The Mosquito War

I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and before you take another step, I want you to look down at this dike you're standing on — this long, straight ridge of shell and mud running off into the marsh. It's a handsome path now. But it was thrown up here as a wall in a war. A war against the mosquito.

You have to understand what this island was, before. Old Sanibel had a mosquito that folks talked about the way other places talk about blizzards. The saltmarsh mosquito, bred in these very flats — and it came not in swarms but in CLOUDS, a gray fog that rose off the marsh at dusk thick enough to blacken a white wall in a minute. They tell of cattle driven mad and smothered, of horses run to death, of homesteaders who broke and left everything and rowed away rather than face another summer. A man could wave his hand across his porch rail and wipe off a hundred of them. This was one of the most mosquito-ridden spots in all of America, and it very nearly kept Sanibel empty for good.

So in the middle of the last century, folks fought back. They came with dredges and they built dikes — this one under your boots and miles more like it — and they turned the marsh into a chain of ponds they could flood on purpose, drowning out the wet mud where the mosquito lays her eggs. Impoundments, they called them. It was a hard, muddy, buggy war, and it went on for years. And here's the turn, the thing that always makes me shake my head: it worked — but not the way they meant. Those ponds they flooded to spite the mosquito filled up instead with fish, and shrimp, and crabs. And the birds found them. Every spoonbill and heron and ibis you'll see today is standing in a mosquito trap. We set out to drain a nuisance, and by pure accident we set the finest bird table in Florida. So walk this old battle line proud. It's the only war I know of where, in the end, everybody won.