I Hate Bugs #2: Scottish Midges

The Scottish Highlands are stunning in myriad adjectives:

They are dramatic.

They are rugged and wild.

They are friendly and happy.

And they aren't so parchingly hot in the summer as most of North America.

What month is this?  JUNE.

In short, they are a challenge to every hiker, climber and outdoorsman, so you would think the Highlands would be overrun with goofy tourists and vacationers.  Here is why they are not.

I hate you.

This is Culicoides impunctatus, more commonly known as one of the biting Highland midge species, and most commonly addressed as “ya wee bastard”, “ow!  ya wee shite!”, and “och fuck off ya fuckin fucker.”

The problem with midges is not how itchy or disease-ridden or buzzy they are, like mosquitoes.  No, the problem with midges is that there are thousands of them per cubic inch of air space.  You never encounter just one midge, you encounter gazillions of them.  Since they are roughly the size of air molecules, you breath them in, you swallow them, they crawl into your eyeballs, they invade your hair and your ears, and if you were naked, I don’t even want to think about where they’d go.   If you are outdoors on a still afternoon, God help you, because even if they don’t bite you, the sight of 600,000,000 midges zipping about crazily a millimeter from your eyes and nose is enough to put you directly into the loony bin without collecting $200. 

Hence, this outfit is standard seasonal fashion for some days.  

Midges laugh in the face of DEET—in fact, they will happily lick it off before chewing into your arm.  It's more like an aphrodisiac smoothie to them than a repellent.  Some people swear by Avon Skin-So-Soft, but the only thing I’ve ever seen it accomplish is creating an oily layer on me that the bugs will stick to and die on—leaving me, once again, coated with bug parts and slime.

My view: useless greasy gunk.

There is only one thing that can defeat the mighty midge: wind.

Midges are small enough to be weak, slow fliers.  In breezes of over 6 mph, they’ll simply vanish as if they were never there, and the Highlands go back to being rugged and lovely.  But when the wind drops, there’s nothing left to do but run.  If you don’t think you could keep up a requisite 12 mph pace, try going to northern Scotland.  You will run like you’ve never run before, hysterically and uncontrollably.  On still evenings, Highland campsites look like Olympic training grounds with wild-eyed hysterical people sprinting back and forth.

Or whipping their hair back and forth, if they are so blessed. 

The Scottish Government once looked into midge eradication for the sanity and prosperity of its citizens, and eventually concluded that the nature of the midge life cycle made it impossible.  Adult midges zoom about on the wind, meaning they’d be hard to reach with a spray, and even if you did kill them all, you're too late--they've already laid a bunch of eggs in the soil just waiting to hatch.   If you wanted to kill the eggs and larval midges, you’d have to burn all the soil and drain all the bogs to reach them, which would basically leave the entire country stripped and barren.  I’m not saying this is a bad idea, but the Scottish Government seems to think it’s cost-prohibitive.

How bad is the Scottish midge?  My Annoyance Factor ratings:

Swarming: 10 out of god-awful 10!

Itchiness: 8/10 slaps merely because of the insane volume of bites you can incur

Ability to make you eat them by accident: 9/10 since the air is so saturated with them

Ability to kill you if you’re unlucky: 1/10.  And you would have to be pretty damned unlucky—drunk, naked, and doped full of blood thinners in order to let these guys drain you dry.  Then again, this may describe a significant number of Scotsmen on a Friday night.

Goner.