New Zealand Listener - May 26, 2018

94 LISTENER MAY 26 2018

THE GOOD LIFE

A

round here, it will be remem-

bered as the Great Stinkbug

Scare of 2018. And it began

with a visit to the woodshed.

I was innocently collecting

more gum and pine for the fire

from our – if you’ll excuse the

boasting – handsomely stacked

woodpile, when my eye fell

upon something asleep on the

end of a log.

Now let me tell you, going

to the woodshed is not for

namby-pambies. You do have

to steel yourself a little before

going in because almost inev-

itably there will be something

nasty in the woodpile. Spiders

are a given. It’s quite common,

too, to lift a log and send a

gisborne cockroach scuttling.

But this thing made me let out

a little scream.

“Michele! Michele!” I wailed

as I rushed inside carrying

the log and its awful cargo,

“I think I’ve found a brown

marmorated stinkbug!”

For the uninitiated – and I was

among them until I read Kathryn

Schulz’s long, fantastically horrifying

piece about them in the New Yorker

• the brown marmorated stinkbug
  (BMS) is a disaster on six legs. Native
  to Asia, it’s slowly invading the planet
  and has so far seized much of North
  America and great swathes of Europe,
  including France, where it is called
  the Devil’s thumbtack.

In the country, you

must learn to to tell

one creepy crawly

from another.

The big stink

GREG

DIXON

The main threat it poses is to agriculture and

horticulture. It will eat almost anything: more than

300 different plants and trees, from oaks to apple

trees. Hell, it’ll even scoff chilli peppers.

It doesn’t just invade countries and fields of

crops; it goes for homes, too. In autumn, the BMS

likes nothing more then heading indoors – and

in vast numbers. In Maryland, Schulz reported, a

wildlife biologist decided to count all the stinkbugs

he killed in his own home; when he stopped, after

six months, the count was at 26,205.

In Virginia, 30,000 were discovered in a shed the

size of an outside dunny. But that was small beer.

“In West Virginia,” Schulz wrote, “bank employ-

ees arrived at work one day to find an exterior wall

of the building covered in an estimated million

stinkbugs.”

I had thought the BMS was not present in New

Zealand, let alone in Wairarapa woodsheds, though

I have come to realise you meet vastly more creepy

crawlies in the country than in town. In Auck-

land, all we worried about was ants in the pantry,

mosquitoes in the bedroom, and the

occasional wasp nest. At our new

place you find gisborne cockroaches

in the woodpile and, occasionally,

wandering about the house after

coming through a window.

T

here are also loads of bees,

wasps, weevils, enormous spi-

ders, blowflies, slaters, midges,

crickets and even stinkbugs, though

up until now only the green ones.

And of course in Wairarapa

there is the pea weevil,

found in April 2016, so we’re

banned from growing peas

until it’s eradicated.

But none of this prepared

me for the discovery in the

woodshed. Michele gassed

the little brown devil in

a plastic container, and I

searched online for photos,

fighting the nightmare

vision of millions of BMSs

descending on us, followed

by an army of entomol-

ogists from the Ministry

for Primary Industries.

Indeed it was on MPI’s

website I found a helpful

guide, which helpfully

pointed out that the BMS

isn’t the only brown stinkbug

in the world, before help-

fully helping me identify the

horror from the woodshed.

You can all stand down. The inva-

sion is off. My BMS was a Cermatulus

nasalis, or the native brown soldier

bug. Naturally I went and had a nice

lie down to celebrate.

People bang on about the menace

of idiots consuming fake news, but if

you ask me we aren’t worrying nearly

enough about the danger of idiots

GREG DIXON reading the New Yorker. l

Know your enemy: the thing from the woodshed.

You nd

cockroaches in

the woodpile

and, occasionally,

wandering about

the house.