Fly Haven

It all started about two weeks ago when our trash didn’t get picked up. We don’t have a wheelie bin as most people do, so if our trash doesn’t get picked up, it just hangs out with us in the house for another week. Usually we put it out in the stairwell so that if it smells, it at least only smells in the stairwell and not in the whole flat.

Well this trash was particularly stinky because there was a chicken carcass in it – yummy, I know.. So, we had our teeny tiny little window cracked open in the stairwell to try to air it out a bit since we can’t just leave the front door open. The day finally came for our trash to be picked up and when I moved the trash bag to take it down to the sidewalk I noticed little pellets all around it. I called Ian out to look at it and we determined that somehow a very small rodent must have smelled the delicious scent of rotting chicken and climbed in through the cracked window and pooped everywhere. The only question was, where did the little rodent go? It’s a long way down from that window and we couldn’t figure out how on earth it would have been able to climb all the way up the wall to get out the window again. So, we just assumed it had gotten into the trash bag and had been taken away with the smelly carcass.

Well because we are busy and lazy and hate our vacuum cleaner and not easily put off by unsanitary situations, we left the ‘turds’ out in the hallway for a while. The main problem was I would forget about them at all times except for when I was actually in the stairwell, so I just never got around to it. Finally I decided today was the day.. it was time to rid ourselves of the turds.

A few days ago I had noticed we had a few gargantuan flies in the house. These babies were biggies too. Nice meaty flies. I assumed they got there, as they all do, when the windows had been opened on a nice day.

WELL. I went out into the stairwell Saturday morning to assess the situation and noticed there were a TON of flies out there. I was totally baffled as to where they were coming from.. maybe the mail slot?? I wasn’t sure. Then I thought, ‘I wonder if those turds are actually fly eggs!’ I went back in to get the vacuum and jokingly mentioned it to Ian, and upon further thought, he said ‘you know, I bet you’re right.’

Being the manly man he is, he went and got a knife and dissected one to find that, indeed, there were flies inside the little turds. UnbeLIEVable!


So, despite my reassuring Ian they would just be very dizzy and not dead as he supposed, we decided that it wasn’t very humane to try to vacuum up all the flies along with the pupas (or whatever they were) and we ran around our house catching them in tupperware and letting them go out the windows. We caught 17 flipping flies! 17! AND there were still 11 more unborn flies that we also dumped out the window. Do you know how full of flies our little flat would have been had they all emerged before we figured out what was going on!? I think it’s actually significantly grosser than if they had been rodent turds. SIGNIFICANTLY.


(sidenote: this is not the window that was cracked open through which we thought the alleged rodent had come, we have no idea how to open this window.. I think it's just for light.. and for flies to gather around)

As I began writing this I had a flashback to when I first moved the trashbag that had the chicken carcass in it – before it was all tied up and everything. Guess what happened when I moved it.. a FLY flew out! I had no idea what that fly had been doing in there! Apparently sweet little mama fly thought that rotting carcass was a perfect bed for her developing babies. And then the nasty little maggots crawled on out and took up residence in the stairwell until they hatched.

Sick sick sick!

So that's pretty much how our Saturday morning went.

Unbelievable. And gross.