If you still think I'm exaggerating when I say the flies have reached plague proportions out here, take a look at this photo. Imagine sitting in the vegetation, trying to look through a scope to see an egg or small chick under hundreds of birds 50 yards away, while hoards of these little demons are crawling all over your face, eyes, mouth, ears, arms, hands, data book, plot maps, pretty much coating everything with annoyance. It's rough. In fact at times it's maddening. The identity of these flies is yet to be determined, twenty odd specimens have been sent to a specialist at UAF to sort this out, but one thing is clear, such an outbreak of this particular species, whatever that may be, has never been documented before in the history of this island. This is a new phenomenon, and it's unique to St. Paul. None of the other islands in the Pribilof group, Otter, Walrus, or St. George, have any reports of these little green-eyed marble-winged pests.
Canon EOS 60D, Canon EF 70-20mm f/4L USM + 1.4x, ISO-640 f/16 @ 1/800 sec.
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