Fly Season—Part 1

Around here we experience many more than just four seasons a year. I’ve written before (7/31/09) on the Celtic Cross-Quarter days, which are actually mini-seasons that arrive half-way between the solstices and equinoxes. So that makes eight seasons.

Then there are early and late times in the seasons. Early spring is a great anticipatory time for us, when we are forced into inactivity, as we eagerly await all the rebirths of the new year. In contrast, late spring becomes so full of activity that we hardly get a chance to pause between tasks of picking garden bounty, beating back weeds, and initiating outdoor projects that have been in the planning all winter.

But there’s a not-so-pleasant aspect to this time of late spring: it’s fly season. In another month or so we’ll be seeing grasshoppers, beetles, butterflies, katydids, crickets, and many other summer insects. This end-of-spring season, however, definitely belongs to the flies—all those critters of the order Diptera: mosquitoes, gnats, and myriad other types of flies.

There are some 17,000 species of flies in North America—ably filling countless flyly niches. They most often get a bad rap by us humans—by being associated with yucky things like blood sucking, garbage infesting, and disease propagating. They certainly do all that, but they also perform many useful jobs, such as eating decaying matter, preying on other unwelcome insects, and providing food for birds. We all love birds.

Flies are distinguished from other soaring insects by having only one pair of wings, whereas bees, wasps, and butterflies have two pairs. Flies have huge eyes and short antennae, while their four-winged cousins have small eyes and long antennae. Non-flies are often given the word “fly” as part of their name: butterfly, mayfly, and dragonfly. True flies, however, are designated by two words: house fly, crane fly, black fly, horse fly, etc. Hmmm, so is it shoofly or shoo fly pie?

Unfortunately, flies that get noticed most around here are pests, rather than their beneficial cousins who do their helpful things out of sight. So we try hard not to let their activities bias us against flies in general, but it ain’t easy.

There are three particular varieties of flies that get our vote for being the peskiest of pests: eye gnats, buffalo gnats, and deer flies. This is the time of year when they marshal their troops and attack us with a vengeance. In defense, we douse ourselves with repellant, but that is only minimally effective—the flies simply go into a holding pattern just beyond arm’s reach, wait awhile for the chemical smell to succumb to our sweat smell, and then renew their attacks. Another dose of repellant might help, but soon you begin to feel sticky and your own smell becomes chemically repulsive. We’ve sometimes been driven indoors—just to get a break from their incessant dive bombings. (It’s nice to be retired and not under pressure to have to work!)

The worst of these three pests for me is the eye gnat. It’s a tiny little thing—maybe less than one-eighth inch (about 3mm, for the metrically inclined). They don’t bite or pierce your skin (it could be worse!); they slurp up your body fluids: mucous, blood, pus, etc. It seems that the primary attraction for them is the fluid in my eye—it must appear to them as a huge enticing meal. They maneuver frantically in little circles a yard or so in front of my face and then one will abruptly dive bomb me, kamikaze style, heading directly for an eye. If I’m lucky, its aim will be off and it will bounce off an eyebrow. If its aim is true, however, it will plunge into my eye and promptly get washed under a lid. I have to run to the house and fish it out. The gnat dies in the process—not a very smart activity!

Eye gnats are incredibly persistent—particularly just before a rainstorm. It’s as if they sense that they need to get their licks in quickly, before their game gets rained out. Repellants can help a wee bit. Wrap-around glasses can also help, but when you’re working hard they tend to get all streaked with sweat. The best deterrent I’ve found is to build a little smoky fire; the smoke drives them away. I am extremely grateful for the fact that eye gnats do not follow me inside, when I retreat from their attacks. It could be worse, I tell myself.

Next time: more flies.