Looking to Outmaneuver Deer Flies?

Lon models his grey-blue summer wardrobe

Deer flies love me, and perhaps they love you too. If you don’t know what deer flies are (lucky you!) they are the little green-eyed, triangle-shaped flies that circle your head at warp speed four or five times and then bite the back of your neck before you can swat them.

Until three years ago, the only defense I took to keep the deer flies at bay (since I was not going to douse myself with DEET, which doesn’t help much anyway), was to use those sticky white patches that adhere to the back of your cap in the hope that the flies would get trapped on the sticky patch. But this was invariably a mess and sometimes a sticky fly that had escaped the patch would fall down inside my shirt collar. Not very pleasant.

But in the summer of 2013, I had an inspiration. I was driving slowly down our lane beside the hedgerow in my wife’s dark red car and it was being mobbed by dozens of deer flies, who I thought perhaps sensed the car as a large, dark, moving animal. This led me to wonder what they were programmed to ignore, especially regarding color, something that I could control for my own deer fly repellent activities. My conclusion – deer flies probably couldn’t afford to get too excited about sky blue – which in Iowa in the summer is a hazy blue or a grayish blue – and there were no sky blue mammals to prey upon and get programmed to expect a blood meal from.

So I bought a can of light blue matte finish spray paint and lightly painted a wide-brimmed open weave straw hat on all exposed surfaces. It still dried kind of shiny, so I fished out an old can of dull gray auto body primer and lightly oversprayed the hat for a dull, patchy, smoky-blue finish. I also retrieved my light blue chambray shirt, which had been washed so many times it had a faded to a blueish gray. I wore the hat with the brim low in the back and the shirt with the collar up and this became my new outdoor attire, along with faded light brown khaki pants in order to not be mistaken for a dark deer or bison.

Maybe it is all a coincidence, but in the last three summers, I have not been bitten once by a deer fly. Numerous ones have circled me a few times and then vanished. Perhaps they approach me because I’m moving, have a dark side, and a shadow like any animal, but then I fail the color test and drop out of their search image.

With this being Earth Week, it’s a great time to reevaluate your use of chemicals in the environment – including DEET – so if deer flies pester you this summer, try going with a pale, sky-blue wardrobe and see if they back off. And the added benefit? Pale blue is also a stay-cool color for working in the sun!