The house next door is foreclosed and abandoned. It is so overgrown with foliage that you can’t even see it from the street and the gravel driveway is invisible beneath a lush growth of weeds. Feeling like intrepid explorers, my partner and I went exploring the backyard of this abandoned house because there is Biblical plague of mosquitoes in our backyard and we suspected the pool next door was the culprit.
Impossibly, the backyard was more overgrown than the front. Spiders, mosquitoes and frogs were everywhere., and the pool itself looked like a miniature version of the Great Dismal Swamp. Poisonous green, a thick layer of foliage covered the bottom and mosquito larvae were everywhere. That pool had not been cleaned in months.
Our worst suspicions confirmed, I immediately called Fort Lauderdale Code Enforcement, where a pleasant woman promised to send an inspector. The inspector, sent the next day, called to tell me she never actually saw the pool because she was “not allowed” to enter a private back yard. “But I put a code violation notice on the door,” she said brightly.
Next came the rains, and the mosquitoes got worse. On the advice of a neighbor, I contacted our City Commissioner, who delegated the problem to a subordinate. The subordinate listened politely to my story of woe and promised to send another inspector. This inspector actually entered the backyard and took immediate action: He put another code violation notice on the door, but the mosquitoes ignored it.
On our next trip to the swamp we noticed an abundance of tadpoles in all stages of development. “Well,” said my partner; “they’ll eat the mosquitoes.” “Sure,” I said unhappily, “and then we’ll be overrun by frogs.” Inspired, I called the Broward County Health Department, and left a series of messages over the course of a week, all of which were ignored.
The tadpoles morphed into frogs who jumped the fence to swim in our pool, which was much cleaner than their pool. My partner and I skimmed them out and threw them over the fence. They came back. Soon after, I went on our back porch to feed the cat and was startled to see a huge raccoon waiting for me. The raccoon had come in through the cat door to eat the cat food. I shooed the raccoon back out and he waddled under the fence and back to the swamp. He came back later that night with some friends.
Determined to take matters into our own hands, the next night we went back to the swamp. We saw several raccoons around the pool eating the frogs. We jumped to see the raccoons, the raccoons jumped to see us and the frogs jumped because that’s what frogs do.
Coincidentally, the next day I got an email from the Commissioner’s office to see if the problem was resolved. I was fairly pointed in my assertion that the problem was worse than ever. “That’s horrid!” said the subordinate. And that was that.
Since nature is apparently going to take its course next door, I did an internet search for “Raccoons, enemies of” and was alarmed to learn that alligators, coyotes, bobcats and what they called, ominously, “really big owls” would be arriving any day to eat the raccoons, if not actually my cat. The food chain being what it is, I can only surmise what comes next. Bear? Wolves? Sarah Palin in a helicopter? Maybe we can have the City Commission declare the property a nature preserve. If the City won’t help its residents, we may as well save the mosquitoes.