Up Moses Creek: Spring Has Sprung!
Brown marmorated stinkbugs, ‘Halyomorpha halys,’ are invasive insects from Asia.
Fred Coyle photo
For the past dozen years here up Moses Creek, October has brought not only cool temperatures and colorful leaves but swarms of drone-like brown marmorated stinkbugs that try to get inside our house for the winter. I wrote about these invasive pests in the Nov. 8, 2023, issue of the Smoky Mountain News, and how Becky and I turned their unwelcome arrival into a kind of enjoyable hunting season, making lemonade out of lemons, with no limit on how many bugs we could bag.
The only problem is that, during the first warm days of spring, the stinkbugs that survived our fall “hunt” and made it into the house reemerge. A stinkbug is like the family cat that wants in, only to want back out. And for several days in March, we find the stinkbug situation reversed: now they are inside clinging to the doors and windows and looking out.
I always assumed that these survivor bugs had hidden deep inside the house, that is until one afternoon this month when I brought up a sliding screen door, stowed in the basement for the winter, and set it back in the doorway leading out to the deck. Almost immediately an unmistakable odor filled the house, and we saw several stinkbugs on the screen. I quickly lifted the door back out of its track, and when I set it on the deck, a heaping handful of stinkbugs spilled into the sunlight from the door’s hollow aluminum frame. That’s when I realized I’d been wrong: the stinkbugs had not hidden deep in the house. They’d stuffed themselves into the screen door itself. My jostling the door, combined with the warm spring sunlight on it, was drawing them out.
I hardly had the chance to yell, “They’re in the door!” before Becky, my usually easy-going and peaceable wife, who, when she watches a sports game cheers for both sides, came hurrying out with a flyswatter in her hand and started whacking the bugs.
To take advantage of her surprising gung-ho attack, I held the screen door on edge and began letting one corner drop hard on the deck. Every time I let it drop, a batch of stinkbugs tumbled into sight. And every time a new batch appeared, Becky went at them with vigor. When some of the stinkbugs tried to scoot under her feet, Becky started doing some crazy looking footwork, too. We’ve been married for 46 years, and I didn’t know she could clog like that! I started banging the door to a rhythmic beat, and the faster I drummed, the faster the bugs appeared and the faster Becky swatted and danced.
It wasn’t long before the flyswatter’s thin wire handle was bent into a U, and its red plastic business end was torn. “Cheap-ass modern flyswatter,” Becky exclaimed. I told her it was made to handle soft, squishy houseflies, not hard-shelled stinkbugs. But I knew she was right.
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Back in the 1950s, my grandparents, Mordecai and Bertha Barefoot, would have ice cream get-togethers for the family on their eastern North Carolina farm. While the women baked in the kitchen and the men cranked ice cream churns on the porch, we kids had a great time killing the flies coming from the nearby pig pen and a chicken coop. And I can tell you one thing: they don’t make flyswatters like they used to!
But what the modern world lacks in quality products it makes up for in quantity. Becky simply tossed the ruined swatter and grabbed another.
Then two stinkbugs landed in her hair.
Have you ever seen the dance called “head banging” — where a woman whips her head up and down and back and forth to frenzied music, making her long hair fly? Well, it’s a good thing Becky’s hair is short, because the way her head was whipping every which way, the hair follicles had to do all they could to hang on by their roots.
Finally still, Becky glanced up at the top of my head and said, “They don’t go for bald.”
It reminded me of the story she once told me about a coworker at Western Carolina University who discovered she had a tick embedded in her scalp: “Her whole body quivered,” Becky said, “and she started yelling, ‘GET IT OUT!’
When I pointed to stinkbugs coming out of the opposite end of the door, Becky called “Switch!” It’s a term she’d picked up in pickleball when two partners need to change sides fast. So, I tilted that end of the door down and she started batting those bugs with pickleball expertise.
Then I noticed that the remaining stinkbugs were poking just their antennae out of the frame first and waving them around like little periscopes. They must have sensed the danger. I thought it was kind of cute. But as soon as they poked their heads out for a better look-see, wham went the flyswatter, and off went their heads.
I can’t tell you how many brown marmorated stinkbugs were packed inside the door, but after I’d banged it for several minutes and Becky swatted, both of us needed to catch our breath. Standing in the middle of the carnage, I wondered if there might be stinkbugs inside our other sliding screen door too. So, with Becky positioned at the ready with flyswatter No. 3, I lifted that door out of its track. Then bugs and Becky and Burt went at it again.
And all the while, a cardinal, who had been attacking his reflection in one of the windows, took time off to perch in a nearby tree, as if he were sitting in a stadium, to watch us and sing his fight song.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)
