Now I don’t know about where you live, but here in southeast Oklahoma spring means flies. Over the past couple weeks there’s been an exponential explosion in the amount of house flies. Little bitty ones, big fat ones and those noisy ones. They’ve been buzzing around landing on me whenever I try to take a nap.
I was underneath the bulldozer the other day and one tried going up my nose. I about came unglued trying to fight that little devil off under there. I skinned my knuckles and lost my ratchet trying to get rid of the blasted thing. I had to crawl all the way out, fetch my ratchet and then crawl back in there again. My knuckles bleeding the entire time.
It seems the flies have an affinity for horses and calves eyes, just in the last few days the livestock has really been battling the flies getting in their eyes. The moist ground and mud holes are a cesspool for hatching them.
Every year my wife buys an assortment of fly bait, fly traps and a host of fly sprays to wage war on those little black moochers. She’s an avid fly control control freak. There will be dead flies everywhere out in the barns when she declares war on them. We clean stalls, feed troughs and water troughs weekly trying to keep the little buggers at bay. The fly bait and fly sprays don’t bother me much, but those danged fly traps get to stinking in the hot summertime. They could gag a maggot they smell so bad.
There’s been university studies and millions of dollars spent on developing stuff to fight off the flies. According to a USDA study from 2013 stable flies cost the beef industry 2.4 billion each year due to reduced milk production in dairy cows, decreased weight gain in beef cattle, and lowered feed efficiency.
I don’t know how much wifey spends fighting flies at our house, but it’s enough to make me think of her every time that Lord of the Flies movie comes on. I’ve never watched it, but she’s the lord of the fly swatter, fly bait and fly traps around here.
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.
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