Running with the Australian bush fly

Spring last week in Wombarra, Australia was more the kind of spring that came with cold gusty winds and chilling spring rains rather than the sweet, sunny, flowery types of spring that inspires a person to lie on the grass and read a book. All the grass was wet. And it was too cold to stay still in any one spot.

But I put on my little sleeveless top and red running shorts and headed out of the door for a run anyway, figuring that I would soon warm up. I shivered a little to begin with but after 5 minutes, the bracing cold actually felt way better than the suffocating humidity back home. So I went merrily along my way, until I realised that I had stalkers: fat Australian bush flies that flew as fast as I ran and buzzed about my head with dizzy joy every time I paused to stretch or to look at the view. They drove me crazy! I looked like a crazy woman doing a crazy dance by the side of the road as I tried to keep the flies and their entire extended families from landing on my face. I was a cow with multiple swinging tails.

How do the flies thrive in this cold anyway?

I was curious about what the flies were attracted to: was it my body heat? Or something else? So I looked it up when I got home and found out something more ghastly than I could imagine. The flies were looking for protein. Female flies need protein for the development of their ovaries, and they get it from my tears, saliva, sweat, the mucus in your nose and blood if I have an open wound. They are hanging about hoping that I would decide to make a nice warm lump of dung for them to lay their eggs in. Yuck!

This would explain why some of the guys had something in the region of 50 flies just hanging out on the backs of their shirts whenever they stopped moving. A friend said that the flies were attracted to certain colours more than others, but now I know better... these "attractive guys" are just sweatier!

It started raining when I was running back to the beach house. Really cold spitting rain, not like the tropical thunderstorms back home where it rains bucketfuls of warm-ish water. I was glad for it anyway, even though it was horridly cold, because it meant that the flies finally left me alone...