Volume four number Two, Two Thousand eighT | summer

Bud Guthrie: Montana’s True Talker

an Essay by William Kittredge

The Future of Wilderness:

Can We Protect the Last
of Our Best Places?

Avalanche Survivor
Cycling Toward
Beijing Olympics

The Unleashing of Rivers

at the Milltown Dam

Anaconda’s Club Moderne:

a Montana Institution
 give
blood
Every summer they bite you,
suck your blood and make you itch
and suffer. So why on Earth
do we need bugs?

h
BY SCOT T McMILLION
PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

ere’s something to think about the next time

your neck and arms have become an itching,
oozing mess.
Or when the whining in your ears makes
you think seriously about spending the night
in a lake, underwater.
Or when you’re inhaling flies the size of
your thumbnail.
When these things happen, think about your place in the food
chain and maybe it will ease your suffering.
Maybe.
It’s bug season in Montana. And if the mosquitoes aren’t out,
chances are the deer flies will be. Or the snipe flies. Or the no see-ums.
Or the midges. Or the horse flies. Those are the big mamas, the ones
with scalpels for jaws that can slice a steak off your hide, toss it aside
and inject the wound with bug slobber, to make sure it itches later.
Bug season is a story about sex and blood. It’s about Darwinian
evolution and the bounds of human tolerance: a complicated mesh that
involves fish and bats and birds. You’re part of it. You feed them all.
And you can’t blame the bugs for what they do. You drew them
upon yourself, with your sweat and the fatty acids on your skin, with
the clothing you choose, with the very air that you breathe.
Still, they’re hard things to love. Even simple appreciation can
The horse fly be tough to muster. But some people try.
is the largest “Think of it from the insect’s point of view,” said John Burger, a
of the blood-
professor of entomology at the University of New Hampshire, where
eating insects
common in he specializes in vampires, the bugs that want our blood. He’s been
Montana. making annual bug-studying trips to Yellowstone National Park since

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 the 1950s, so he understands the local pests as well as New
England’s.
They drive him crazy, too, he admitted, but he still offers
up a fondness for creatures he feeds with his own blood.
His personal irritation, he said, pales in comparison to the
importance of blood-sucking vermin in the greater scheme of
things.
“You have to look at the entire system that they live in,”
Burger said.
For example, as larvae, mosquitoes consume plant debris
and turn it into flesh, filtering water in the process.
“It’s not unlike a cow,” he said. “Turning plant matter into
meat.”
Horse flies show their carnivorous colors early in life. While
still maggots, they’ll consume anything they can overpower,
including each other, just to make themselves stronger.
That maggot meat feeds fish and all sorts of aquatic insects
that also nourish fish and other critters. When the adults emerge,
they become food for dragonflies and birds, bats and frogs and
more fish.
For these creatures and more, mosquitoes and flies are an
extremely important food source, Burger assures.
“On the side, they bother us, but that’s nothing compared to
their ecological role,” he said.
Stable flies, non-native to Montana, are often found around barns or
pastures. They have sharp teeth. Here they feed on gauze soaked in
sheep’s blood at Montana State University’s Veterinary Entomology Lab
in Bozeman, where all of the photos for this story were made.
And while they’re bothering us, they’re bringing us into the
food chain, one drop of blood at a time.
Female mosquitoes, deer flies and horse flies, after a
successful bout of sex, must find a meal of blood if they are
to produce healthy eggs. So, instead of ice cream and pickles,
the recently impregnated swarm out in search of blood. They’ll
generally take what they can find, but the best targets are large
mammals, like deer or cattle or your unguarded ankles.
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They find you by locating your odor plume, a cone of aroma
made of carbon dioxide, sweat, lactic acid and other chemicals
from your skin and mouth. You waft this attraction behind you
like a long cape and when the huntress finds it, she swoops,
jaws clicking in bloodlust and dripping with saliva engineered
by nature to make you bleed faster.
Without the blood meal, the eggs won’t mature. That means
there won’t be maggots to feed other bugs and next year’s crop of
pests won’t emerge, which might mean a more pleasant evening
on the verandah, but it also means thinner pickings for birds and
frogs and dragonflies, creatures that, in an indirect way, rely on
your blood.
Males of most fly species don’t need the blood feast. They lap
up the extrusions of aphids, which, according to Burger, produce
a sugary poo that the male flies particularly enjoy. They also seek
nectar, helping plants to pollinate, and their bodies also feed fish
and birds and such, without drawing blood from you.
Male mosquitoes and most male flies are, in the blood cycle,
an indolent necessity. But if their mothers hadn’t gorged on blood
— maybe some of yours — the boys would never have hatched.
“You’re actually contributing to their success as a member
of the community that they live in,” Burger said.
Unless you slap them dead.
Especially those big, slow horse flies with that mouth full of
razors.
Killing them takes them out of the food chain, but it provides
some solace and it shows that entomologists are not immune to
the visceral pleasure of vengeance.
“They make a satisfying squash when you swat them,”
Burger agreed.
At least we’re not cows
We are bug food, all of us. And as uncomfortable as that
fact may be, know that it could be worse. At least we aren’t cattle.
When the mosquito clouds become opaque, when the deer flies
invade our ears and noses, when blood from the horse fly bites
drips from our limbs, loosened by the anticoagulants in fly spit,
we have options. We can smear on bug dope. We can go roast in
the car. We can pack up the tent and go home.
Greg Johnson, a professor at Montana State University in
Bozeman, traps mosquitoes around the state to help track West
Nile disease. He said the Milk River country around Malta offers
the most consistent suffering, though he’s dubious of local yarns
about skeeters big enough to have sex with a chicken, while
standing flat-footed.
While the prairie hayfields can teem with mosquitoes, the The mosquito is
thickest swarm he’s ever seen was at Canyon Ferry Reservoir the most common
near Townsend, where he trapped an astonishing 30,000 of Montana’s
vampire insects.
specimens one night. (A typical Milk River mosquito roundup
might produce 5,000 creatures.)
“I don’t know how deer and cattle and horses survive that,”
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 45
 he said.
Creatures of the field and
forest can suffer horribly. Fly
bites can drain a liter of blood
from a horse in one day, and
flying vampires can retard the
weight gain of cattle by as much
as a kilogram a day, Johnson
said.
And as tough as it can
be in Montana, it can get even
worse in other places: Scientific
journals tell of cattle in the If the Rocky Mountain wood tick plays an
important ecological role, entomologists say
deep South literally being bled they don’t know what it is.
to death by the little vampires,
suffering the tortures of a million tiny incisions.
“They removed enough blood that the cattle went into shock and died,”
Johnson said.
Ticks, too, can be deadly, even aside from the diseases they spread.
A species called the “winter” tick can infest deer or elk by the thousands,
removing hair, draining blood and slashing the odds of surviving a Montana
winter.
Ticks also are the unloveliest of bloodsuckers, with their loathsome mouths
and sneaky behaviors, their fondness for crotches and armpits, the greediness
of their sucking appetites, the diseases they carry. Even entomologists find
them distasteful.
“I just can’t find anything good to say about a tick,” Burger said. “I
suppose they probably provide food for something, but I can’t think what.”
“It’s hard to rationalize their place in this animal world we live in,” added
Johnson.

To understand is to transcend...
or maybe not
Biting fly infestations vary from year to year, and scientists aren’t sure
exactly why, but they postulate that varying amounts of cold and moisture
in the winter and spring affect the survival of eggs and larvae, dictating
whether you spend the summer slapping at yourself or lazing comfortably in
the hammock.
But the vampire insects never go away entirely. Snipe flies, deer flies
and horse flies like hot, dry weather and feed in the daytime, according to
Burger. But when they go to bed, the gnats and mosquitoes and midges wake
up, especially if it’s cool or humid.
Though their numbers vary, they’re all a part of the system. So are we.
They bite. We swat and spray and swelter in thick clothing on hot days, trying
to keep our blood to ourselves, but it doesn’t always work. Our blood nourishes
vampire eggs, linking us to fish and frogs and birds. It connects us to nature,
one tiny drop at a time.
Thinking about this — winged vermin nourishing themselves on you so
they can be gobbled alive by a toad — won’t stop the itch.
But it might help you scratch it.
Summer’s here. Bugs are coming. Swat away. But think about it.

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