It's Lake Fly Time!

Call'em what you want: lake flies, mayflies, Canadian soldiers, shadflies... it doesn't matter. The main thing is, they're back!

Here's a link to the Morning Journal's story.

For those living near Lake Erie (like me), the arrival of the first wave of lake flies is something you get used to. You don't really look forward to it, you just accept it. You go to bed one night (last night, actually), and when you wake up in the morning, a wondrous thing has happened. Your light post looks like it grew fur.

My parents have told me many stories of how bad the lakeflies used to get in Lorain in the 'old days'. Apparently the piles of dead ones would get so thick that people would slip on them and fall. And the city would have to use a front loader to scoop them all up and get rid of them.

Living in Sheffield Lake for more than ten years, I have gotten used to seeing piles of dead ones under the street lights along Route 6. Some years they are worse than others. And some years, the lake flies arrive several times over the summer. (They always seem to come about the time the International Festival starts, guaranteeing that the scene down by the Black River looks like a biblical plague.)

So the midges came last week (you can hear the city-wide humming of the pesky critters at night), and now the lake flies have arrived. Did I say that I like living near the lake?