Then what do I do about all the cave pythons?
Alligators
What do I do with all these pesky VelociRaptors?
T-Rex.
Use a multi-pronged approach. In my experience, the following works (in order of effectiveness):
Clear any old leaves from under the porch, and put in some pipes in to drain rain water out from under the it.
Stay inside at dusk and dawn. (If the bats are out, stay inside. They are probably not feeding on dragonflies)
Wear loose long sleeves and pants.
Spray DEET on your clothes, not on your skin.
Use a circle of citronella candles at floor level (not citronella scented) in colored glass jars.
Clear out the creak below your property line - so the water runs faster past your yard.
Plant lemon-grass and other herbs around your porch (I don’t believe this works at all, but it does smell really nice.)
Put up bathouses - preferably on the property line of a neighbor you dislike - lots of people find bats creepy. I have a place in Maine, so I love them. But if there are enough mosquitoes around to keep the bats happy, there are probably too many for them to make a dent in.
I have also found a natural repellant that is effective for your skin; I’ll post the name on Monday (if I remember), but it is oily.
Leave a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel on the bites for five to fifteen minutes immediately after being bitten.
Use Technu Extreme Scrub for really bad bites; its promoted for poison ivy, but I use it for any bite the witch hazel doesn’t take care of. I think they call it homeopathic, but its actually herbal. Anyhow, it works.
Hope this helps. I’m going to start using fans, too.
Winnipeg is pretty unique in that department; it’s in proportion to its mosquito problem (which I remember well from my childhood :mad: )
Home Depot and Lowes have mosquito/insect foggers that run on propane. I use these in the back yard when the mosquitos get thick. They are also good when out camping. They sell the bottles of insecticide also. Just read the directions and be cautious around the fish pond and insects you may want to keep. At my house I am cautious around the parsley and fennel plants because I like having the Southeastern Swallowtail Butterflies around, and this stuff will kill the caterpillars and the cacooned ready to hatch. Otherwise one fogging works well for mosquitos and flies for most of the evening.
Bats come out/hunt no matter if skeeters are present or not (bug-eating bats, that is). No doubt at all. I have plenty of them around me dusk/dawn - skeeters or not. Its fun to take ‘wounded’ grasshoppers or such and throw up in air and have 'em never return to Earth - bats gotta eat, right? 
Skeeters are more active dusk/dawn, so there’s a correlation there anyways.
OP mentioned stagnant (unmoving?) water - probably a big contributor if it is stagnant/standing by definition. Skeeters don’t breed in moving water (basically).
Lewey’s is an effective DEET - free repellent, but it’s an oil/lotion, so you can’t spray it on. I like it for my ankles.
Repel Lemongrass & eucalyptus smells wonderful, but I think the mosquitoes like it, too.
Yes, that was my point; they come out at the same time.
I knew someone who ran a mosquito control program. The crew spent most of the time clearing ditches, so water wouldn’t pool. They used lots of traps, to identify which mosquitoes were around, to determine the most effective spray for the species.
I worry that insecticides I might use would hurt the dragonflies and bats and birds. I’d rather wear pants and long sleeves and watch the dragonflies than sit in shorts and a t-shirt.
I am 101% with ya on limiting/not using insecticides - unless there a HUGE problem with skeeters and/or other disease-vectors of compare. I tend to frown upon blanketing of areas with bug-killer as first-line defense, especially upon or quite-near ‘waterways’ and prefer the ‘remove source’ approach similar to other posters describing. I could fog/blanket my backyard/veggie-garden for death to my ~severe skeeter issue, but choose not to as I depend on the bees/ladybugs/mantises/etc and love the immense range of insects/critters that have their own little world back there.
Several pairs of Mississippi Kites (raptor birds) live/hunt around my garden, and last evening, I finally got one of the birds to nab grasshoppers (locusts?) I tossed up to them - so cool ‘befriending’ wildlife! I chose to keep the ‘harmony’ of Nature’s diversity and not ‘nuke by deadly fogs’, basically. I could always rig-up a body-wrap of netting, but then too hard to walk and ‘harvest’ amongst the plants… harmony in Nature is irritating at times 
I’ve seen the estimate that an average colony of small brown bats will eat 500,000 insects a night. It is to be hoped (don’t know if it would work this way) that they would depopulate the area around the bat house and work their way farther afield before running out of steam, and might create a local zone with few mosquitoes.
Your last name wouldn’t be Bodine or Clampett by any chance, would it? 
Yay! I’m not so old that nobody else got it!
The Twin Cities sprayed for mosquitos a couple of times a summer when I was a kid. Now they use dunks, which puts less strain on the mammals. You are what you breathe.
I suppose that might work with a high breeding creature like mosquitoes, but don’t you think a truly successful predator would never depopulate its prey? “Survival of the fit enough”.
But I still cherish my bats and dragonflies.
An idea I’ve been mulling over for a while is… to get a standard household fan and fit it in the top-end of a big tube. Stick a bag made out of fly screen on the bottom-end and a bright halogen light somewhere inside the tube, facing the fan. You may also need to suspend a ball above the fan, to reflect the light outside better and give all neighbourhood insects something to aim for. Then switch on light that shines off the ball, switch on the fan to suck in the air near the ball and blow it down the tube, into the bag, and within a couple of minutes, you’ll have kilos of insects including your mosquitos which I’m not sure how best to get rid of… Of course, this may be quite loud, but it’s cheap. For a deluxe quieter option, substitute the standard fan for a room-sized Dyson Air multiplier (rrp $450).
I reckon this thing will be so efficient, the local bats will go hungry…
This has been around for decades. Attract with a light, suck 'em in with a fan into a collection cup/container.
The New Jersey Light Trap was designed in the 1930’s. Its essentially a big can with a light and fan.
The CDC miniature light trap is a bit newer, smaller and more portable, but the same idea.
I’ve used both in the field. I GREATLY prefer the CDC trap - its small. The NJ trap is a big bulky thing, mostly made for a permanent or semi-permanent trap site. The CDC traps are easy to move around.
So what you’re saying is… that if I’d thought of this 80 years ago, it’d have been cutting-edge?
Do they work really well then, anything like my bat-famine-inducing, insect-population-decimating aspirations? Or are they more for obtaining sample of a local insect species for entomological purposes?
They are not used to reduce population sizes, but rather for collecting mosquitoes for surveillance purposes (identification, virus isolation etc…).
it is very difficult to “trap out” a mosquito population. Those propane-fueled mosquito magnet traps claim to do this, but while they can catch loads of mosquitoes there is no data that this has any real effect on the standing population size. Most people have no idea how large these populations can be. I’ve caught more than 10,000 female mosquitoes in a single trap in 12 hours.
Thanks for the info, mozchron. It seems I may need to add a canister of CO2 into the mix to get the results I seek. Or maybe just get rid of stagnant water sources…