Its simple. You buy the cheapest .22 caliber semi auto rifle thats worth a damn, a Savage Model 64. Then you buy a box or two of CCI Stinger hyper-velocity 22 LR rounds. Take them home and practice and set your iron sights to be dead on at 15 yards or less… you wll need to adjust the rear sight all the way down (have the dovetail sititng on the last ”step” of the elevation blade towards you.. this will set your rounds for very close range shots. If your shot pattern is too far left then move the front sight to the right. adjust both until you are placing rounds in a half dollar size circle consistently at 20 yards. Watch for him at night until you identify the path he takes through your property. He will always follow the same pattern… once you found it set up in a line of fire away from anything that your common sense tells you wont hit someone or something if you miss… but you wont. Not at that range and not with the practice youve had. I suggest attaching a small ”tactical light” or securing a small bright flashlight with easy on/off button not a twist on/off type to the lower left hand side of the barrel.. at about your 7 o clock. far enough forward on the barrel as to not block out front sight visibility in the barrell shadow. remain quiet and still until you see him. He will normally keep to the same schedule so if you can figure that out then get to your ambush spot a half hour earlier. When he appears slowly slowly raise rifle and set your shot up. control your breathing. pop your light on, make a small tisk tisk sound and he will freeze and look right into the light and wont move until he can figure out what that blinding light is. He wont see you behind the light. Aim for the neck. if your shot goes a little high its a headshot, a little low… the vitals, lungs, heart. If your dead on and hit him in the neck… same result as either one of the other shots… dead. a hyper velocity round with a hollowpoint lead nose will hit him like a freight train at that range. It will mushroom upon entry and dump its kinetic energy into him. Thats the importance of hollowpoint rounds. a regular 22 LR round will also kill in any of the three hit zones before mentioned… the problem is a 22 round is a penetrator by nature… like a laser it will punch all the way straight through and come out the other side still retaining its shape, mass, and a lot of its energy if you dont hit in the exact right spot ie heart, lungs, neck, brain. anywhere else and hes taking off like you never hit him and unless you hit an artery hes not gonna bleed out from the tiny entry and exit wound. He may die eventually.. maybe… in a bad way. You dont deserve to take the shot if you arent confident you can make the kill quick and clean. If he bolts after you shoot dont freak out… only shot you are gonna get that will drop him instantly is a brain shot. the neck and vitals are guaranteed death within 30 seconds.

I agree with others here who have suggested mosquito dunks. There are also smaller pellets that you can sprinkle in the water called mosquito bits that contain the same active ingredient, Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) bacteria. This bacteria is lethal to mosquito larvae, but is harmless to humans and animals. If you use mosquito bits, simply sprinkle some on the surface of the water until the surface is covered. Getting a water pump for your bird bath is another way to discourage mosquitoes from breeding in the water. The added bonus with that solution is that you'll attract even more birds, because birds love the sight and sound of moving water. Best of luck!

The cheapest way to get rid of a cat is to do something to make it remember your yard as a no-go zone. In other words, scare the crao out of it. I had this orange cat stalking around in my yard, trying to catch my birds. One day I looked out, saw the cat in the bushes between my deck and the lawn, so I grabbed an air horn, and slowly sneaked up behind it, and blasted the air horn right behind hit. I've never seen a cat jump so high in my life, and it ran, and ran, and ran, and I've never seen it again. I guess I traumatized it! Joe

[from Washington Post article posted earlier] "For example, before and after large storms, more bats tend to die. On warmer nights when wind speeds are lower, more have died. But researchers do not know why." OK: Point us to the papers! Not to the newspapers, but to the researchers papers! Here are just a couple of "duh" ideas about those patterns of bat deaths. Before a large storm, bats want to eat more (ingesting more per hour than typical) to compensate for unavailable hunting time during the bad weather - so they hunt more aggressively or "recklessly." But of course, subscribing to that requires a way of verifying that the bats sense the oncoming bad weather, and/or somehow respond to anticipated bad weather and food supply fluctuations. (Bears do that, don't they? I believe some humans still do.) Or, perhaps the bats' prey (forget the bats) sense the oncoming bad weather and seek cover or more stable structures, so they cluster more around the turbines, which draws in the bats and increases collision risks. After bad weather, similar ideas: bats are hungry and hunt more aggressively, and/or many bats are weakened or stressed by the weather that just passed, and regardless of how aggressively they hunt, they're just more prone to run into things. The warmer night/lower wind "anomaly" presented the biggest "duh" to me: on warmer nights with light winds, it just makes intuitive sense that more prey are out and about, thus probably more bats too. It becomes a simple case of probability - just like more people in the US are killed in car accidents around holiday times. Ahhh, the "Poshington Waste"...as trusted by some as "Faux News" is trusted by some others.