Sunday, May 24, 2009

Infestation Not Bothering 'my' Nestlings

We first noticed the flying buggers last Sunday. They were all over the chickens, annoying the H-E double hockey sticks out of the poor things. I did not know what they were, but noticed when I smashed some against the window pane in the chicken coop door that blood splattered. The evil things were blood sucking vampires! Poor chickies. I dusted all that I could catch with diatomaceous earth that I had on hand. Not much else I could do that night.

The next morning, they all seemed to be gone as if by magic...as quickly as they arrived. I have since found out that these pesky buggers are 'black flies' or 'buffalo gnats'. They do suck blood and can actually kill a BULL if the infestation is bad enough!

A day or two later when we started butchering our meat chickens, we noticed that the black flies were back. They didn't bother me too much, but seemed to like DH better. We could only get about a fourth of our chickens processed outside because of it.

I received an e-mail from our bluebird club about the pests. Apparently they can be a real problem for baby birds---even killing the babies still in the nest. The recommendation is to paint pure vanilla around the box opening using a Q-tip. For some reason this repels the black flies. I did this immediately...what a horrible way for a baby bird to go!

Yesterday when we had to get some more chickens processed, I got the idea to put some pure vanilla and some water in a spray bottle. We sprayed our arms, head and neck with this vanilla water while working and this seemed to help.

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