Baldy’s botfly has got to be ready to emerge any time now. It’s a monsterous warble, the whole end of the fly protruding like a gigantic blackhead, except that if you ever find a blackhead with a protruding segmented carapace, run, don’t walk, to the parasitologist.*

I confess, after two summers of bot-watching, I kinda wanna see one of these suckers pop. Sure, I’d be off my feed for a week afterwards–hell, even just studying Baldy’s warble through the binoculars makes my skin itch with savage psychosomatic sympathy (try saying that five times fast!) but it’s like a demented nature show. You have to stick around until David Attenborough tells you that the cycle of life is again complete.

*Naturally everybody has their family parasitologist on speed dial, right?

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