Nosey Foe

I will never forget the girl who was both allergic to DEET and highly reactive to mosquito bites. It was her first year tree planting and my second. Every night her eyes swelled shut, and every morning she tucked dryer sheets into her shirt collar and spritzed herself with mouthwash in the hope of mitigating another attack. That didn’t work. Nothing worked. “It won’t be this bad next year,” we’d tell her. “Your rookie skin just isn’t seasoned to the mosquito’s bite.”

My hatred for mosquitoes had never been so virulent as when I tree planted. And then I read Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito. These tenacious creatures that announce the Canadian summer and represent the only reason anyone might actually welcome the season’s end are our deadliest predator. They don’t just bug, they ­obliterate: 52 billion people since the beginning of time. That’s nearly half of those who have ever walked the planet. Our six-­legged foe can drink three times her weight in blood...