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Welcome to...crunch...North Bay
the Ottawa Citizen, July 7, 2002
It’s shadfly season—a time for living, dying, and littering in that northern insect mecca. Downtown streets echo with the crunching of dead shadflies underfoot. Exasperated merchants repeatedly wash the insect bodies off their storefronts; and car owners dig out their snow brushes to clean their vehicles.
Shadflies (or mayflies) don’t bite, but they can make your northern fishing experience since the fish won’t bite either, turning tail on lures and feasting instead on the massing insects.
Nancy Thompson remembers her first shadfly encounter, after moving to North Bay from New York City 11 years ago.
“We were looking for a house in July, and there were shadflies plastered all over the picture windows and stuck to the light fixtures. Everywhere you went, you were crunching on these disgusting things that smelled like dead fish. When cars drove by, you could hear millions of shadfly bodies crunching.”
For most of the year, the shads, as they are sometimes called, live in the bottom of Lake Nipissing in nymph form. When the lake warms up, they emerge in huge numbers and transform into their flying adult stage.
“When they’re in this stage they don’t eat,” says David Hackett, a biologist at Nipissing University. “In fact, they don’t have functional mouth parts. They’re just flying sex machines. They fly around, meet each other and lay eggs, and after a day or two, they die.”
North Bay residents will tell you tales of traffic accidents caused by the slimy insects as the bugs pile up under street lights, creating driving conditions similar to the hazards of wet leaves.
“Shadflies are attracted to the light, and for whatever reason, they’re also attracted to the lines on the road,” says Walter Neeley, a North Bay traffic enforcement officer. “We investigated an accident a couple years ago where a car was making a left turn onto Main Street. It couldn’t negotiate the corner because it was sliding on shadflies and it ran into a parked car.”
Although shadflies have become a legend of this northern Ontario town (along with other famous residents Mike Harris and the Dionne Quintuplets), the city is not alone. You’ll also find shadflies around Lake Simcoe and Lake Sinclair and in parts of England, where they’re dubbed them “mayflies” because they emerge during the month of May.
University of Windsor professor Lynda Corkum lives near another shadfly hotbed--the western basin of Lake Erie. Thirty years ago, she chose the insects as the subject of her PhD thesis, and she’s been studying them ever since. Corkum is a bona fide shadfly enthusiast, and although she hasn’t made it up to North Bay yet, she has seen videos of their local phenomenon. She does acknowledge that large numbers of shadflies can be a nuisance.
“They’re attracted to lights, so people should just turn their lights off if they don’t want to hose down their houses or their boats,” she says. “And at night, don’t wear white clothes, because you’ll end up covered with them.” She points to an incident at a power plant in Monroe, Michigan two years ago, when so many shadflies congregated around the lights on a transformer, that they grounded it and cut off the flow of electricity.
Corkum insists people should be happy to see swarms of shadflies emerging from Lake Erie this year, because the insects are indicators of a good water quality. Sewage treatment plants and industrial waste systems have improved water in the area, resulting in shadflies returning to areas where they haven’t been seen for years.
In Dundee, Michigan, a mayfly music festival was launched three years ago to celebrate the insects’ return. But during preparations for the mid-June country music festival, organizers had their fingers crossed hoping the guests of honour wouldn’t crash the party.
Back in North Bay, a few residents have also decided the annual swarms of shadflies are something to be celebrated. This summer, the Nipissing Stage Company is debuting a musical called Shadflies and Shotguns, a play loosely based on another North Bay icon, Jack Cody, a convicted murdered escaped from a local prison and terrified residents until he was caught a month later.
“Shadflies show up for about three weeks. They smell bad and they take the city hostage. I thought it was a nice analogy,” says playwright Patti Fedeli.