Plagues

It was 93 degrees outside on the first day of fall. Ninety-three degrees and bone dry. How dry?

So dry that I raised a cloud of dust just by standing.

So dry that every photo I tried to take was blurry yellow-brown.

Yes, the dust is unpleasant. But the light, fluffy soil that fills the air (and is great for growing onions), also grows my mortal enemy:

Puncture vine.

AKA, goat heads.

AKA, the things that I track around with me everywhere I go.

Heat and dust and puncture vine are not what we're here to talk about though. I'm here to talk about culicoides.

They call them no-see-ums, so look closely while you can.

We had a cold spring and a late summer, so here, all of a sudden at the end of September, the bugs have arrived.

Quincy stopped shaking long enough for a picture. I see at least eight flies on him.

Bunny's tail never stops.

Blue's eyes were red and swollen from the constant irritation.

 Something had to be done. So I got out the arsenal:

The nice thing about it being 93 degrees is that I could safely give Blue an early-fall scrubbing. I spent an hour working medicated shampoo into this:

Hair loss and dermatitis caused by culicoides and the neck threadworms that they transmit. Blue has a lot of these nasty patches of so-called sweet itch.

Then I drenched him in Flysect, smeared his face with Swat, hit all the sweet itch patches with EQyss gel, and topped it all off with a fly mask. The end result looks a lot like what I started with... minus the flies!

Who's a pretty boy? Blue is!