Because of our shared environment, I believe that I should be a good environmental steward and learn how to coexist with wildlife.

No one likes mosquito bites, I sure don’t. I wanted a way to manage mosquitoes without impacting more than mosquitoes.

Native plants and insects are at the bottom of the food web and support our environment and wildlife. Responsibly managing mosquitoes is essential to our health and the health of our environment.

In my role as the Wildlife Sanctuary Program (WSP) Assistant at the Northern Virginia Bird Alliance (NVBA), I started testing out out Dr. Douglas Tallamy's mosquito larvae trap in 2021 and documented it with his guidance. How to information is on the NVBA website along with FAQs as the large traps have been refined with feedback. The FAQs and maintenance tips are essential elements for trap management.

The Wildlife Sanctuary Program consists of volunteers that help property owners become better environmental stewards, learn more about WSP. Educating property owners about the impact of pesticides and herbicides is part of the program. We find that many people simply do not know how much the pesticides used in mosquito spraying negatively impact our environment. We are working on outreach and education.

In 2024, WSP volunteers dove into recent peer-reviewed scientific research on the impact of pesticide spraying on the environment - the resulting NVBA brochure "To Spray, or Not to Spray" summarizes what works and what doesn't to manage mosquitoes.

This is the research that shocked me - the bolded bit below especially - and causes me to cringe each time I see a mosquito fogging advertisement (this snippet is copied from page 7 of the research paper - please see the paper for the research cited):

The protocol used by the Pyrethroid Working Group (an industry group) to collect the data that informed EPA’s 2016 ecological risk assessment of nine common pyrethroids provides some indication of the problem. "The outdoor non-agricultural section assessed urban residential, institutional and commercial uses of the pyrethroids that occur outdoors, as well as turf, ornamental plant, and nursey uses. For residential and commercial uses, the maximum labeled rate was one application per year occurring on the same day in a 10-hectare watershed with 58 residential (or commercial) lots." (emphasis added) The ecological risk of residential mosquito fogging applications, with treatment normally occurring every three weeks during summer, not once a year, was not assessed, and is clearly much higher. But, even with only a yearly application, harm was evident: "The assessment found that there were acute and chronic listed and non-listed LOC (Levels of Concern) exceedances for freshwater and estuarine/marine invertebrates from the residential, commercial, turf and nursery uses for bifenthrin, cyfluthrin, lambda-cyhalothrin, cypermethrin, esfenvalerate, and permethrin. Benthic (sediment-dwelling) invertebrates tend to be more sensitive to the pyrethroids and pyrethrins than water column dwelling invertebrates. The assessed active ingredients with the most risk concerns for fish were permethrin and bifenthrin. For bifenthrin, there were chronic listed and non-listed exceedances for freshwater fish for turf, residential, and nursery scenarios. Bifenthrin also had acute listed-only LOC exceedances for all uses for freshwater fish." These pesticides harm insects, fish and macrobenthic organisms--all organisms not specifically targeted by the applicators.

The take-away from the above? The 1 time per year application for pyrethroids is bad for the environment and the mosquito fogging application rate is every 3 weeks over the summer. In my area in Northern Virginia, that’s about 11 times from early April to early November. That seems really bad for the environment to me.

Nature Needs Our Support

I am a native plant gardener to support wildlife and I love watching critters in my Certified Wildlife Sanctuary, especially the butterflies over my Joe Pye and New York Ironweed in the summer. I also have nesting bluebirds, cardinals, wrens, and woodpeckers and they need the caterpillars to successfully raise their young.

Invest in health and Nature

Mosquito Jill supplies kits as a part of an integrated pest management solution to control mosquitoes. Mosquito Jill Kits come with the hard-to-find components to get started setting up your traps. Invest in some easy to maintain traps that can be used season after season. New Mosquito Dunks, water, and dried organic material is quite affordable compared to fogging.