deer fly breeding grounds in our area

I'm posting three pictures today to show you a little bit about what our property and the surrounding areas are like.  This will give you an idea of the type and extent of deer fly breeding grounds that exist in our area, and will show you where I walk when trapping deer flies with my umbrella trap.


This first picture shows a zoomed-out view of our area.  The small circle in the middle indicates our homesite.  The large outer circle marks a one-mile radius around our homesite.  According to Russ Mizell's website (see my post from July 9, 2012), female deer flies will travel up to one mile from their breeding grounds in order to obtain a blood meal (i.e., in order to come and bite you!)  As you can see in this picture, our area consists of both farmland and wooded land.  There are plenty of corn fields and soybean fields around, and decent-sized cow farms.  You can also see there are plenty of wetlands in our area (perfect for producing crops of deer flies).

This picture shows a zoomed-in view of our property.  As you can see, we are surrounded by woods and are very close to wetlands.  Our home is situated within a clearing that is approximately one acre in size.  It is not completely cleared out, as we purposely left several islands of trees around the yard.  Our driveway (which is 1100 feet long) winds through the woods.  Our woods are a mix of scotch pines that were purposely planted in the 1950's (well before our time!) for a Christmas tree farm and hardwoods -- several types of oak, maple and cherry trees, lots of hickory and sassafras, and some quaking aspens, cottonwoods, elms, and others.  And, of course, lots and lots of brush and understory growth of all kinds, including plenty of russian olives, wild berries, wildflowers, virginia creeper, and the dreaded poison ivy.

When I go out each morning to trap deer flies with my umbrella, I take a slow stroll around the cleared areas of our property, gently twirling the umbrella as I go at about one revolution every two seconds (as determined by the super scientific one-mississippi-two-mississippi method).  I walk down our driveway, then I walk along a little bit of our road frontage (I go about 30 feet on both sides of the driveway), then I walk back up the driveway and then I take a meandering drunkard's path all around our yard.  I walk the perimeter of the house, the perimeter of our yard, and then here-and-there around the yard.  Once I sense there are no more deer flies to catch that day, I stop and do my counting.  The entire process (from prepping the trap to disposing of the trapped flies) takes one hour.  I estimate that I stroll something like 2/3 of a mile each morning doing this.

And then, as I've stated previously, I am able to enjoy the outdoors for hours without being bothered by deer flies.  I don't start noticing them again until the late afternoon or early evening.

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