This time of year, people hardly notice the number of bird baths, pet bowls and flower pots in yards across the South.
But Dr. Art Leis and Sharon Sims see the containers as incubators for the enemy.
Many of the vessels contain squiggly colonies of mosquito larvae. And after the baby bloodsuckers hatch, they tend to bite the hand that grew them.
“If you are raising mosquitoes in your backyard, that’s where they are going to live,” said Sims, president of the Mississippi-based Mosquito Illness Alliance (MIA). “They don’t fly very far.”