Yeah, same here, started with a sense of something scratching at my back, and a second later felt like someone was digging into my back with a rusty nail…
Sorry to hear
Other anecdote, back in the early 90s my grandpa got sick with an unknown disease, kept becoming worse to the point he needed to be hospitalised. He had a terrible looking boil on his arm which then developed into an even worse looking lesion, nobody knew what it was until they called a specialist pathologist who took a look and immediately said “Lyme disease”, he was treated and cured without any lasting effects.
I remember being and remaining puzzled about how the Drs didn’t see it given how specific Lyme disease lesions are. That said, my grandpa was a very urban person, the closest he’d get to nature would be exotic fruits in cocktail parties, and this happened in Athens, not exactly a hotspot for deer (though there are deer in a sanctuary just a few km off the centre). I get that familiarity plays a huge part in what Drs think when they see a patient but still feel it’s puzzling that they missed it while the specialist gave a diagnosis in a second.
Same. They never bite my family members, but always bite me.
The tool with a heated tip (called Bite Away or Heat It) helps very good if applied immediately. I bring it with me to the mountains to treat the Bremse bites, otherwise I suffer for many days.
BTW, crickets were so loud at my location in the early morning that it was hard to sleep.
I lived in Schondorf on the Ammersee for a while and every two years the mosquitos became more than jusr an annoyance.
Walk out of the door to the car and by the time you clear the garden fence any exposed area was black with them and you could literally stoke them off your arms, it was horrible.
I got bit so much that it made me sick all day.
The Gemeinde would spray insecticide from a tanker now and then and you had a few days relative peace.
Until they voted a greenie Bürgermeister who stopped all this spray nonsense because environment and so.
It got so bad that you could not sit outside in the summer and Autan was known as “Ammersee deo”
Thing is Schondorf is full of rich people and the, got mr. Green to cut that shit out.
Aside from crickets, which I think I always heard at night in a few countries (Greece, UK, CH), my wife made a comment the other day that she hasn’t seen fireflies since she was a kid. Made me realise I haven’t seen fireflies since I was a kid either. Perhaps I saw one or two, two or three times in the last 30 years, now I see these are also in decline
Yesterday at the petrol station some (young) bugger was complaining about all the insects on the front of his car, I looked and counted not more than perhaps 10…
I tried to explain that in the 70ties and 80ties his car would be black from all the insects and I could see that he was thinking “what the hell are you talking about… its always been this way”
And this is the danger, they dont know! Our dismay at the lack of insects is their normal.
Very true, after long drives in the late 80s to mid 90s I remember my dad spending ages scrapping a cake of insects from the grill, headlights and windshield.
Even 20 years ago in rural Alsace, we saw only a few fireflies. Here the lavender is blooming in force, and we are surrounded by flitting cabbage butterflies, colibri hawk moths, and at least 5 varieties of bumblebee: today it’s carder, buff-tailed, red-tailed, white-tailed, and Garden.
I am down by the Lech for a swim
Thousands of Dragonflies, neon blue ones, black ones and red ones, Dragonflies as big as Apache helecopters.
Managed to snap a shot of the dragonflies, and a picture of a dragonfly riding on tbe head of a snake swiming upriver.
Have to zoom in on the last picture.
