Catch-and-Release

My friend Lee enjoyed fishing but never wanted to catch anything. So, she would sit at the lake, hook in the water, but no bait on the hook. She met her goal.

I don’t fish, but I do practice “catch-and-release” with flies.

The last two days have been a free-for-all.  It happens once a year, and my guess is a chipmunk dies under the porch, a fly decides it was a good place to give birth, and for two days we end up with 50 or 60 flies daily on our screened-in porch.

I could swat them, but that would be even more time-consuming, what with cleaning up fly guts. I could go nuclear, and spray them, but that seems repugnant, and I hate the smell of the poison.

So, I catch them one by one and ferry them to the screen door and the great outdoors.

I’ve tried to catch two at a time, but inevitably they both end up escaping. So, it’s 60 trips back-and-forth on the 15-foot stretch of porch.

My equipment is not high-tech – a clear 20-ounce Solo cup and the thick glossy cover of a Cigar Aficionado magazine, folded in half.

Neither my husband nor I smoke anything, and neither do we drink, but somehow (possibly his subscription to Golf magazine), we receive free subscriptions to Cigar Aficionado and Wine Spectator. We chuckle as we chuck them into the recycle bin.

Cigar Aficionado is a wonderful magazine for catching and releasing flies. There’s usually someone on the thick, glossy cover smirking like they have the world by the tail, smug, arrogant, self-satisfied and in control of the universe. And holding a cigar. It amuses me to use their glossy photo to trap the flies.

A cup against the screen, a fly buzzing underneath, a little jiggling so that the fly buzzes to the bottom of the cup. I slide the magazine cover between cup and screen. Over to the screen door, and I wish the fly a happy day as it flies off.

Occasionally, there are mishaps. The fairly-fragile-fly and I move the wrong way at the same time, and they end up squashed between the cup and the cover. It always makes me a little sad that they didn’t get their shot at freedom. I apologize to them for the mishap.

I also keep a catch-and-release set indoor. As I catch the flies, I tell them “You want to be caught. Trust me. This will be the best day of your life. This is such good news for you.” Often, it seems like they understand and wait to be captured, ultimately released into the sunshine, to fly off to their next adventure.