A mosquito test

As a writer I feel it's my duty to accomplish two things in life:

A) Inform.

B) Entertain.

And, of course, get bit by lots and lots of mosquitoes in the process. Why just the other day I was in a swamp because I've been poking around in swamps lately looking for many things and finding very little but misery, a cut finger and a sore knee.

(In one particularly nasty swamp I did find a single white-crowned sparrow, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but I thought I'd mention it because it was the only thing with wings that didn't try to bite me.)

Why, pray tell, have I been spending so much time in swamps? Because the other day I was hiking this one trail I like to hike and just as dusk was approaching and the day was ending I saw a big bird fly out of a tree and toward this big swamp that I hadn't been in before.

The bird, I surmised, was a great gray owl, one of the finest birds on Earth and so I figured if it flew into that swamp then it probably lived there. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but I can tell you this: If you have two legs and no wings it's one helluva place to try to get around in.

The mud is like oil and there's trees down everywhere and they're not friendly trees either, they're spruce, with scaly bark and umpteen branches that claw at your pants and rip at your shirt and cut your hands.

But enough about me. This is about mosquitoes because when I was in this swamp the mosquitoes and the gnats were everywhere - in my ears and on my neck and covering my hands and flying in my mouth and it was not a cool day by any stretch but I still had my hat pulled down and my long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the wrists.

The mosquitoes didn't care - they just covered my hands like buzzing gloves. It took a couple of hours to go a mile into the place and when I got out I was bloody and tired and felt like I'd gone 12 rounds with a gorilla.

So I wised up and bought some bug dope. Two kinds, exactly. One kind had good old fashioned 35 percent DEET in it and the other had citronella oil and other stuff in it that I could actually pronounce.

The nice thing about having two arms is you can do experiments on yourself, so I sprayed one bare arm with the DEET stuff (Deep Woods Off) and then the other with the citronella stuff (It's called Natrapel, which makes you smell sort of good, well, at least not bad) and then I went out with Boy Wonder into another swampy area.

(Boy Wonder got the citronella, exclusively).

And here's what happened: Both actually worked quite well over the course of a three hour hike.

The citronella stuff didn't seem to bother flies, but it did keep mosquitoes away and the Deep Woods Off also kept the mosquitoes away, but some other bug still managed to bite my arm and leave a welt.

Both cost roughly the same. We still didn't see much (no owls, but we did see a black bear track and found some orchids, which is also fun.) but we also weren't carried away by mosquitoes either, which is a big, big bonus.

So I guess I'm leaning toward the citronella stuff, primarily because I can't even pronounce the real name for DEET which is N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide.

I'll have to do a few more experiments on myself.

I'm sure of one thing: The mosquitoes will be waiting.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.