The Souris and Area Branch of the P.E.I. Wildlife Federation has designed a trap that is proving successful in trapping hundreds of the critters that are plaguing folks all over the eastern end of P.E.I.

"We got a design off the Internet that is working well," said Susan Saville, project coordinator for Souris Wildlife. "We put in a request for funding on this project last fall and a lot of people laughed at us, but we are having the last laugh. The trapes work really well and the word is spreading like hotcakes around the country."

Spreading the word as fast as the earwig population itself. Jack and Carol Coffin from Fortune have a couple of the traps that Ms. Saville's Group made. They are trapping about 60 to 80 earwigs every night but Ms. Coffin said that is just a drop in the bucket.

"We're polluted with them." Ms. Coffin said. "They crawl onto the deck at night and get in around the doorsill. When I open the door in the mornings, hundreds and hundreds of them drop onto the floor. It's really disgusting."

Ms. Coffin has been putting Sunlight soap around the doorsills every evening and that takes care of many of them, and with the trap she hopes to get rid of many more. "We've had an awful problem with earwigs last years and this year is as bad or worse," she said. The Souris Wildlife Branch made dozens of the simple wood traps with used pallet lumber and a few elastic bands and then they put up a few signs around Souris. Within hours of putting up the signs about their free traps, Ms. Saville was inundated with phone calls from Mount Hope to East Point requesting one of more traps. Ms. Saville suggests to her customers that the traps be set in the evening under decking, porches or around shrubs and fences. In the morning they should be dumped into a bucket of sopay water, which will kills the insects. "I'm not asking people to handle the earwigs but I do want them to keep some kind of record for me to see if the traps are effective," Ms. Saville said. "People don't have to count the darn things, but one man told me he stopped counting when he got to 410. I would have stopped counting long before that." "The traps are certainly making a lot of people happy and the whole thing has been entertaining for me. I've heard a lot of earwig stories this week, some of them are truly gruesome but a lot of them are funny too."

A bit of old wood and a lot of ingenuity have resulted in a booming earwig clean-up in Eastern P.E.I. Souris wildlife are project coordinator Susan Saville and her E.D.A. workers build dozens of earwig traps out of used pallet lumber and have distributed them from Mount Hope to East Point. Ms Saville said the traps work best if put out in the evening under decking, porches, fences or any damp cool areas. The entire trap should be dumped into a bucket of soapy water very early in the morning. With Ms. Saville is Alan Sheehan who is holding an open trap. Photo by Beverley Roach

By Beverley Roach from the Eastern Graphic summer of 2002

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Souris Branch of the P.E.I. Wildlife Federation

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