I took this photo at 7:30am, in central South Dakota last week. Extremely humid, and extremely hot (peaking to about 110F in the late afternoons). The fog in the mornings was about as thick and dense as I'd ever seen it. This made for pretty ornaments with the spider webs in the field we worked in.
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Pretty, indeed. So what do the spiders catch out there --just flies, or anything more substantial?
Skeeters, AI. We hope they catch and kill as many mosquitos as they can possibly eat — and even more!
I hate mosquitos with a passion. What's skeeters? A nasty variant thereof?
"Skeeters" is Minnesota and Dakota lingo for mosquitos, harbingers of malaria, west nile, and all things rotten and horrible (they are one argument against "Intelligent Design").
They've been horrific, at least since Lewis and Clark rolled through presentday North Dakota. These Jeffersonian explorers remarked on how atrocious the mosquitos were at one point on the upper Missouri in their journals.
John Finerty, a Hibernian war correspondent with the Chicago Tribune, also remarked how awful the skeeters were in northeastern Montana in the late 19th-century. Finerty was an imbedded reporter with General Crook, and accompanied one of the frontier officers and a couple Native scouts across the British-American border to visit Sitting Bull and his encampment. Finerty and Company rode at a steady gallop, but the skeeters were so thick that it didn't matter. They still got chewed up, enough to make a hard-drinking, Chicago journalist remark on the nastiness of it all.
My archaeological outfit does work up in that part of Montana today. We can report that the concentrations of mosquitos haven't dropped much, if at all.
'Skeeters, as MFT has so well detailed, are the bane of the Plains summer. Which is why Grizzlies, Werewolves, and denizens of the Gallatin Valley blessed the high mountains which so mock the little flappy wings of those skeeters' buzzing in the great swaths of badlands below and to the East [badlands and butte-d vistas leading to the realms of MFT]
Before the dawn of deet (the active ingredient in skeeter repellent), smudge pits were often used in Native American villages and the Grand Army of the Republic encampments to smoke the mosquitos away. It's only the female skeeters that bite, as they are interested in protein-rich blood for their offspring.
Check July/2007 issue of National Geographic for a rather decent write-up on skeeters and malaria, the world over. The article bombs at the very end, but there's some good descriptions about how malaria attacks the body.
Also note: Teddy Roosevelt nearly died from malaria during his South American expedition. He also recognized it as the main (if not one of thee main) problem to confront after we bailed France out of their botched canal project in Panama. Teddy ordered the tall grass to be cut, I believe swamps to be drained, and the deployment of mosquito netting.
...to the high mountains, yes.
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