Neighbors: Lessons in Nature

We live in the middle of a good size city, so sometimes it is easy to forget that we are still part of an ecosystem and that Nature provides us with many neighbors. One super annoying neighbor is the Box Elder bug, pictured here much larger than it really is. This is the second year in a row that we are having to come to terms with our shared space. They are perfectly harmless but they are also perfectly maddening! They feed off box elder trees and any related trees and in the fall when it starts getting a little cool they are attracted to the warm walls of homes and buildings where they sun themselves for hours. They have no natural predators. None. Again, they are harmless and don't carry disease, sting or destroy things, but they like to get in the house and it is just...gross. I would show a photo of them swarming the side of the house, but you might never come to visit again! It is with great chagrin that I write that I am unwilling to spray them as the pesticide would be much worse for us and for Zeke than these box elder bugs. A good cold snap would get them tamed (until next fall), but the weather has been so unseasonably warm that the bugs may be ringing in the new year with us. Our box elder management approach has been to vacuum them up, but I may break the watering ban to spray them with a little soapy water. Bad for my non-violent karma, good for having a bug-free house.

What strikes me a little funny and a lot frustrating is that there is little chance that we will ever get rid of our box elder neighbors. We finally identified the female box elder tree in our yard (the bugs only congregate around female trees). Once we found it, we realized our entire property line is covered with female box elder trees. And that our neighbors' yards are filled with box elder trees. We might take down the trees in our yard, but it would do us little good as there are all the other trees and then we would have no trees in our backyard! Finally, what has happened in the past two years? Well, yes, there is the baby, but he isn't attracting them and I'm not even sure he has noticed them. We got the house painted a lighter color, much lighter than any of our immediate neighbors. Between that and the relative height of our house, we are the box elder bug party house of choice -- none of our neighbors seem to have as big a problem. So, our long-term options are to take off the second story of the house, repaint what remains and dig up our backyard. I definitely think I'm going to try the pressure washer.

Much less noisome and much more noisy are our new neighbors, a pack of coyotes who live on the hill and along the creeks behind our house. They may have been here for a while, but we only realized they were coyotes last month and not just dogs on the loose. Once a night, they have a regular coyote jamboree. Sometimes though they get talking and singing and yapping from sun down to sun up. At least one of our (human) neighbors has seen them, but we have only caught a glimpse of their flashing eyes as they went over the hill. Coyotes elicit strong feelings all over the country, especially as they spread into cities, and most of those feelings are negative. Granted I'm warning neighbors to be careful and not leave their pets outside unattended, but I have rather warm feelings towards the coyotes. This is in stark comparison to the box elder bugs. (Though I might feel different if coyotes were swarming my house and trying to come inside.) The coyotes, as well as all of the hawks that nest nearby, remind me that nature is everywhere, even in the cul de sacs of infill urban housing in Atlanta. Zeke has yet to hear them as they mainly howl when he is asleep, but I have told him about them. (Did you know that coyotes really aren't that solitary and often mate for life?) I'm going to try to record their voices some night to let him hear them...right after I spray the box elder bugs.