Our feeble fights can’t ever keep the cursed ladies from their blood
THEY are tiny, they are innumerable and they love it best when conditions are warm and dull and still. The males are innocuous, for they merely dance and mate and live blamelessly on sap and nectar. The female is the terror, for before she can lay fertile eggs she must feast – and she feasts only on blood.
She is, of course, Culicoides impunctatus – the Highland midge or, in good Scots, the midgie. And she attacks in great number. As they say on Raasay, ‘Kill a midgie and a thousand come to the funeral.’
Joyously they shoal round your head, squeak in your ear like tiny Messerschmitts and nibble at soft and intimate parts of your face – they particularly like the corners of my eyes. And within minutes that dreadful, itchy, allergic reaction has set in.
Midgies are the curse of the North and West, the torment of those who must work outdoors, the anguish of the angler seeking sea-trout at dusk, the infuriation of campers and hikers.
They are no respecters of persons. Charles Edward Stuart, on the run after Culloden and usually forced to sleep in the open, was driven to distraction (and drink) by their insufferable bites.
Although there were subsequent, ineffectual plans in the years ahead for a renewed Jacobite rising, he would insist with some hysteria that it be launched anywhere but the Highlands. The cause, they say, was his regret for what had been inflicted on so many Highlanders after his defeat but I think myself it was the midgies.
They once ruined Queen Victoria, forcing her in 1872 to abandon a picnic in Sutherland. Never the sunniest of souls at the best of times, she lamented that she had been ‘half-devoured’.
Such is the impact of midgies on the economy of Gaeldom that, in the late 1960s, the Highlands and Islands Development Board invested much serious money trying to find some way of eradicating the blighters. It failed. Now midgies are to be celebrated, if that’s the word, with their own television show. In a documentary for BBC Scotland next Monday evening, Dr Jim Logan – a senior lecturer in tropical medicine and an expert on parasites of every variety – will enthuse for an hour over Culicoides impunctatus.
HE apparently admires midgies and bubbles forth with facts and figures. They breed – in enormous numbers – in the bog covering about a quarter of Scotland’s landmass, from only two square yards of which some half a million can emerge. A single midgie weighs 1/200th of a gram, is one millimetre long and has spotted wings. A swarm of midgies can dole out 3,000 bites i n an hour…
They have serious biting technology and, if you see a blownup picture of Mrs Midgie, the mouth-parts are terrifying – a sort of jaggy, sawing syringe. Female midgies don’t actually prick you and drink: instead, they make a tiny slash and joyfully lap up the results.
Their spit contains histamines to encourage the flow and it is to this that your skin reacts furiously in around ten minutes. By the end of a junior football match which I endured one evening last year, dozens of us on the touchline in the midgiethick air were all but dancing in agony. Youngsters were begging to be shot – or at least to be allowed to go home.
It comes as scant consolation to learn that midgies have no particular preference for human blood and that 90 per cent of their intake is from unfortunate livestock and wildlife. They are attracted by the carbon dioxide in a beast’s breath (or ours) and especially by sweat. They have a slight preference for women over men and for dark-haired people over blondes.
Bright clothing is a slight deterrent and they dislike breezes and direct sunlight. A fortunate minority seem to be immune to their bites.
People often assume that midgies are a particular curse in the Outer Hebrides. In fact, because the terrain is broadly flat and treeless and, on most days, distinctly windy, they are rarely a serious pest, save for that still, dank, clammy fortnight we endure each August.
Midgies are experienced in their full horror in sheltered nooks of the West Highland mainland, by long, probing sealochs and under huddled, lowering mountains. Think twice before you go camping in, say, Lochcarron or Glen Shiel, or risk a barbecue in Ballachulish.
Para Handy – and if Dougie was here, he would tell you – maintained that the most vicious midges were in Arrochar, ‘chust with aal the points o’ a Poltalloch terrier, even to the black nose and the cocked lugs, that sits up and barks at you…’
In an especially bad, sodden, soggy summer they can make their presence felt outwith their normal demesne. In the awful summer of 2002, for instance, they were a pest even in Edinburgh. And a long succession of generally mild, wet summers and mild, wet winters has seen them emigrate further still.
The Highland midgie is now, apparently, established in the Lake District and i n north Wales, with reports of itching as far away as Cornwall. Many thought hopefully that the frightful winter of 2010-11 would markedly reduce their numbers the following spring – all those weeks of hard frost. In fact, they were worse than ever – certainly, untold midges had perished but the death toll on the beasts that prey on them was disproportionately worse.
So out the midges duly came, hatching from May onwards and making it their mission to ruin camping trips, picnics and barbecues throughout what resembles the Scottish summer. The most afflicted are those who have to work close to the ground, in the sort of environment particularly favoured by midges – crofters, forestry workers and so on.
IT is easy to cackle about the midgies as a dark Scottish joke but they cost the tourism industry about £ 268million a year and have put untold visitors off Highland jaunts for life.
It is extraordinary how ineffectual and helpless we are in the face of a creature so tiny. You can buy assorted repellents but they only reduce the bites. You can buy a hood of mesh to drape over your cap and face, but it limits your vision in low light and some midgies will always find a way under it. Little is suffered to stand between the lady and her blood.
There are all sorts of homespun remedies, from bog myrtle to citronella candles to thick tobacco smoke. It has been widely murmured that the most effective repellent of all is actually a cosmetic – Avon’s Skin so Soft. And various machines – the Midge-Eater, the Predator – have been patented to trap and slay them by the hundreds of thousands. But when there is so much bog, and half a million midges can emerge from a slice of moor the size of a grave, the odds are always rather forlorn.
The 1960s eradication trials, by Achnashellach in Wester Ross, failed because the only chemicals that worked killed almost everything else besides, and because there is simply too much peatland for an extermination programme to be feasible.
Highlanders, sensibly, tend simply to admit defeat and retreat indoors when midgies are at their worst, rather than toil on at the hay- cutting or carry on lifting the peats.
And there are true horror stories. It is said that there was a gamekeeper on one sporting estate on Lewis who was particularly detested, and that one balmy evening he was jumped by local youths, stripped, bound and pegged out on the ground all night long while the midgies banqueted. By morning he was insane and never worked again.
But everything, even so tiny and vile as the midgie, has its place in the ecosystem. Midgies feed birds, bats, and carnivorous plants such as the sundew. They seem to have an important role in controlling the movement of deer, keeping them in high and windy spots through summer and giving woodland a chance to recover.
And, as one observer muses darkly: ‘If nothing else, you have to admire them for their power-to-weight ratio, a bit like an entomological Benny Lynch. If they were the size of horseflies, with their bite relatively the same, Scotland would be uninhabited.’
The Secret Life of Midges, BBC One Scotland, 9pm, Monday October 20.