I was speaking at a conference recently when a couple of pesky flies kept buzzing around my head. I told the group my next column would be about flies. It’s that time of year when houseflies are most abundant. I’ve often wondered what the purpose of a fly is? The only answer I can come up with is to irritate us.
Luckily for us, predators, parasites, fly swatters, fly paper, bug zappers, rolled-up newspapers, and other fly killers, greatly reduce the fly population, or they would probably take over the earth. Next time you see a spider, don’t be so hasty to squish it or knock down its intricate fly-trapping web. They love flies! Nobody has ever said to me, “I love flies.” I think only spiders and another fly could love a fly.
Flies of one kind or another have been around for a long time. The oldest fly fossil, a limoniid crane fly, is some 225 million years old. True houseflies are believed to have evolved in the beginning of the Cenozoic era, about 65 million years ago. I’d bet that the human species has been trying to kill flies since they could first grasp a stick and try to smash them. It doesn’t look like killing a few flies is going to make them extinct real soon. I read that there are more than 100,000 different species of flies! Who’s got the time to sit around and count them? Most of us just swat the pesky critters and are happy to get rid of them.
Flies were an everyday part of our lives on the farm. We could predict an approaching storm by their behavior. Flies have great vision, quick reflexes, and are great weather prognosticators. When I was young, we didn’t need the Weather Channel to see if a storm was approaching, we just looked at the kitchen screen door at our farm. “Looks like it’s gonna’ rain. The screen door’s covered with flies.” They seemed to know a storm was coming and they would be safer and dryer if they could get inside the house.
Somehow they always managed to get in the house no matter what we did. We had screens on the windows and doors, but they didn’t fit very tight, allowing flies to find a way into the house. Plus, every time we opened the door, flies would enter too. I can’t blame them; they probably smelled the good food that Ma was cooking inside!
When I was growing up, a fly swatter was an essential part of our house. Fly paper ribbons hanging from the kitchen ceiling were also a fixture. Do you remember using them? Younger people may not be familiar with fly paper. I haven’t seen one hanging around for a long time. It wasn’t the most appetizing sight to have those coiled strips full of buzzing flies stuck to them, but it was better than having the flies parading through our food while we were trying to eat. The flies loved Ma’s cooking as much as we did.
The old two-holer during the summer, was also a favorite gathering place for flies. Spiders knew it was a great source of food too. There were plenty of spider webs decorating every corner with an abundance of trapped flies, that had been searching for a meal. Now they waited to become a meal. Man’s irritation is a spiders delight. I remember always checking the hole before sitting down in case a spider had spun a web across the hole. A trip to the outhouse was always an adventure.
We had an overabundance of flies in the barn. Needless to say, manure and flies go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of either around the barn!
Every person who’s milked a cow during hot summer days knows the irritation and perils of flies buzzing around cows. There’s nothing like the stinging slap of a cow’s tail alongside your face, as she tries to swat the flies away. We won’t even talk about the fun of getting a soggy, you-know-what-soaked tail across the face! Now I see most cows have had their tails clipped. That would have kept the tail from whipping you across the face, but how does a cow without a tail swat at the flies that are constantly buzzing around them?
When I think of flies in the barn I’m also reminded of the use of DDT to control them. Each morning and evening after we brought the cows in from the pasture and put them in the barn, we used a hand-pump sprayer and went down the line, spraying each cow. The mist from the DDT spray would hang like fog in the air. Soon, hundreds of dying flies covered the barn floor and we’d sweep them into the gutter. If only we had known about the health hazards of breathing in all that DDT. I can still “taste” that spray when I think about it.
It’s a wonder we’ve lived this long, growing up with filthy flies that shared our food, breathing in poisonous DDT, being smacked upside the head by soggy cow’s tails, and dealing with outhouse-dwelling spiders!
It just goes to show, you’ve gotta’ be darn tough to share this world with pesky, irritating flies and survive. Now, if you’ll kindly pass me the flyswatter, here comes another one.
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