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EXCLUSIVE
By Willie Morrison
The
caretaker of a remote midge-infested
Highland estate is quite literally
bagging the tiny terrors in
their millions - with the help
of new technology specially
designed to destroy blood-sucking
insects. Sandy Snell, steward
at Scardroy Estate, in Strathconon,
Ross-shire, is conducting the
first tests in Britain of a
US-made machine called the Midge
Magnet.*
Powered
by bottled gas, it was originally
designed to trap and destroy
mosquitoes. It attracts insects
by emitting phoney animal smells
and sucks them into a bag to
their deaths.
Sandy
has been testing the machine
for the past two months at Scardroy
Lodge, home of Canadian tycoon
Dr Murdoch Laing, for its importer,
Alex McQueen Quattlebaum, from
the USA. He is currently preserving
each bag of midges on ice till
the end of the insect breeding
season. This will help assess
the machine's effectiveness
by giving an indication of how
many of the horrors it has killed.
"One
day I weighed a bag to find
it had trapped two-and-a-half
pounds of midges," revealed
Sandy. 1 spoke to an expert,
who told me llb in weight was
equivalent to about one million
midges. "The machine is
on 24 hours a day, out in the
front garden of the lodge. "Given
the number of bags I now have
on ice, I estimate the Midge
Magnet has now caught at least
15 million midges, with a few
million more in prospect by
the time they stop breeding.
If you take that many midgies
out of an area, it's bound to
make a big dent in the breeding
population. "Certainly
I've been able to stand outside
where 1 wouldn't normally at
this time of year. I would generally
expect to be bitten quite badly,
but not one has been landing
on me.
I
do see a diminution in the numbers,
so I'm quite impressed. Under
normal circumstances the window
sills here would be covered
with midgies, but this year
there are very few. "This
is very much a learning curve,
so I'll be keeping the bags
of midges until the end of the
season. "If anyone wants
any frozen midgies when we're
finished with them, I'm open
to offers!"
Sandy
explained how the machine worked.
"I'm not a technocrat,
but basically it attracts the
insects by imitating a large
mammal like a cow breathing,"
he said. "You put an attractant
tablet called Octenol into the
machine, which works off bottled
gas, emitting a plume of animal-like
scent from windwards to attract
the insects. "Fortunately
it doesn't cause any smells
offensive to humans."
Nor
is the apparatus too expensive
to run. A 19kg bottle of gas
lasts for around six weeks.
Sandy
(54), who hails originally from
Leith but who has lived in Strathconon
for 28 years, commented: "I'm
very attached to the strath,
but all the more so since we
engaged in battle with the midge."
Businessman
and classic car racer Alex Quattlebaum.
and his wife Pamela live for
most of the year in their native
South Carolina. For the past
16 years they have owned a house
at Kiltarlity, near Inverness,
in which they annually spend
three months.
This
week Parnela explained that
she and Alex had first encountered
the machine at a beach party
near their home in Charleston.
"We were amazed that there
were no mosquitoes present very
unusual for early summer in
Charleston," she added.
'We marvelled at what it could
do, but didn't think more about
it until we arrived back in
Scotland, and Alex saw the need
for the same relief from the
midges over here. He did some
research and found that midges
and mosquitoes had similar characteristics
which would make them equally
susceptible to the theory behind
the machine. Thus the name change
from Mosquitomagnet to Midge
Magnet.
"Not
being one to sit still, he looked
into importing the Midge Magnet*.
He had some samples sent over
from the States and placed a
couple at large estates plagued
with midges, where they have
been very successful."
A
similar high-tech machine was
used on the set of Monarch of
the Glen when it was being filmed
at Loch Laggan.
Reprinted
courtesy of Highland News Group
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