An Open Letter to the
Black Flies
by Bill Shein

TO: The Black Flies of Berkshire County
FROM: Bill Shein
RE: You

Let me begin by stating, unequivocally, that I have nothing but love for all of Earth's creatures. I share my home — dubbed "The Animal Farm" — with many dogs and cats. There may even be cute little goats in my future, and perhaps some other animals as well.

Because my house is adjacent to Beartown State Forest, a variety of furry woodland creatures stroll the grounds at their leisure. Birds frolic gleefully above, and, every spring, a nest under the edge of my roof is home to a little bird and her newborn birdlets.

In fact, some know me as our town's very own Dr. Doolittle, though my ability to talk to the animals remains a well-guarded secret, lest the TV news people descend upon our quiet hamlet and block traffic, destroy flowerbeds with their satellite trucks, and poison our air with their excessive use of hairspray.

Importantly — and please pay attention here — I don't kill insects. Much to the amusement of family and friends, I capture insects and carefully place them outdoors, often saving them from the sharp claws and toothy mouths of my spider- and moth-eating cats.

You should also know that I never use the toxic bug sprays formulated to painfully fry the nervous systems of insects. And my back yard never glows with the purple light of those electronic bug zappers — though at this time of year, it's not hard to understand why many back yards do.

Now let's talk for a moment about you, the black flies of Berkshire County.

You arrive in early May and stick around until the weather turns hot. You emerge, as adults, from our streams and creeks, where as larvae you enjoyed the dissolved oxygen found in moving water. You like calm, sunny days; wind is not your thing. And at night, you're strictly off-duty.

At one-fifth the size of a common housefly, you are small enough to pass through our window screens. You are attracted to the carbon dioxide and moisture in our breath, and you find the smell of our perfumes and soaps enticing.

But here's the problem: In your constant hunt for food, aka "human blood," you get into our eyes, crawl into our ears and burrow into our hair. You surround our heads, dive-bomb into the back of our throats and get sucked into our lungs. Your females bite our skin, irritate the wound with toxic saliva and inject an anticoagulant to drink our blood, Dracula-style, free of pesky clotting agents.

Put simply, your behavior is obnoxious.

So here's what I ask of you — and I speak for every human resident of the Berkshires: Seriously, just stop it. Enough already. Quit it. I'm not kidding! Just stop.

Look, you don't live long. Your life span is counted in days, occasionally weeks. Why spend so much of it torturing others? It can't be good karma.

After we humans have endured a long, cold winter, and you black flies — as little more than gooey gobs of larvae — have passed countless months at the bottom of chilly streams, there must be a better way for us to spend the spring.

So here's a proposal: Starting this week, we humans will fill our hummingbird feeders not with sugar water, but instead, with delicious human blood, removed carefully and painlessly from our arms by trained phlebotomists using sterile instruments (instead of the toxic-saliva-covered teeth of black flies).

We'll place hundreds — nay, thousands! — of these blood-filled feeders across the region, so you'd never have far to go to find nourishment.

What do you say? I mean, why would you bite and gnaw and peck at our flesh — and regularly be crushed and smacked and zapped and sprayed to death — when you could drink your fill at the blood distribution centers we'd very much like to establish for you?

Certainly there are those among your kind who see a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Which came first: Humans crushing black flies between our fingers with sadistic glee? Or black flies pecking and biting humans until we scream with rage?

I say we forget all that and move forward, together, into a less contentious future. Otherwise, things might have to change at my insect-friendly Animal Farm. Not to pressure you, but next week there's a sale on electronic bug zappers at my favorite local hardware store.

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Bill Shein speaks fluent "Bzzpt," the language of the black flies.

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on May 7, 2006. Join a discussion about this column in Bill's blog. And read Bill's previous column, "David Blaine's Ho-Hum Stunts").