Video of summer insects goes viral
Kelly Rivard never wants to see another fish fly again. And who can blame her? Wednesday morning, she and her husband woke up to millions of fish flies, “layers on layers on layers” of them, on the driveway of their Belle River home.
“My husband ... woke up in the morning and I just heard a screech,” Rivard said. “And I was like, what the heck’s going on? I couldn’t believe that it was him, because I’ve never heard that.
“He goes no, no, you’ve got to come and see this — I walked out and I did the same thing. I went, ‘Ah, oh my God!’ ”
Rivard filmed her husband power washing the fish flies, also known as mayflies, onto the street and posted the video on Facebook Wednesday morning. By Saturday, the video had gone viral with over a million views.
“We usually — like everybody — just hose them down and they go down the sewer drain, and they’re gone,” Rivard said. “But this — no. There’s no way that could happen.”
Her husband used a smaller hose on the fish flies on the driveway near the house.
“I said, you know, that’s not going to do anything for what’s down there,” Rivard said. “And he’s like, ‘No kidding.’ So he put the hose on them and it didn’t even budge.”
There were so many fish flies that the Rivards had to use a power washer. Rivard said the bugs were alive and “flapping their wings.”
“There were layers on layers on layers, it was just awful. It was gross.
“I had them all over me, flying,” she said. “When they were being hosed off, they were flying around.”
A neighbour helped her husband bag up the fish flies, and luckily, their garbage and recycling was collected the following day.
The Rivards live about a block away from the water in Belle River. One of the five street lights on their street is in their yard, which they speculate might have attracted the bugs.
But they’ve lived there since 2007, and its never been that bad before. The entire street gets fish flies, but on Wednesday, they were concentrated in Rivard’s yard.
“Our one neighbour walked out, he went: ‘Oh my god!’ ” Rivard said.
One neighbour has lived on the street for 25 years, and said they had never seen anything like it. Another neighbour, who has lived there his whole life, agreed.
The video Rivard posted on Facebook has over one million views and more than 600 shares. Rivard said she went out to eat in Windsor on Saturday with her sister and brother, and three of the six people in the restaurant had seen the video.
The Rivards have had a few fish flies around their property since Wednesday, but nothing like the mass they experienced that morning. “I don’t know what I did to them — maybe in a former life,” she joked. “Maybe I did something to them last year, that they came back with a vengeance .... Other people, they didn’t get hit as hard. Not even close.”