How to avoid midges

Midges, gnats, or as they are often called once inside the home “fruit flies” are tiny members of the fly family which can usually be seen in small swarms in spring, late summer, and early fall.

We cannot, for the purposes of this tutorial, teach you how to avoid “fruit flies”. These aerial annoyances will spend much of the year flying around your head, suicide bombing your face as you wave your arms to shoo them away like King Kong and the airplanes.

Fruit flies live on fermenting vegetables and fruits and they are unavoidable as long as you bring these products into your home. When you are at the grocery store and see hundreds of flies on the onions just remember that each fly can produce 600 eggs and that they lay the eggs on the vegetables. This is why I have given vegetables up entirely and eat only baked goods. However, I can’t recommend that because the lawyers tell me that’s an unhealthy diet.

The midges I want to teach you to avoid in this essay are the non-biting flies that gather in shafts of sunlight on a crisp morning walk. These are the bugs that will sometimes land in an unsuspecting hiker’s mouth and ruin an otherwise perfect moment of contemplation.

It’s important to know that these midges have two speeds: cruising and attacking. At cruising speed you might think you could reach out and easily clap one to death but try it and they will frustrate your clumsy trap by switching to attack speed.

If you observe a throng for a few moments you can often pick out a single fly, circling at cruising speed. He – and it is a he – will then switch to attack speed, dive in and back out of the mob, quickly trying to mate with one of the female flies at the center.

It is this diving in motion which makes the midge the most dangerous to the casual hiker. In his frenzy to mate the gnat abandons normal self preservation and makes an erratic dive for the female, flying at top speed, and if you aren’t careful right into one of your bodily orifices.

The first piece of advice to avoid these bugs is to keep your head up and eyes alert. I’m not saying that to criticize people for looking at their phones – lord knows I like a bit of phone gazing while walking – rather, I actually find myself most distracted contemplating life by looking at the ground. There is something about the way that the earth passes by in a blur of sticks and muddy holes, rocks and gnarled roots, that soothes my mind, switching me off to the dangers all around me and setting me into a mood where I can contemplate things like “how to avoid midges”. Which I will ironically crash into a few seconds later. So, keep your heads up, hikers. Being in nature is no time for contemplation.

The second thing you must do is keep your mouth shut. A sharp inhalation through the mouth will draw in flies from yards away.

That’s why as you approach the mob (you saw them coming because you weren’t looking at the ground and wondering why your nearly three year old dog is still an utter spaz) it is best to purse your lips and breathe only through your nose, then to start to swing your arms wildly. It can be difficult to do all three. Your muscles may start screaming out for oxygen but like that time when you were a kid and you tried to hold your breath under water for as long as possible, you must struggle against the horde without taking a single breath.

If you should accidentally breathe in and get a fly in your mouth the only recourse is to start dry-spitting. Think of the word “petewee”, and slightly stick your tongue out while exhaling sharply. It also helps, I find, to shake your head about and say “damnit” while windmilling your arms to drive away the rest of his unfortunate shipwrecked friends.

But remember, dry-spit only. Despite the fact that you are windmilling, shaking your head, and yelling “damn flies!” this isn’t a punk show in the 70s. “Gobbing” – or spitting a loogie – may be the most efficient way to get the fly out of your mouth but it is considered the height of bad form.

If you’ve kept your head up and your mouth shut, you should be mostly ok, however, there is one more tip and it is the most important tip I can give you: squint, hard. Getting a fly in your mouth is gross but it is nothing compared to getting one in the eye.

Every so often, about once every 5 years or so, a fly will avoid all of your defenses and like Luke Skywalker, who used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16 back home, will fly straight into your god-forsaken eyeball.

“HOW??” You will yell, as you start to claw at that red globby thing in the corner of your eye. “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?? Aren’t my eyelashes here to prevent this exact sort of thing?” You will scream as your eyelashes close in on the midge like a Venus Fly Trap, never to let go of his corpse.

It burns, it itches, you can try to get his body out but you won’t. Instead, you will finish the next 40 minutes of your morning walk thinking about how his little fly corpse is probably lodged behind your eye, where the eyelashes and other detritus that falls into your eye accumulates over your lifetime.

That’s it, that’s my advice. When you’re walking the dog, keep your eyes up to see the swarm, no contemplation allowed. As you approach the horde shut your mouth tightly, squint your eyes, and start waving your arms.

If you follow these guidelines, your face should remain mostly fly free.

Happy walking.

Qq

18 comments

  1. So I glanced at the headline of this post without my reading glasses and I said to myself “How to avoid midgets? This should be interesting “

    But then I started reading and I must say I was disappointed.
    Thanks for the tip on how to avoid midges Tim, but what about them midgets 🙂

  2. There’s this tract open land in the centre of the Trinidad capital Port of Spain, called the Savannah. It’s 3.7km in circumference. So on this hot sunny day while taking visitors around on foot, we found ourselves needing to get to the other side. We will cut across it, I told them.

    That beautiful, shimmery haze we could see in the distance? A swarm of midges. The walk quickly turned unpleasant, and we went back to trekking on the ring road pavement.

  3. But what about canned bug spray, Tim?!!

    I carry bug spray and bear spray whenever I walk my dog…in suburban Texas.

    Pesticide for midges and mosquitoes… bear spray for Trump supporters. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

  4. Why does Tim not have a syndicated football column in an English newspaper already!? This one is a bit off but Tim’s usual writing is better than at least half the articles on Guardian and Independent.

    1. By his own admission, Tim aspires to be a Guardian football journalist. Amy’s gone now, so there must be a vacancy.

  5. This reminds me of visits to see my dad in his little flat in Mornington Crescent. He always had a cavalier attitude when it came to food hygiene, but you couldn’t ever tell him anything. In his later years he wouldn’t eat a whole piece of fruit at once, and left half-eaten bananas, oranges, and apples sitting out on the kitchen counter “for later”. Walking into the kitchen would invariably cause a large black cloud of fruit flies to rise up in a biblical wave, filling the small room so that the only recourse was to hold your breath and retreat as quickly as possible, beating your arms in a futile effort to keep the buggers from getting stuck in hair, nostrils, clothes, wherever…
    “Christ, Dad, can you do something about these flies in the kitchen?”
    He gives me the stink-eye. “Flies? What flies?”

  6. I spend an inordinate amount of my screen time checking this site to catch Tim’s latest observation on Arsenal and I find an article on insects? Insects?? Really???

  7. Tim

    Interesting post. I spend about 1/2 the year in Texas and 1/2 the year in Colorado and here is Texas we have a tiny biting midge from the family Ceratopognidae but everyone calls no-see-ums because they are so small that its very hard to see them. My wife and I like to go trail riding on our horses when we are in Texas and the no-see-ums can be incredibly irritating

  8. Either all of you are whiny about a few insects, or I shouldn’t travel. I was warned about midges in Scotland too but I was lucky enough to not have any problems. But it seems these insects are everywhere. If they are bad enough to get claude to beat a hasty retreat, then I respect the midge.

    Also, Tim. You are a weirdo. But like, in a good way. Thanks.

  9. The whole time I was reading this I was waiting for a reference to the perils of watching Arsenal play

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