"They have two seasons up there, winter and bug season!"
"Well you can't go outside in the summer, the mosquitoes are so big they will carry you away!"
... and many other pearls of wisdom like that.
So right now we are still in winter so it isn't bug season... but by that it means there are NO bugs... AT ALL! Every time I turn the light on in the basement bathroom, I cringe. Waiting to see the scurrying away of a spider or some other basement dwelling yuck but there aren't any and there haven't been for months. Even in the summer we only had small spiders in the basement and not that many. As for the mosquitoes and other flying bugs... yes they are around in the summer, especially if you are anywhere near a beaver pond. But all in all I have never experienced the quantity and size of the bug life that is on the Island... Holy crap!
The spider in this picture is on the ledge of my bathtub in Duncan... it almost takes up the whole ledge!! I thought it was a toy spider when I first saw it, and this is just a house spider - those bloody jumping spiders that infested my house in Ladysmith where terrifyingly aggressive and fast and big... and then those ones that were really long but so thin you practically couldn't see them (they looked like balls of hair) and that isn't even touching on the wood bugs, centipedes, earwigs, and all the other nasty things.
So as far as bugs go, I prefer the ones up here!
We have been having an amazing winter this year. We had a couple weeks of the very cold weather and then a couple weeks of snow and for the last while we have been sitting between -10 and +2 and this week has had the sunshine as well... it is beautiful. I can hear birds singing, the icicles were huge from the melting during the day and freezing at night although ours are almost gone now. We still have a fair bit of snow but if this weather keeps up... who knows maybe by the time spring break is here, it will already be spring?!
