Greenbottle Fly
Well, this one has disturbing implications:
We had a sudden infestation of these flies in the house, to the point that we had to vacuum them off of the windows:
These are commonly known as “greenbottle flies”, and this one is most likely in the genus Lucilia. The thing is, these are a type of “blow fly”, which eat . . . well . . . carrion. As in, something died somewhere in or near the house. The flies that grew up eating the corpse then ended up inside the house once they matured. Eggs would have been laid on the corpse all at once shortly after it died, and so they all matured simultaneously. Judging from the number of flies, it was probably something moderately large, bigger than a mouse or shrew.
Maybe something like, say, a squirrel [1].
Maybe one of the squirrels that we’d been hearing off and on for years, scrabbling around inside the ceiling tiles and driving the cats and dogs nuts, but that we oddly haven’t heard anything from for a few weeks now . . .
So, if we were ever to replace the ceiling in the living room, there are pretty good odds of finding at least one squirrel skeleton up there. Maybe several. Not that this would be surprising, we have found perfectly articulated mouse skeletons in the walls while doing repair work on the house in the past. It does make me wonder just how much of a small-rodent graveyard our walls and ceilings are, especially considering that this is hardly the first time there have been sudden pulses of blowflies trying to get out of the windows.
[1] At least we aren’t missing any pets. Yes, I counted the cats. They’re all still with us.
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