Far North Rambles #10: Wear A T-shirt
Wear a T-shirt under your bush shirt despite the heat! The T-shirt protects your chest and stomach areas from biting insects that always find a small patch of exposed skin.
For those who have not worked or lived in remote areas, it may be hard to appreciate just how bothersome the biting insects can be. In central and northern Ontario, the first two weeks in June can be really bad when the black flies burst from the creeks seeking a blood meal and a pound of flesh as an appetizer.
One summer, we set up a fly-in tent camp in northern Ontario. My home for 1.5 months was a 12 x 14 foot cotton tent. When it was sunny, we worked. When it rained, we had a camp day.
We had worked about 20 days straight and were ready for a day off. I woke up one morning to the sound of rain on the cotton tent fly. Ahhh. Finally, a rain day. When I turned on my side to get a few more zzzz’s, I saw the shadows of the trees on the tent sidewall. That was a jolt awake I had not wanted. To see the shadows meant the sun was shining. If the sun was shining, that meant it was not raining. If it was not raining, that meant we had to crawl into our 20 day-old unwashed work clothes and fight the black flies to map the geology. Then came reality check #2. If it was not raining, what was that sound that resembled raindrops falling on the cotton tent? BLACK FLIES! The black fly scourge had peaked. They were beating against the outside of the tent trying to get in to have a tasty snack of our blood! That was one of the more demoralizing wake up calls that summer!
During the day, you can use the appearance of the biting bugs to tell the approximate temperature. Early in the morning, for about an hour after the sun rose, was the time of tranquillity. No bugs, the lake was calm, the temperature was cool. By about 8 AM, as the temperature started to rise, the mosquitoes appeared to wish you good morning. By 10 AM, the temperature had reached the “activation temperature” of the bothersome black flies. By early afternoon, when it was really hot, the mosquitoes were gone, the black flies were waning, but the deer flies and moose flies peaked. The constant buzzing of the deer flies and moose flies was almost as bad as their bite as they carried out their acrobatics around, and over, your head seeking any exposed skin to excavate a hole. Finally, about the time to head back to camp, the temperature started to fall and the cycle reversed itself to black flies and then mosquitoes. I used to say, working and living in the bush during the summer, first and foremost, required emotional skills to ignore the bugs. Only then could you focus on the work. Peace came if your project had a boat and motor so you could speed around the lake to escape the bugs - especially in the evening when the mosquitoes attacked again with vengeance.
During a normal hot summer, most bugs were largely gone by mid-August, but it was in early June, of my first summer working as a geological assistant, that I learned the value of wearing a T-shirt under my long-sleeved bush shirt despite the heat!
Andy Fyon wearing my protective bug shirt and white cotton gloves to minimize the impact of the swarms of biting mosquitoes on the tundra, near Inuvik, Northwest Territories, summer 2007. Photo by Elizabeth Ginn.
In northern Ontario, the black flies appear at about the same time as the trees leaf out. The black flies appear in biting swarms around mid-May in southern and central Ontario and usually the first or second week of June in northern Ontario. One good behaviour of black files is they tendency to go to a window or tent wall or roof when trapped inside a vehicle or tent, respectively. This photo shows black flies that managed to get inside the work truck in the time it took me to quickly open the truck door, jump in, and slam the door closed! Photo by Andy Fyon, June 11, 2007.
Andy Fyon, Aug 19, 2020 (Facebook March 27, 2020)