Bug tales

[Guest]

Let’s hear ‘em.

Despite the blackflies, mosquitoes, greenflies, sand flies, ticks, chiggers (I really hate chiggers) and the like, the most memorable bug episodes have had little to do with the usual backcountry challenges. I already offered this

I won’t freak you out with the sizable bug that flew into my ear. The bug that I reflexively, and unwisely, pushed further in with the tip of my pinky. Or the ever-more-faint mubzzuubbb, mubzzuubbb sound it made. Or, that it seemed worse when it stopped going mubzzuubbb, mubzzuubbb deep inside my head some minutes later.

There is a lot more to that tale. There was a single (sizable) bug sharing the truck cap with me as I sat reading, flying annoying noisy circles around my head but never actually landing, so I let him live. When I was ready to turn off the reading light I told him “Welp, time to kill your arse” and prepared to swat him. I had no sooner gotten out the last “ss” than he flew on a bee line (but more beetle shaped), and with seeming intent, straight into my ear canal.

I was 20 miles of dirt road from pavement, 30 miles of pavement from any help, and a little freaked out. Being dark out I never actually saw if I flushed out the carcass, which was also disconcerting for a few days, especially thinking I might begin to hear mubzzuubbb, mubzzuubbb in my other ear.

And this

Also excellent for a mayfly hatch, the likes of which I have never seen. For several miles it was like driving in a heavy snowstorm with limited visibility, in part because the air was clouded with wings, in larger part because every snowflake” went SPLAT against the windshield.


That built up to a thick bugsludge the consistency of creamy peanut butter pushed aside the smeary windshield before I exited the cloud.

I should say “we” exited the sludge. Every single westbound car exited at Lordsburg and lined up at the then one lonely gas station. In a line. To use the squeegee.

The tailgate tent failure reminded me of one more. The worst night’s sleep ever in the Taco. Or any earlier capped truck bed.

Soon after I had done the initial outfitting on the tripping truck, including bugproofing the cap door and tailgate with puzzle pieces of foam weather stripping and minicel until it was light tight, I headed north on a multi-week trip.

That trip included a stopover at DougD’s place, where we spent an enjoyable day sitting by the truck, drinking considerable beer and playing show and tell with boats and gear. I was in and out of the truck bed so often I sometimes neglected to close the cap door. Meh, I’m coming back in just a minute.

It did not seem at all buggy as we sat and shot several bulls, and I told Doug that I would probably leave pre-dawn and head for Maine. It was, at first, a fine night’s sleep.

But around 3am I awoke to a distinct zzzzzz and the occasional pesky mosquito bite. The zzzzzz was weirdly focused, so I turned on a flashlight and found the source; a small but dense swarm of 50 mosquitoes piled into each corner of the cap roof over my head.

After some minutes of trying to swat that mass the effort was proving comically futile. I’m not getting any sleep back here and 3am is pre-dawn. Time to hit the road. Bless his heart Doug came out with a cup of coffee for me at 5am only to find me gone.

I have ever since become far more conscious to close the cap door every time, and even limit repeat access when it is buggy out. Kinda like keeping the screen on the tent doors zipped closed. Well duh, whoulda thunk it.

Got bug tales?

 

[Alan Gage]

My first encounter with black flies in northern Minnesota was educational. I'd always gone up in late summer/fall ever since I was a little kid but one year thought I'd go up in June. It was just a short weekend car camping trip on some little remote lake and they chased me home a day early. My car was full of them and they continued attacking me as I drove away. I spent at least an hour swatting the little buggers on my dash and windshield, each one give a nice splat of blood. Which brought to mind the question, "who's blood is that because I didn't get bit that bad.

Then there was the tick that brought to mind the leach scene in Stand by Me.

Alan

 

[Jim Dodd]

Swarmed by Mosquitoes at the end of a portage, one time, in the BWCA. Then, I'll call them a "Flock" of Dragonflies showed up ! They bounced off our hats riddling us of that swarm !
I have a special spot in my heart for those Dragons of the air !


Jim

 

[Boreal Birch]

The first year that the Forest Service first made the regulation of banning cans and bottles in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, I didn't read the fine print. In late May or early June my old girlfriend and I headed out with no cans or bottles of anything. No cans of bug spray, no bottles of bug dope either. Well I didn't suffer too much because bugs don't seem to like me, but Mary Ann was eaten alive. I doubt she ever went on another canoe trip, I know for a fact she never went anywhere with me again.

 

[sweeper]

We'd have a huge swam of dragonflies come into the yard sucking up all the bugs off the lawn. I like to lie down in the middle of all of it and watch them scream past my head.

 

[Guest]

On one day every year powder blue dragon or damsel flys come here to Turtle Pond to mate. No other surrounding ponds have them. The next day they are gone. fascinating. I'm always planning to write down the date to see if it's the same every year. maybe this year I'll start.
Turtle

 

[Guest]

Also, once while in Alginquin park with my scout troop we had horseflies as big as quarters in one campsite. The boys said we needed antiaircraft artillery for them. Too slow to be a threat and you could hear them coming, but I bet they could take a big bite.
Turtle

 

[Uncle_Skwid]

Ticks in the wrong place are about the extent of my disturbing bug stories. Lots of ticks; lots of bad places. They can quickly and seemingly without movement end up in the Wrong Place. (See posted video above and imagine the tick, tiny and difficult to pick at and STUCK... ) The bug in the ear, Mike M, is frankly the stuff of which nightmares and horror movies are made. I have issues with my ears due to time spent underneath polluted and cold water, and frankly, despite the fact that my manager, the woman who puts up with me, is a nurse and tries her danged-est to flush my ears, I still find myself clogged and swollen and full of gunk often. The feeling is pretty much terrible. Like, terrible terrible.

 

[Odyssey]

No horror stories to tell, due to the fact I can swim just a little faster than leeches, just. Until this last decade most of our trips have been well after bug season. By October all the moms and dads in the bug world have already settled down, raised a family and gone on to bug heaven (to heck actually if they've listened to me). So the few bloody ears and clotted matted hair lines are nothing more than a brief encounter with the blackfly stragglers not yet headed to Hades. Mosquitoes on the other hand can turn up at any given moment. A lone wolf whining and floating around inside the tent, only to disappear whenever you go searching with headlamp lit, and returning to your ear just as you drift off to sleep "wwweeeeeeeeezzzzzz".
There was only one time I was nearly beaten by mosquitoes, and that was in summer on a long Algonquin portage. They seemed to like to hang out under the canoe, which was on my shoulders of course, and played a harrying type of game nipping at my face and neck, then drifting off with every swipe of my hand. The DEET had long since been sweated off. Every 100 yards or so I'd set the canoe down, and even laying it right side up in hopes of dissipating the buggy clouds. They must've been phantom bugs, because it was as if they'd never existed. Up goes the canoe and on down the trail I go...until the little buggers are back at it again. It was a long carry that day, and I've since learned to have a small spritzer of DEET at all times.

I did have a tick encounter of Alfred Hitchcock proportions, which I'd rather not get long winded about. They covered me under clothes and over, within seconds of walking barely 50 yds along a tall grassy trail. I ran out to highway side trailhead, stripped off and found every one of them. I gladly would've agreed to a cavity search I was so paranoid, if family had've been so inclined. Which they were not. Even so we found two more on the drive home. Ticks unsettle/scare me.

 

[yellowcanoe]

Sand flies in the Everglades. They covered my tent overnight turning it from blue to gray.. Upon awakening and taking a pee I had so many bites that I swole up.. About 1000 in less than a minute and in a local area.

Made me scuttle the trip. Never wear or take blue.. It is a trip killer.

Sand flies are tropical no seeums but in force on fabric you can see them.

 

[paddler123]

No Title

Mosquitoes in Labrador this summer - we ate dinner in our tent some days to we wouldn't have to take off our nets.

 

[yellowcanoe]

Aah a good pic of why blue and black are not so great.

 

[Canotrouge]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjLBXb1kgMo

 

[riverstrider]

As I started wading up a section of Spencer Stream in Maine, my canoe following me at the end of a short leash as I tracked it upstream, the horseflies and deerflies found me. The deerflies were more annoyance than anything, flying circular sorties around my Tilley, but not scoring any hits. The horseflies on the other hand would waste no time...they'd land and rip a chunk out just as my hand was descending. I gathered a good dozen of those evil b*st*rds by the time I made it up that short rip and was able to get back in the boat and resume poling upstream. The cloud seemed to disappear...until I found them at the bow of the boat. It seems they were all cuing in on whatever was at the head of this attractive object moving upstream, and remained blessedly unaware of my presence about 9 feet behind them. Later on during that trip I noticed the same phenomenon as we portaged from Spencer Lake and Fish Pond down to the Moose River at Spencer Rips (that guy Spencer got around)...I discovered that pushing the canoe on its cart from behind attracted far less evil flies than pulling it from the front.

-rs

 

[Guest]

Then there was the tick that brought to mind the leach scene in Stand by Me.

Gawd Alan, there are some memories I try to suppress.

Coming off a long, rough living swamp trip I found a partially engorged tick on the bottom of my nutsack. That is some pretty stretchy skin, and simply pulling it off wasn’t happening. Nuff said.

One companion on a 4-day weekend of rivers group trip was bitten on the foot by, we supposed, a spider. His foot swelled up to near grotesque size. We had several nurses with us who plied him with drugs and attentive care. Attractive young nurses at that.

He spent a considerable remainder of that trip with his foot being fondled in some young lovelies lap. It didn’t look that bad to me, and I was ready to go find a spider myself.

The most grotesque bug bite reaction I have ever seen was my childhood best friend on a spring Pine Barrens trip. There were few bugs, or at least none that annoyed me. He likewise was not complaining of bug bites, but his face swelled up to an Elephant Man visage, with puffy slits for eyelids.

I had camped and paddled with him for years before, and years after, and that was the only time he had such a reaction. No idea what touched it off.

 

[Odyssey]

Reactions to insect bites are a curious thing, and range from the annoying itchy to the anaphylactic shocking.
On a canoe trip with my brother, son and nephew one summer, we woke one morning to my nephew's arm bearing a pain-free pimple the size of a golf ball. It was red and hot suggesting some infection, but we couldn't see any punctures or broken skin of any kind, even with the aid of a magnifying lens. I had a first aid kit containing antihistamine, pain killer etc, so I felt fairly in control of the situation, but as the bump grew hotter and nearly the size of a baseball my brother made the decision to cut the canoe trip short. I wholeheartedly agreed. There was no previous history of this kind of thing in the family, so it seemed bizarre to see this. Much later the same day a doctor couldn't solve the mystery besides prescribing medicine for the symptoms. I was hoping for a eureka moment of "Oh, I can tell you exactly what it is etc etc." The next day it was gone. It was nothing I'd ever seen before or since.
http://www.healthline.com/health/bug-bites

 

[snapper]

I'm very fortunate in that most biting critters leave me alone. Even during the height of the blackfly season in the Adirondacks, I can splash on a little DEET and continue wearing shorts and a t-shirt. For that reason, I've only worn a head net once but boy was it needed. We were camped at the bottom end of the Raquette Falls carry and we were trying to eat dinner. It was so bad that everyone kept their head nets on throughout the meal. The process went like this...spoon up some food from your bowl, bring the spoon up to your mouth area, quickly open the net, stick the spoon in your mouth, withdraw spoon. Even with this you'd end up with a dozen or so flies inside your head net with every mouthful. It was awful. The joke over dinner was...hey, extra protein! It lost it's humor very quickly.

That's all for now. Take care and until next time...be well.

snapper

PS - That was also the year that we ignored the college's ban on smoking and got a bunch of Swisher Sweet cigars. Everyone was "smoking" over the 7 days just to keep a cloud going around their heads that was smoke instead of flies.

PPS - Somewhat like Odyssey's nephew, we had a student on that trip who received fly bites around both eyes. They swelled almost shut for 3 days. She was a real trooper about it all and didn't even seem to mind her new nickname (Peepers) but it gave me a new appreciation for how susceptible some folks are to insect bites.

 

[Mihun09]

Leeches and ticks.

A few trips ago coming back up the Wanipigow River towards Wallace Lake in high water. We make a little bitty mistake and dump at the bottom of a rapid trying to get to the take out. We were in the water 15 minutes maybe after floating the canoe to the bank and standing in muck while we emptied the water with coffee cups. So, back in the boat, found another way to the take out, went a few more ports and then called it a day. I'm sitting on the rocks and stripping off wet clothes and get to my socks. I wear socks to keep the leeches at bay usually. So, without looking I just rip my socks off, And, the half dozen leeches that were latched on through my sock. Bloody heck. It took over a year for those wounds to heal completely.

Ticks.

Again, on the Wanipigow River at the west end of Wallace Lake. We had taken a site we never had used before for just one night. Nice spot but in the morning after flipping the canoe over from it's resting place we found a half dozen ticks in it. These were not the typical brown wood ticks but something different, a light beige colour. We cleaned the boat out, loaded up and headed home.
A couple days later at work I had a recurring itch on my back. I would scratch and it would eventually itch again. I finally managed to reach around to the spot and felt what I knew was a tick, but I had broken it in half with the aggressive scratching. I went to one of the female first-aiders and she removed what was now a bloated tick the size of my pinky finger nail. The danged thing left a divot in my back where it had been but the following day I got the bulls eye rash. Huge red ring around the white center bite mark. Off to the clinic for the medication. Haven't had any issues since thankfully and we flagged that spot on maps and with the Manitoba University that keeps a map of deer tick sightings.

Tick in Winter
I sleep outside of where we keep the camping gear, just a wall between me and it. One very cold January day as I was working away at my computer there was a streak and something drops onto my desk in front of me. This isn't really new, spiders do it all the time, which is bad for them. On this occasion I saw a tick, and it was in a hurry to get to me. They are very fast. However, I got it first and it got the ride of it's life into the plumbing. Ticks in the dead of Winter is a bit much.

Karin

 

[sweeper]

I found this on the Swift Canoe FB page today

 

[meopilite]

I took a walk down by the river today, April 13th, and had a good plenty of mosquitos having me for lunch. It was 52 degrees F. I had never saw mosquitos this early, especially when its only 52 F.