149. Bubblewrap

It’s full-on fly season now.  Solitary horseflies as big as your thumb hover and harrass, and when they bite it feels like a bee sting and then itches for days.  Stable flies home in on the lower legs of any livestock they can find; in Gus’s case, they jockey for position wing to wing, each trying to access just enough skin to reach the superficial capillaries on his shins.  Face flies and ear gnats swarm and bite, leaving swaths of little scabs.  They all compete with deer flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums of various stripes, and the various truly evil tormentors who specialize in attacking eyes, or genitalia, or wounds . . .

Nevertheless, it’s good for Gus’s brain and body to be turned out with his pasturemate Bobby, and with a little hillside of grass to nibble, and with the smells and sights and sounds of the farm to monitor.  Since spring, when the little ear-biters hatch, we’ve turned him out with a flymask that covers his head in a stiff nylon mesh to allow vision for him but no entry for flies.  Around the summer solstice, when the stable flies arrived, we added fly socks, also made of stiff mesh that protects his lower legs.  And now the variety and numbers of pests are so high that he goes out wrapped in full-body armor.  

As warm weather approached, Sandy — a seamstress as well as horsewoman and infinitely catholic factotum — carefully tucked and tailored a horse-sized fly sheet to fit Gus’s donkey torso.  The sides hang low, almost down to his socks, so he looks like a stumpy medieval charger in armor and colors, ready for a miniature joust.  So far, we think it’s helping:  I haven’t yet found him screwed tight into his shrubby hidey-hole where he spent a lot of last summer.

During trick-training in the arena, Gus still gets naked.  It’s a chance for me to wipe his eyes and scratch his face, and empty his socks of the shavings that get in there when he lies down in his stall.  And after our session, we still go out grazing, since he finds the flies magically less annoying when he’s chewing.  The grass and clover are mangier these days, but the up-side is that Gus is actually willing to quit grazing before the flies eat him down to a skeleton.  On the sultriest days, when the bugs are always at their worst, Sandy leaves him inside, or brings him back in early, so he can shelter in the shady barn with his big electric box-fan blowing on him.

It’s a little sad that he’s a boy in a bubble, but it beats being bug bait.