We have an invasive alien insect species here in Virginia, the stink bug. It smells terrible when it is killed, so the animals don't want to eat them since they probably taste as bad as they smell. The naturalists recommend killing them instead of releasing them to the wild, and after a few years of just trying to ignore them and wait for them to go away on their own, I've decided to hunt them.
Now, they are not challenging to hunt. They fly slowly. If I find a random bug or two in the house, I just wait for them to land on something, pick them up, and throw them in the toilet to drown. They do not create a stink this way.
But they amass in droves on my screened porch. So I leave the vacuum cleaner nearby, and any time I want to relax on the porch, I first hunt the resident stink bugs to extinction. To make it more fun, I am keeping a tally. Thursday night I got 105. Tonight, 48 hours later, I got 270. So I'm at 375 for the week.
I put the crevice attachment on the wand, and I've discovered that they don't try to get away if you hunt them from behind, they only fly away if they can see the wand coming. And I've also found that some individual bugs are wilier than others, they are better at escaping. But even those bugs are no match for me, I just wait until they stupidly leave their hiding spots to try to escape through the screen, and get them then.
I think turkeys are still in open season, but I haven't seen any in a while. I heard them the other night, but I'm too busy with my garden right now to focus on hunting them. It will have to be just stink bugs for now.
I am curious to see whether they will, as a species here, realize that they now DO have a predator in their environment. At least if they consider their environment my house or porch, they do. I will continue to track my kill numbers, to see how it progresses through the season.
