'There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...'
Well, this old gentleman did so too. A greenhead!
This salt-marsh horsefly with two big globular sets of green eyes that take up virtually it's entire head bites lands on your leg or arm quietly but then chomps fiercely so as to startle with the pain. Your blood, someone's blood, is essential for the hundreds of eggs they need to produce and lay their second and subsequent broods between the flood tides of July and August. No neat hypodermic extraction here, rather savage gnawing, gouging and digging. As the full moon approaches and their marsh grasses risk flooding, they grow frantic with need for blood.
Solid-built insects, they barreled around the lights we set on the camp table to play our game of Mexican train, butted us, tumbled and zoomed off again. At night they weren't a menace. Likewise, bumbling around in the light fabric top of the tent, they seemed preoccupied.
Sit outside in the sun at the campsite, perhaps enjoying a gentle breeze, and sweat a little, or lay damp on the sand of the beach after bathing and you'll find them pouring out of the marshes and over the dunes to your leg, side, back, neck, shoulder, any place you have blood they can lap.
'You should have seen your expression,' laughed my wife as I felt one of these vampire flies hurtle into my open mouth (I was making a good point) and collide with the back of my throat like a bullet. Cough, spit: 'It's out,' but what if, already famished but provoked to further fury by entrapment, its mandibles go snicker-snack on my tender oral tissues as if trying to eat its way out?
No, I didn't suffer the torment you regularly inflict on dog, horses and humans, driving them mad with the pain and harassment. You make our recreation areas unusable, all for the sake of your precious eggs, your future. Isn't there something we could offer as good as our blood? It's most precious to us, so why wouldn't it be currency of high value to you. Perhaps, you werewolf of flies, our relationship in this summer moon month will always be fraught, but stay out of my mouth, or 'Perhaps, he'll die.'
Well, this old gentleman did so too. A greenhead!
This salt-marsh horsefly with two big globular sets of green eyes that take up virtually it's entire head bites lands on your leg or arm quietly but then chomps fiercely so as to startle with the pain. Your blood, someone's blood, is essential for the hundreds of eggs they need to produce and lay their second and subsequent broods between the flood tides of July and August. No neat hypodermic extraction here, rather savage gnawing, gouging and digging. As the full moon approaches and their marsh grasses risk flooding, they grow frantic with need for blood.
Solid-built insects, they barreled around the lights we set on the camp table to play our game of Mexican train, butted us, tumbled and zoomed off again. At night they weren't a menace. Likewise, bumbling around in the light fabric top of the tent, they seemed preoccupied.
Sit outside in the sun at the campsite, perhaps enjoying a gentle breeze, and sweat a little, or lay damp on the sand of the beach after bathing and you'll find them pouring out of the marshes and over the dunes to your leg, side, back, neck, shoulder, any place you have blood they can lap.
'You should have seen your expression,' laughed my wife as I felt one of these vampire flies hurtle into my open mouth (I was making a good point) and collide with the back of my throat like a bullet. Cough, spit: 'It's out,' but what if, already famished but provoked to further fury by entrapment, its mandibles go snicker-snack on my tender oral tissues as if trying to eat its way out?
No, I didn't suffer the torment you regularly inflict on dog, horses and humans, driving them mad with the pain and harassment. You make our recreation areas unusable, all for the sake of your precious eggs, your future. Isn't there something we could offer as good as our blood? It's most precious to us, so why wouldn't it be currency of high value to you. Perhaps, you werewolf of flies, our relationship in this summer moon month will always be fraught, but stay out of my mouth, or 'Perhaps, he'll die.'
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