Sometimes Nature is Gross

Ah the rains. They have arrived, quelled the dust, and put a little moisture back in the air and a little green back in the landscape. They have also brought lots of mud, which makes driving a (mostly fun) challenge.

Less exciting than the mud are the bugs. I've started to notice more bugs in the dining area and in my banda. I'm sure this trend will continue. What I hope stops immediately and I never have to experience again is the massive insect orgy that occurred in, on and around (but mostly in and on) my car this morning.

The culprits

I braved the mud from last night's rain to get out to Scott's plain for some observations. I made it and parked near a promising group of female tommies. Not minutes after my car had stopped did I start noticing small black insects flying around outside my window. Within minutes of that, hundreds of them had landed on the windows on one side of my car and the hood, windshield and roof. It sounded like it was raining, so many of them were knocking into the car. As soon as they touched down they began a random search until they encountered another insect or clump of insects, at which point they began fornicating furiously.

Get a room!

I had the window on the other side of the vehicle rolled down so that I could watch out of it and use my rangefinder and camera. As the horde of insects accumulated, I decided it would be prudent to seal the car as best I could (which is not very well since there is a two-inch gap between the window and frame in my back windows. Soon they overtook the other side of the car. In the meantime, my tommy moms had begun some interesting behaviors. I couldn't stop observations on account of the bugs, but I also couldn't continue observations with the windows rolled up. So I rolled one down, only far enough to peer out of. That was far enough though, and in no time the party had moved inside and I had horny insects crawling and doing the deed on my equipment, clothing, legs, and hair. I protested ineffectively by flicking as many as I could.

Eventually my tommy moved far enough away that I had to move the car to keep her in sight. Eager for the possibility of escaping the swarm, I started the car and moved several hundred meters. I hoped that if I could escape the cloud, the insects would stop coming in and I would only have to deal with those that were already inside. No such luck. The bugs seemed attracted to the car and the cloud followed. Worse, the movement of the car seemed to excite them, like a vibrating bed in a cheap motel. They began doing it even more enthusiastically, with more buzzing.

Gross.

After about an hour and a half of this, they all began dying, an endeavor that I encouraged with many well-placed stomps of my shoe (for some reason they congregated in the footwell). By lunchtime, all I had to show for the ordeal was a sprinkling of dead bodies spread throughout my car, an incomplete tommy observation (the bugs had distracted me to the point that I lost sight of her in a herd), and a much less charitable attitude towards small winged invertebrates.