pests

[urbpan]

What I was writing about pests became too long. What it boiled down to is this:

There are pests. No species is a pest all the time, and any creature can become a pest depending on its effect on humans and their property. A few species have become serious, persistent pests, and can cause health problems and/or property damage. Some introduced animals are environmental pests, endangering the survival of endemic species. The occupation of pest controller is a necessary one.

Many people are simply intolerant of animals or for some reason need a high degree of control over their surroundings. These people perceive pests everywhere, and want to live in as sterile an environment as possible. For them if there are snakes, or worms, or spiders, or whatever animal they dislike in their yard, it's a pest control problem. These people are nuts.

In my role as an urban naturalist, I've always felt it was important to talk about living things on their own terms, skirting the issue of whether they are pests are not. Now that I'm also a pest control professional, I'm starting to feel an obligation to speak about when animals become pests, and what to do about them. While I spent most of my life arguing against animals being killed, when they are pests, if they can't be excluded I recommend that they be killed.


On this day in 365 Urban Species: Japanese maple.

Comments

[roaming.livejournal.com]

"Now that I'm also a pest control professional, I'm starting to feel an obligation to speak about when animals become pests, and what to do about them. While I spent most of my life arguing against animals being killed, when they are pests, if they can't be excluded I recommend that they be killed."

That sounds like having a job that pays you to fill the role of Pest Controller means you can change your view of what's right to do with perceived pests. Like changing suits for different occasions. Which I find hard to believe about you. Not that I know you 'cept for LJ.

(btw, I'm not a "can't kill anything for any reason" person, though of course I like to avoid it even if it means I go out of my way or am discomfitted a bit. (The black ant invasion of my kitchen this past summer pushed me to the limit, but I managed to control the urge to squoosh. Eventually they left. I'm sure they'll be back.)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I suppose it does read that way. My first draft was overly wordy, but perhaps it would have conveyed the evolution of my views on the subject better. I would rather have the reader understand that my views have changed over time, and that I arrived at the job with my current views. Clearly, I wouldn't have taken a job that forced me to act in disagreement with my beliefs. I couldn't have taken the job I have now, if it were offered to me a decade ago.

What's changed "now that I'm a pest control professional" is that I'm learning a great deal about pests--taking a class for certification, for example, and reading lots of books, journals, and websites on the subject. I want to share my knowledge, as usual, but (as you well point out) it will seem like a strange contrast to what my blog readers have come to expect.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Evolution is a beautiful thing, even if just on a personal level. :-)

[nutmeg.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm biased, but don't forget all those plants that are pests and threaten endemic species!

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I went from nurturing the bittersweet in my yard (and proclaiming that I wouldn't cut any weed without first knowing what it was--still good practice in general, I think) to waging war on bittersweet at Drumlin Farm. Once I was cutting a thick stalk of it, and said to someone "It must be 60 years old!" and he asked me (I forget the exact words) if I'd payed my respects to it before cutting it.

[nutmeg.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have been waging war on the bittersweet in my fence in my backyard. It is intertwined with some Virginia Creeper I want to keep and I have a general aversion to herbicide (when I can do without it, my research requires spraying LARGE areas with nasty stuff). So several times a summer I cut it out of the fence and the Creeper and slowly it's dying. Unfortunately, the honeysuckle is taking it's place, but at least honey suckle doesn't hybridize with natives and make the native genotypes disappear.

Its really disheartening to walk around and see bittersweet wreaths on people's doors, full of beautiful berries for the birds to eat and spread in the forest.

Sigh.

Anyway, it is interesting to reflect on how our viewpoints change over time.

[momomom.livejournal.com]

That's a good explanation, including the part in the comments. I'll be interested in what you have to say on this subject.

I'm into integrated pest management with no use of insecticides inside my house beyond ant baits for my own personal comfort but I also have my limits of what I can tolerate in my personal space. Lice=chemicals.

[smallerdemon.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I know some very caring people who feel exactly as you state about animals and insects, etc. in their vicinity. Me, I love it. Snakes are still a cause of distress for much of my family, but I've come to love them quite a bit. Vultures are something else that my family growing up didn't like and I flat out don't get it at all (since a world without them would be one hell of a lot more unpleasant than the world with them) and I love all birds, even the much despised but unquestionable champion of survival the pigeon. Birds are just damn cool.

Spiders, well, not my favorite creatures, but in general I'll toss em out of the house rather than kill them (although, if you are a spider I advise against being on my toilet at 3 AM when I get up to pee, since I'll mostly need to pee and you are in the way, and there's a lot of spiders in the world).

A gentleman I once worked with who was a great naturalist at heart once said something that has stuck with me quite a while, though: Nature ends at the door. :)

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

We have various insect problems in our house, and I face most of them, since I'm the one living in the basement. There's an unfinished, unsealed room attached to the finished part - damp, cement floors, open wood beams, like you think of when you think "new england basement". When I was a kid I could kill bugs without a qualm, but now I can't do it. I can't handle the crunch. I can poison things, I can smother things, I can drown things, but I can't crush something with an exoskeleton. And I absolutely cannot deal with corpses.

My policy is to leave any predators alone as long as they hide from me. If I've got enough of a population of nonpredatory things to keep all the spiders and house centipedes going, I sure as hell want some spiders and house centipedes hunting that stuff down. If all I had were a bunch of carnivores eating each other, I'd have a self-limiting problem... although I guess they could all be critters coming in from the rain. I also appreciate the nocturnal, stealthy, hideaway habits of my little predator friends - I almost never find the remains of their dinners. I do get a kick out of it when a big one comes out into the light and scares someone, too. "THAT THING HAS FIVE BILLION LEGS!" Even the babies have five billion legs.

Sadly, spiders and house centipedes don't do very well against grain moths. (Or mites on the plants. Sigh.) My cats won't let me get a bat to take care of that problem. We use traps for those, and ants the one time we had them, and poison the external barrier of the house. We will use whatever we must to defeat and destroy destructive populations. I just hope I never have to bugbomb the place. Ugh.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Grain moths are tough. They are the only animal that I will go out of my way to kill. I use fly tape, but the pheremone traps are supposed to work pretty well.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

That's what we've got, the pheromone traps; the first round killed off most of them, but apparently there was a reservoir because they came back. Seems to work better than the fly tape, at least until the fly tape gets covered with little corpses and becomes a pheromone trap. This is the second round of traps and the population is low again, but we still find them in the food sometimes. I suspect it's going to be a seasonal thing.

Moth corpses are the only corpses I can routinely see and not be completely squicked out, which is good, because the kitchen has several objects covered in them.

[morgi.livejournal.com]

The relativeness of pests reminds of a show I saw a few times on Discovery about animals gone out of control. Some innocent woman fed the cute mallard ducks she saw hanging around her swimming pool... and then she a Biblical plague of them. The footage was pretty impressive.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Good example. My workplace uses netting specifically to exclude mallards from one exhibit.

How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth......

[(Anonymous)]

How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth......

There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to "man's footprint". But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.

We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe "knowledge drought" - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the "right way". The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.

National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D'Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States - No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help "stem the tide", I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ .

This new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.

Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." --Victor Hugo

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

Re: How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth......

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your website, and the fact that you have made your book available for free download. I will likely consult it at work occasionally.

One criticism: your writing style has a political bent to it, like a pest control manual written by Dr. Bronner, or a Communist newspaper. I can imagine some people being put off by that. No need to capitalize every letter in the word POISON every time you use it. We who have passed the pesticide applicator's exam know that pesticides are poison. Their job is killing, and none of them kill only the pest you target, especially if misused.

Re: How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth......

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

now that I've read some of the book, I see that the writing style is more moderate and professional there. however! one quibble: for your house sparrow chapter, you used an illustration of a white throated sparrow!