Midges

Pete Smith petethebloke@gmail.com March 2007

The midge, also known as midgie, midgy or (sometimes) midget, is a flying insect of the genus Culicoides. I've even heard of them being called no-see-em, but this is ludicrous and I'll explain why later in this article. The little beastie is abundantly common throughout Donegal and any other part of Ireland that is wet enough to support him (but it's not the him version we fear... it's the her version and I'll come to that soon too). I want to give a wee bit of background (know your enemy) and go on to discuss the approach to warfare that can be employed, followed by a summary of the weapons at our disposal and a suggested strategy for counter-attack (aye, right).

What is the midge? The male version of the midge is a harmless little fella who lives only for nookie. He's born, he larvates, pupates, becomes an adult, looks for weemin midges, has his wicked way wherever possible and then retires to watch sport on the telly and sip on a glass of bog water. The female midge is a tiny, flying singularity of purified malice with a miniature drill for a mouth and a stomach that can hold a thousandth of a pint of human blood. This means that a typical herd of female midges has the gastric capacity to suck a fifteen stone man dry - but more on that later.

The female midge, once she has been seen to by the male, lusts for blood so that she has the energy to lay her eggs. A chicken is content with a few bits of grain and some peckings from the compost heap, but a midge needs a meal of pure blood even though her eggs are microscopic and can't be used for omelettes. She sniffs the air and can detect carbon dioxide as it "plumes" from mammalian nostrils. Following the scent, she homes in on the mammal (usually a climber) and bores a hole in his skin using the drill-like mouth, then sucks out some blood, leaving a hole full of horrible germs and fascinating chemicals that prevent clotting. This hole subsequently becomes inflamed as the body's defences get to work and a red spot may linger for 12-24 hours. The pain experienced by the bitten climber is out of all proportion to the tiny size of the inflicting insect. (Unlike cleggs, a midge hurts while it's sucking. The clegg uses an anaesthetic aswell as an anti-coagulant and can thus carve out a whole lump of you without you noticing - a sort of sunday joint of red meat that can be carried off and consumed at leisure. Once the anaesthetic wears off you are left with an ulcerating laceration the size of a football pitch and twice as sore.)

The main reason midge attacks are so incredibly unpleasant is that a herd of midges may contain 20 billion billion billion individuals. This is more than the number of atoms in the whole universe, so you can imagine how difficult it is for a climber to fight them off. I have personally experienced midge eclipses (when the sun is entirely blotted out and darkness results) and midge soup (when the concentration of midges in the air surrounding me was sufficient for me to "swim" through them like a drowning rat in a tureen of minestrone). Perhaps the most frightening experience for a climber is to be lifted off his feet as the herd of midges tries to carry him to their lair. Bites in the eyelids and the inner ear are the most painful, while bites on the arms and legs quickly get forgotten when the herd crawls down to the scalp and starts trying to chew in to the cranium. The midges that are squashed by the climber may outnumber the ones that fly off with a meal of blood to digest, but the midge population sees this as a victory and Phyrric is not in their vocabulary - each female can lay nearly 200 eggs after a meal. The victim would have to kill 99.5% of biters before he could consider himself 1-0 up at half time.

What can be done? Some people use repellents. They DO NOT work. I repeat, they DO NOT WORK. Also, they smell bloody horrible and probably cause cancer. DEET is the most common one and should be used carefully near synthetic materials because it can ruin them. It does not affect nylon, so should be OK near ropes and webbing (I think, but check). Used in 100% concentration, it evaporates quickly and becomes ineffective, so use it in lower concentrations (30%, say) and it has a longer lasting effect. It is supposed to stop the midge detecting your CO2 emissions. Nonsense! Donegal midges positively love the stuff and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it actually attracts them.

I had a theory a few years ago that midges can smell their squashed chums, i.e. swatting them attracts more midges in ever greater numbers. This is a bit like the wasp theory that says killing a wasp in the kitchen will result in more wasps arriving to see where their sister disappeared to; whilst shooing the wasp out of the window will diminish their curiosity resulting in fewer wasps in the kitchen. I persevered for quite a while, watching midges bite and suck and struggle away under the burden of gallons of my blood, in the vain hope that my reward would be fewer bites. Of course, it was utter bollocks, word soon got around that an idiot was doling out blood like a haemophiliac at a black pudding convention. I was almost desiccated by the time I came to my senses and I was able to kill 30,000 midges with each slap to any exposed bit of skin.

I'm lucky in that I don't react too badly to midge bites. One climber at Lough Barra a few years ago was bitten so many times that he had to go to Altnagelvin hospital and was given anti-histamines to bring down the swelling. It can also be dangerous if bites become infected. Midges do not have a particular reputation as vectors of disease, but you can be sure that they don't scrub up and disinfect before they drill a hole in you. If you make the mistake of thinking that a tiny, footery little creature like a midge can't have many germs on her, remember that germs are small - you'd need about one billion bacteria to sit in a lump before you could even see them. Mrs Midge could carry a million bacteria and viruses around with her and not even trouble the Ryanair baggage limits, let alone the Midgean limits.

A grim picture, it seems: we are few, they are many; we are relatively civil and good-natured, they are malign in the extreme; we are soft and yielding, they have kango drills for lips; we can smell curry cooking next door, they can smell our breath from a mile away; we concoct a foul chemical to repel them, they adopt it as the latest must-have parfum; we worry about illnesses of old age, they pour in to battle like berserkers with Valhalla in their sights (though no one has suggested midges are religious, there is something a bit reminiscent of suicide bombers about them). The answer seems to be retreat and stay at home, but we wouldn't get much climbing done that way. Dressing in clothes that completely cover our skin is impractical because 1, we want to climb and 2, midges are most prevalent when the air is warm and humid - not the time for wrapping up in layers of kit. My solution is a midge hood of fine nylon gauze. The protection around my face and head is bliss and I can almost ignore the ones that bite my hands and arms. There is a price to pay: vision is impaired in a strange way because the fine mesh diffracts light and makes judging distances difficult - I can't use it whilst climbing. It also creates a little microclimate of its own and can be uncomfortable in the warmest weather.

That's about it, really. Until someone pours DDT into the bog, we just have to suffer the little blighters. G'luck.