this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I live in northern Ontario in mushkeg country ... mosquito season is starting right now.
At the height of the season in about June, July in the wilderness on a windless quiet evening, the air literally comes alive with the hum of billions of mosquitos. If you are not protected, they will literally drive you insane from the constant noise, touching, buzzing, biting, stinging .... it's very annoying to get bitten on your arms, legs, back and chest .... but it is literal torture when you get bitten so much you are getting stung between your fingers, at your cuticles, your toes, the palms of your hands, soles of your feet, your face and you get bugs trying to wedge themselves into your ears, your eye lashes or try to fly into your mouth or nose.
I'm Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in this environment. The way we coped with it is to keep all your clothes on no matter how warm it gets outside. I remember seeing my grandfather in full wool pants and heavy shirt with another layer of underwear underneath .... on warm July days! Traditionally, we never exposed any skin in the summer time.
I'm not as extreme as my grandfather but my friends always look at me weird for keeping a long sleeve shirt on with jeans and socks on warm or hot summer evenings around the campfire. Meanwhile, my friends in shorts and tank tops either slather themselves with bug spray or get so drunk they no longer feel the insects eating them alive .... until they wake up the next morning.
So that NFB short is an accurate description eh?
That was about black flies
Mosquitos have a small sting and half the time their anesthetic works and you don't notice they're there until they're full. And they often only work in the evenings, less at night and a lot less during the day.
Black flies are a flying platform for a jagged needle and jaws to tear open your skin. They don't bite they tear open a hole to insert their needle. They fly during a hot summer afternoon and in the right temperature they'll swarm, drive you insane, make you run like a maniac and eat you as you slowly flail on the ground until you stop moving.
Mosquitos will leave a little pin prick wound, black flies will leave a big welt the size of a loonie and just as hard and if you get caught outside surrounded by these demon insects, the welts will actually merge and harden your skin ..... and they will keep landing to tear open more.
"And the black flies, the little black flies
Always the black fly no matter where you go
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones
In North Ontar-eye-o-eye-o, In North Ontar-eye-o"
I would rather die from mosquitos than be tortured to death by black flies
Yep, and if it's a nice thin dry fit shirt, you're getting bit right through your shirt.
Shirt! .... if you happen to stretch your jeans too tightly over your butt, they're biting you through there too.
The book Hatchet opened my eyes to this. One of the really early scenes in the book is the main character getting absolutely alive by mosquitoes at dusk. That scene scares me...
Never read the book but I do know what being swarmed by mosquitoes means. I have relatives who live further north and I've been there when I was younger. My worst experience was being out in the woods in deep wilderness in July in the mushkeg. No wind, no weather, just completely still air, hot, humid at dusk when the temperature was just right. We made a fire to smoke our tent but it only made it manageable to survive. Outside, I went to do some repairs to a tent and I had to wear gloves, covered head to toe and a heavy hooded jacket to cover my face. The only thing exposed was about a baseball sized hole in front of me ..... the mosquitoes swarmed the opening and nearly choked me. I was only outside for about two minutes to get things done then had to run back inside. An exposed person in those conditions would have probably gone insane.
But those nights are rare, most of the time, there is a bit of a breeze and mosquitoes are transient. Even on hot humid nights for whatever reason, you get a reprieve and the bugs aren't so bad. Most of the time, there is enough of a breeze to manage things and you can use campfire smoke to control the bugs.
It's a completely harsh environment and sometimes I can't believe humans lived there for thousands of years. And it's where my family is from. The same locations I'm talking about freeze over in the winter to minus 40 degree temperatures in February. You can die by mosquito bites in the summer .... and frost bite in the winter.
Interesting! I've always assumed that Indigenous cultures around wear lighter, breathable clothing during the summertime if they lived in the warmer provinces.