us home to dinner instead. That is unless the joke is about somewhere else. One time in the past. New Jersey may have deserved a bad reputation, but things have improved. WHY THE DISCOURSE on mosquitoes? We received a news release from Cutter, the manufacturer of insect repellants. first aid kits, snake bite kits and compresses. Outdoor people know Cutter products. From them came a lot of

mosquito knowledge. Here is some of the information from the fact sheet : When mosquitoes arrive in the U.S. you can expect about 10 trillion of them. There will be 41,000 mosquitoes for every person in tjRttfrS.A. Stretched end to fend, the mosquitoes would reach from Earth to Venus and back again. There will be more mosquitoes in 1986 than all of the people who watched all major league baseball games since 1904. THERE WILL BE enough mosquitoes to fill the Grand Canyon. (A good place for them, by the way). If each mosquito were a penny, there would be more than needed to pay off the national debt. The female mosquito will bite one to four times during her life span. There is a bright side in all of this. Mosquitoes bite animals and birds as well as people. If not, and we were the only item on the female mosquito's menu, we would be scratching 100 bites EVERY day. THE LIST goes on: One person dies every 30 seconds somehwere in the world from the results of a mosquito bite. Only female mosquitoes attack because blood nourishes their eggs. Male mosquitoes are vegetarians. Females can lay 100 to 300 eggs after every . meal. Mosquitoes have been on this planet for 200 million years. They can survive freezing temperatures and 100-degree heat. Worldwide there are 2500 kinds of mosquitoes. There are over 150 kinds in the United States. They are tiny — only 1/8 to 1/4 inch long. They do not really bite They penetrate their victims with a hollow, flexible snout called a proboscis. MOSQUITOES LIVE from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of * Brazil and everywhere in between. If it were not for mosquitoes. Cubans would probably speak English The pests infected English military forces with deadly Yellow Fever every time they tried to invade the Spanish Caribbean in the 18th Century. We bring you the above information from the people at Cutter Laboratories We do not like mosquitoes We do not know anyone who does. Purple Martins supposedly eat 2,000 mosquitos a day We have had a mar tin house in the yard for 21 years. No martins came there. As a result, we can blame the martins for not doing their job. I just decided to head for my calculator to see how many martins we will need to do in 10 trillion mosquitoes.

C ape May Cnnnl\ ALMANAC MARCH, lyxi. MOON PH vses/positionS correction times The Moon 'i effect on the Tide is Compute approximate times greatest when closest to Earth of high * low water for your (in perigee I and when in direct area by adding or subtracting alignment with Sun t Earth the following number of Ifull I new moon phases ; On minifies for each (id# phase in and about these dates low the Tide Table pressure systems andlor strong »indl I depending upon direr lion i may result in flooding and/ or extremely low tides Moon I'hasr* I O» HIGH I i«i ijujrirt 3 Great Egg Harbor Inlet \r* Mmm HI Plus 12 pluSlO KirM oujrtrr in ()cta„ C||y (9U, g, gridgei l ull Moon 25 p|us3S p|us22 Corson Inlet i bridge) 'vSr ' ph"!l p"°7 Sea Isle City * i Ludlam Thoro Bridge 1 TIDE TABI.K plus 66 plus 43 Computed for Cpp# May City sea Isle City Beach /b.» »■«>• minus 21 Inlet 4 »■" p" p piiuis . o 5 Will I ip : o y 27 •• w Stone Harbor i. Thu 4 15 4 U In .1. in m 'Great Channel Bridge i 7 En .17 41 It 22 II 17 plus 43 plus 40 n Sal '• ]<j m 12 13 Hereford Inlet < Anglesea ' 'i sun •• >. :• -n I.1 'ji i j i'i | 0 tu Mini 7 w : :* i IH I i" v ' . . . q . 11 To,- HIS IHU III! I I'i »iMw««i 12 Weil it V. y 12 2 41 2 .1 Minus2 minus 17 t; Ihu '• >2 • ix i i'i 1 fi West Wildwood 14 En in i« in y, iv. 4 Grassy Channel bridge ■ I . s.,1 II. 41. II ill 4 tt I I'I plus 46 plus 43 II. sun II 28 1144 .11 ,114 Cape May Harbor ' i; t™ m n 5 '» ; S- 2 S pto ' „ i""""* II Wed t 26 2 10 H 12 H li Fa,hom 2n Thu 2 11 1 22 1 It K 14 Pi"*" Pi"*' 21 En in i 2* Hue lit 12 Cape May Point 22 Sal 4 44 . 21 l» 5B II " . plus 46 plus 34 it Sun .17 |6I* ll 42 II 54 McCne Shoal 24 Mi ill <. 21 .. 41 12 2. pi^ 28 plus22 2.. Tut- .'li .11 12 44 I In _ , _ % w„l 7 .7 nu I D.I..O..B.. "7 I'hu k it h v. 'IK j "14 Bay shore Channel 2H En •> n. '14 "tut Tit. • Hay -Canal Junction* 25 Sal Iti in. ill .7 t VI : 'a plus 47 plus 36 III sun It 112 1 1 ii 4 41 I 4S Miami Beach 31 Mon 12 to 3 43 5 )'• plus 75 plus 6 1 Iiennis Creek Entrance plus 114 plus IT Brandyyt ine Shoal Lighl » plus 77 plus V2 -

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