Lord of

the flies

This spring and early summer I have been fortunate enough to find several bird nests.

Finding bird nests and photographing birds nests are different things entirely.

For one, most of the nests I've been finding have been in nasty old swamps.

Fortunately, I have an affinity for nasty swamps and I don't mind having wet, dirty feet. I think it's genetic, but don't tell my family that, they might take it the wrong way.

Once you find a bird nest, in order to get a picture you have to wait for the birds to actually show up.

Sometimes this doesn't take long. One particularly affable pair of three-toed woodpeckers set up their nest in a hole in a tree in a place that was not only easy to get to, it was downright luxurious by bird watching standards. Which is to say I could sit in the bed on my pickup and watch them.

On the other extreme, another nest I found entailed a walk through a swamp in downfall and fireweed that was nearly over my head.

There's another thing about watching bird nests the documentary photographers who make those cool little movies never tell you: It can be extremely boring. I waited three and a half hours the other day for this bird to show up at this nest.

Three and a half hours. That's an entire NFL football game.

Then just as the bird showed up, the skies went cloudy and made for a lousy picture.

Fortunately, I had the flies and mosquitoes and bees to keep me company - hordes of them. There were flies that bit. Flies that looked like bees. Big flies. Little flies. Stupid flies.

The stupid flies were more annoying than the flies that bit. I mean, a fly that bites, well, at least you know why it's on you. But the dumb flies, they just landed on you and it was nothing to pick them off. They'd let you grab them and squish them and then I got tired with that I tried feeding them to a nearby spider but even it was stupid because it would always let them get away.

What sort of spider lets a big old juicy fly get away?

You know you're bored when you start feeding stupid flies to stupid spiders. Either that, or well, you're just a little stupid yourself, which, especially in my case, might not be all that far from the truth.

The nastiest fly of them all was a little fly that reminded me of a black fly but it wasn't all black - it was sort of yellow-brown. It drilled into my arm, drew blood and left an itchy welt.

The flies that look like bees send you in a tizz at first glance because you think they are a bee but then you squish one and you realize you've just hammered a fairly interesting insect.

And like I said, there was some real bees, too. They didn't bite however and they didn't sting, but I still didn't like them on me, so they got squished too.

I suppose all that squishing probably broke some federal law.

But I'm paying my fine, trust me.

‘Cause those little fly bites, boy do they itch.

Chris Peterson, the human flypaper, is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.