Midge fly bad for deer but good for gardens

We thought that President Donald Trump would save the economy of Eastern Kentucky, but it turned out to be the midge fly that did it.

The midge fly bites white-tailed deer and they die. They die from epizootic hemorrhagic disease or something or another. It might be deadly, but you gotta say “epizootic” is a cool name for a disease. Even cooler than blue-tongue disease. Wonder if you could draw a check for epizootic.

We thought it really cool to see deer return to the mountains, but we forgot how catholic they were when it comes to breeding. In some counties, you could get more jail time for shooting a deer than for shooting a white-tailed person. Shooting black-tailed persons was somewhere between.

I had a client sent to jail over venison in Boyd County. He had never been in jail before, but found out he could handle it and so when he got out he went to real crime in the mountains involving liquid folk art.

But before you could say “Bill Stumbo’s White Half Runners,” planting by the signs, hoeing a row and hands in the soil were not as important as decorating your garden boundary like a used-car lot with pie pans and ribbons and juice.

That made it harder for the deer to eat up what you were going to can, but they did it anyway.

But deer have their defenders, who defend them by shooting them and hanging up their skulls over mantels. I like a nice rack too, but not on animals. As opportunities for gun owners to shoot humans decreases over time, you have to have something to shoot.

But large mammals are destined to doom if they cannot migrate. We put them here in regional confinement and along comes a fly they call a “no see um.” It gnaws on a deer and soon the deer dies of lethargy, weakness, thirst and a swelled head.

They say humans can’t catch it, but I seem to recall those very symptoms in a lot of dear people.

They say elk cannot catch blue tongue and that’s bad, too. To keep an elk out of your patch requires one of those Trump walls, but city people do like to come and hear them bugle, and of course, they do provide some minimal justification for flattening mountains.

We are approaching the fall and the colors. People like to drive through and look up at the oranges and reds on what mountains are left. This year, they better put some of that stuff under their noses like the coroner uses.

The first frost kills the midge fly and then we will know if any of the deer population has survived. If the strong deer survive and have the energy to breed, Darwin would say that the species will be stronger.

I am not exactly sure what the Bible says about that.

This story was originally published September 15, 2017 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Midge fly bad for deer but good for gardens."