Tag: midges

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Midgification

Normally the wind on this breezy hillside croft is enough to keep the worst of the Highland Midges at bay.

Midge (much magnified)

Not so this summer. These tiny insects, with the needle-sharp biting teeth of Satan, have been in full swarm on many days recently. It’s midge-geddon out there!

They’re at their worst, it seems, during early mornings or late evenings before the temperatures of the day and the winds rise. We’ve been seeing vast clouds of them in the last month.

Midge swarm in progress

They’re difficult to catch on camera as they’re so imperceptibly small, but once there are enough of them airborne you can start to get a sense of the horror that is a midge swarm.

The only thing to do is to retreat indoors until the swarm passes. And remember to keep your windows closed! They’re dispersed by any wind over 6mph or temperatures that are too high or low, so thankfully it’s not a long wait as we can usually rely on the winds to kick in.

If you must venture outside, keep as covered as possible and use a midge hat complete with netting. We also use natural repellants, such as Smidge, although I’m not sure how effective these really are.

Thank goodness we don’t live in a more sheltered area. There are advantages to being perched on the top of a wind-scoured hill!

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Midgification

One of the main challenges of a highland summer are the midges.

We’re luckier than most being at the top of a windy hill. Midges can’t fly in winds of more than 6mph, apparently, so we pray daily for a good, brisk wind.

Many has been the warm, sunny evening when we would have brought out the firepit and barbecued long into the night if it weren’t for the midges. Once they start flying there’s no escape and no respite. The worst of it is that we want to sleep with the caravan windows thrown open on these warm summer nights, but we can’t without swarms of the little horrors coming in to plague us.

We smother ourselves in Smidge and don our midge net hats to try and avoid the worst of them. I’m counting the months until temperatures dip enough to kill them off. By September, I’m hoping.

The other downside of the croft in the summer with the proximity of neighbouring livestock is horseflies. The locals call these Clegs. I’ve been bitten several times by these horrible things whilst working on the croft, and unlike midge bites, they’re huge and need disinfecting. They land like ninjas, incredibly softly, so that you don’t notice them until they’ve started scissoring away a circle of skin from you.

Giant Dark Horsefly

Husband took a picture of this one on the caravan window a few days ago. It was a good inch and a half long, the same size as a hornet. It was probably a Giant Dark Horsefly, and although I don’t think anything this large has landed on me, I shudder to think of this airbus of the fly world anywhere so near to hand..

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Hot, hot, hot

The weather here on the island has been very hot over the past week. The caravan has suddenly transformed from fridge to oven..

The temperature gauge inside recorded 26 degrees centigrade yesterday, and that’s uncomfortably warm for us. Especially when opening windows to try and catch a breeze results in swarms of midges coming in off the croft…reminder to self, we must get some midge netting fitted to the windows.

The seedlings however are loving it. Uncle Bert’s Kale is growing madly, the potato plants are all greening up nicely and I have my first bean on my borlotti bean plant!

It was too hot to cook indoors yesterday and we were too tired to summon up a BBQ, so we headed down to Camuscross early to try and get a table for a cold drink and some supper. It’s so good to be able to do that again now that lockdown has eased.

There are worse places to be on a hot June evening… This time last year we were in London… I know where I’d rather be.