Fresh, young blood attractive to hungry black flies

While growing up on Limekiln Lake, the month of June seemed to follow the same rhythm. In the beginning, the leaves started to green.

Then came the bugs—in the millions.

But at the end of the month the pesky bug season was just about over and a canopy of every shade of green  imaginable had covered the forest.

It was the second week of June and my friend Eddie and I were hanging out together.

The black flies didn’t seem to bother either one of us, even though anyone who saw Eddie’s exposed neck that day would have described it as a messy, dried blood pincushion.

We even made a game out of counting our bites as we hiked around the backside of the lake to catch pollywogs.

We didn’t get started till after lunch because he had to finish up his chores. 

He was still scarfing down half a liverwurst sandwich when his bike rolled into the driveway to greet me.

He had a plastic bucket draped over the handlebars and a great cloud of black flies were massing around his head.

I grabbed an aluminum bait bucket and with a small goldfish net tucked into my back pocket, I launched my own bike.

Off we went sailing down hill to the trailhead at the end of the sand road.

We dropped our bikes in a muddy ditch that was just starting to fill in with tall green grasses.

That’s where our black fly hiking buddies started to bite.

The first bite I got was right on my eye brow. I could tell it was a good one as I could see my brow puff up when I squinted.

With our buckets in tow we plodded down the well-worn trail along the shoreline of the lake.

Eddie was in the lead and I could see the small black specks covering the back of his neck and swarming around him without pause.

I was glad he was out front as it seemed he was taking the brunt of the herd of flying vampires.

By the time we reached the old sump swamp, we started counting bites.

Our totals were actually pretty close as we each tallied more than a hundred small red lumps.

Then we pent about a half hour combing the muddy inlets of the sump for small black pollywogs to net and capture.

Eddie liked to try to catch them by hand. But I preferred to use the net so I could try to fill my bucket with thousands of them.

It wasn’t long before we decided we had sufficiently fed the bugs. It was a difficult trip back with our buckets splashing and all that bug swatting as we cautiously maneuvered our bikes to the release point near Turner’s stream.

As we poured out our swimmers the flies swarmed us for one last feast.

One of Eddie’s ears was bitten so ferociously that it began to swell shut. We decided that was enough for one day and called it quits.

We planned on going back to the site later that summer to see how many of our tadpoles made it to the frog stage.

But for the time being, we needed a blood transfusion and some Witch Hazel.