IF YOU HAPPEN to spot a massive swarm of these guys, don’t panic; the world is not about to end. Around this time every year, hundreds of thousands of St Mark’s flies appear in Ireland and unlike many of their flying friends, they do not go unnoticed.
Billy Flynn, who is an ecologist with the Irish Wildlife Trust, told TheJournal.ie that we have nothing to fear of these strange-looking insects.
“You might see hundreds of them in one place because they form mating swarms. The males do this little dance thing in order to impress the girls and the one deemed to be the best dancer would get to mate with one of them.”
The trust gets calls about these flies every year from members of the public. “They have quite long legs and the last two pairs are really long and they’re hairy black insects as well. They fly in an apparently upright position because the legs are dangling down and people get freaked out by them.
Cyclists can fly into one of these amazing swarms and if you haven’t got glasses on you know all about it. You can also end up driving through one of the swarms and suddenly it’s splatsville. They like grasses so they hang out in gardens sometimes and when people see them all they think: “Oh my God, it’s a plague, it’s all gone biblical”.
Many of the calls the trust has received over the years have been from farmers who spot the swarms of big black flies in their fields and become worried that it might be a new type of pest that will destroy their crops.
St Mark’s flies are not a threat to crops and are actually great for flowers and fruit trees as they are important pollinators.
If we haven’t managed to convince you yet that these shiny, black, creepy crawlies are actually alright, you will be glad to hear that they are usually only here for two or three weeks at the start of May.
After they mate, they only have a couple of weeks to live so by the end of this month, most of them will be gone – until next year, that is.
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