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Thrip-blight
posted by Rob on 22 Jul 2008
Before I moved to the countryside, and lived beside open wheat fields, I'd never heard of thrips. They're tiny little black insects, like a barely noticeable snip of black thread, but around this time of year they exit the wheat fields in their billions and make a nuisance of themselves. They wiggle their way into LCD displays (I have a couple with permanent black dots inside them), into picture frames and land on your skin, moving around just enough to make you itch. They're easy enough to pick off but there are so many of them. And the outsides of my windows at this moment contain hundreds of them, queued up and waiting to get in. Hopefully if I stay indoors, under a blanket, I'll be OK. See you again once it starts getting frosty.
Comments: 5
Love this word for them, Rob - we always knew them as thunderbugs. Google says they can also be called thripids or thunderflies. Most annoying when they get underneath the glass of picture frames!
Posted by: fiona robyn | July 23, 2008 08:32 AM
Ew! Ew ew ew! This post made me shivery.
Posted by: KatharineC | July 23, 2008 01:32 PM
As we speak, there are several in my computer screen, not to mention the lenses of my specs!
Posted by: Sarah Bower | July 23, 2008 03:27 PM
Thank you Fiona! So, thrips = thunderflies. Good. Now I'm not confused anymore. And, yup, pesky wee things, for sure. Though not that many in Stockport, thankfully!
Posted by: Mark Thwaite | July 24, 2008 07:20 AM
Oh, the joys of living in the countryside. I've lived on the Yorkshire moors for over a decade now and each year the place appals (sp?) me in new and more digusting ways.
Thrips are pretty ugly, and can be very invasive: but nothing like as grim as discovering that the compact black ball that your dog has been playing with for the last few days is (how to put this nicely?) the left-overs from the shepherd's rubber-banding pliers. No, not the tails, the other bits.
They do dry out and mummify quite nicely in the dog-bed next to the Aga, and my sons have been known to play badminton with them but I feel that's taking recycling too far. Sometimes I long for the quiet streets of Kensington, and my previously rather glamorous life.
Jane
Posted by: Jane Smith | July 24, 2008 04:22 PM