(2012)
House Point Island Flats greenhead box traps.
Those blue boxes on stilts that you see through the marshy flats of the far West End in summertime are nothing less than charnel houses for Tabanus nigrovittatus, the deservedly despised greenhead fly. They are designed to “encourage greenheads to fly under and up, as if they were aiming for the belly of prey such as deer or livestock,” Cynthia McCormick explained in The Cape Cod Times of 1 August 2014. “But once they enter the devices, the flies can’t get out.” That’s because they have flown into an inverted funnel. Once through its narrowest point, they are trapped inside the box, where they die. By the hundreds. And — he added, with perhaps a bit too much satisfaction — by the thousands. The traps are set out by the Cape Cod Greenhead Fly Control Project.
¶ Last updated on 22 April 2017.