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Description
Readers of my blog this past summer were treated to the unsettling saga of Lumpy the squirrel. Lumpy lived in my backyard, and suffered from a truly disturbing affliction--squirrel bot flies. They live around here. A squirrel bot fly lays eggs somewhere or other, and the squirrel brushes against them, the eggs land on the squirrel, hatch, and a small larvae comes out, burrows into the squirrel, and sets up shop, dining on squirrel flesh, growing into a "bot"--a balding lump the size of a jumbo Kalmatta olive--that the poor squirrel waddles around with, and then one day, in a scene presumably reminiscent of "Alien," the now mature botfly decamps, climbing out of the squirrel and flying off into the wild blue yonder.

Astonishingly, this doesn't kill the squirrels--they can have two or three and not suffer any prolonged ill effects. It leaves a distinctive puckered scar, however, and it's REALLY FREAKING DISGUSTING.

Naturally, I couldn't look away.

The problem, of course, is that once you spot the bloody things, you start seeing them everwhere--I was spotting so many infected squirrels by the end of the summer that I felt like I was living in a rodent village of the damned.

Casa del Lumpy (as my husband took to calling him) was host to two botflies, one on each side, and lived through it. I spot him occasionally now--he looks healthy, he just has two mondo scars with the fur growing the wrong way. People kept urging me to draw him, but I resisted, on the grounds that it was just gross. However, today I'm just in one of those moods, and felt like doing a quick doodle of this most noxious of subjects. The dark spots on the bots are--sigh--the air intake of the bot, which protrudes so they can breath.

It ain't high art, but that's why they call 'em scraps...

Description
Readers of my blog this past summer were treated to the unsettling saga of Lumpy the squirrel. Lumpy lived in my backyard, and suffered from a truly disturbing affliction--squirrel bot flies. They live around here. A squirrel bot fly lays eggs somewhere or other, and the squirrel brushes against them, the eggs land on the squirrel, hatch, and a small larvae comes out, burrows into the squirrel, and sets up shop, dining on squirrel flesh, growing into a "bot"--a balding lump the size of a jumbo Kalmatta olive--that the poor squirrel waddles around with, and then one day, in a scene presumably reminiscent of "Alien," the now mature botfly decamps, climbing out of the squirrel and flying off into the wild blue yonder.

Astonishingly, this doesn't kill the squirrels--they can have two or three and not suffer any prolonged ill effects. It leaves a distinctive puckered scar, however, and it's REALLY FREAKING DISGUSTING.

Naturally, I couldn't look away.

The problem, of course, is that once you spot the bloody things, you start seeing them everwhere--I was spotting so many infected squirrels by the end of the summer that I felt like I was living in a rodent village of the damned.

Casa del Lumpy (as my husband took to calling him) was host to two botflies, one on each side, and lived through it. I spot him occasionally now--he looks healthy, he just has two mondo scars with the fur growing the wrong way. People kept urging me to draw him, but I resisted, on the grounds that it was just gross. However, today I'm just in one of those moods, and felt like doing a quick doodle of this most noxious of subjects. The dark spots on the bots are--sigh--the air intake of the bot, which protrudes so they can breath.

It ain't high art, but that's why they call 'em scraps...