I have never in my life seen so many flies as there are in Pep, NM. My parents say its due to the cattle in the area. They are awful (the flies, not the cattle)!! The more you swat the more there are - amazing really. And they BITE!!! Alot!! It hurts... Bear is like "really, you brought me here?". Poor guy. As nice as it is outside, you can't stay outside because of the flies. And when the nights get cool, they latch onto your warm car or whatever... Really, its almost fascinating if it wasn't so gross and annoying.
Bryan has spent hours swatting them.
A word on goatheads. I haven't taken a good photo of these wicked little plants but they are abundant in the Pep area (maybe all of NM). My parents are fighting a never-ending battle of getting these things eradicated from their yard. Goatheads are like grass-burrs (stickers) except they only have two stickers off of the head. They look similar to... well a goat's head. And painful - oh they hurt like a son-of-a-gun if you step on one bare-foot or stick it in a finger when you pull it up. Thus the never-ending battle of eradication. I'm all for poisoning the little buggers, but most poisons will kill all of the surrounding vegetation and that isn't good in a place that sees very little - even if most of it is 'weeds'.
An observation: most things out here stick or sting you - ferociously!! Tumbleweeds are another nemesis of my parents so as we identify goatheads (via the little yellow flowers they have) we also dig up the tumbleweeds (also stickery). Turpintine weeds - smell a bit like turpintine (hence the name), another weed that crowds out the grass and cattle won't eat.
One thing I found very cool - is that moss-rose will grow wild there. You guys in the NW may not know moss-rose but it is very popular down here. We've just always grown it in pots but as it seeds out, they spread. They are a close to the ground growing plant, almost like a ground cover and covered in bright flowers even this late in the year. It is really neat to see these happy, spots of color in an otherwise bleak pasture.
1 comment:
Absolutely fantastic post title!
I can relate to Bryan, with his flyswatter. My sister thought that it was hysterical that I sat outside with mine, armed against the legions of flies when we camped at Bottomless Lakes this summer. But it gave me some sense of working to make the world a better place, and reminded me of when I was a kid and my dad offered me a penny for every fly I could swat out on the covered patio in California. He would have used up the family "fortune" if we had lived in New Mexico dairy country back then.
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