Well, it's not like I wasn't expecting this. A small plague of very large black flies has descended on my house. It has been a few weeks since the death and consequential stink of Big Rat and, as I feared would happen, the flies that were around at the time of his decay apparently all got together and decided the time was good for having a family. I don't know where the corpse ended up but he must have been somewhere where he would be accessible to small flying animals.

On the bright side, these things are big, dumb and sluggish and are fairly easy to execute even without the aid of my trusty fly gun. The catastrophe, thus far, isn't on the scale of what happened to me 20 years ago or more at my Garden Street house where there were so many I had to set off a fumigation bomb in the house and leave, returning later to vacuum up thousands of the disgusting buggers. In numbers, I would guess there are fewer than 20 who have appeared so far. Nonetheless, I will have to report to Jean Anne Rogers, one of my property managers who suggested that this bait thing had never been a problem for her, that she will have to rethink her advice on these matters in the future.

I am thinking I will forgo the accompanying photo I had planned to use with this post. I am fairly certain every last one of you reading this has seen a large black fly before.