‘They are everywhere’: City of Maine residents blame neighboring New Brunswick poultry farms for fly infestation

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TORONTO – A small Maine border town struggling with a nasty fly infestation is looking for answers, and a state official suspects the source is on nearby Canadian poultry farms.

The fly problem has made life a challenge for the residents of the town of St. Francis, covering mosquito nets and peppered windows, and making life difficult for anyone trying to enjoy the outdoors.

They come into houses, they are all over the doors and windows, they crawl on you when you go out. They are everywhere, local resident Jake Harvey, 42, told CTVNews.ca.

Harvey, who used fly traps in an attempt to fix the problem, said the fly problem was a recent phenomenon.

I’ve been here five years, the last two years have been horrible, he says.

Like many in town, he suspects the reason for the swarms is across the Saint John River on poultry farms near the village of Saint-François-de-Madawaska, New Brunswick.

There really is nowhere else that can come. This is the most common denominator, he says.

Bill Sheehan, director of the Presque Isle office of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, agrees with him.

There are quite a few large poultry farms in Sainte-Françoise. It’s a large poultry area, said Sheehan, who was called by local authorities to investigate the infestation last week. I’m just speculating, it’s just my guess based on geography.

He said he contacted New Brunswick environmental officials to investigate the matter. An email sent by CTVNews.ca to the New Brunswick Department of Environment and Local Government for more information was not immediately returned.

He called the scale of the infestation impressive.

There could be a square meter and you could have over a hundred flies at a time. It’s extremely boring, he says. A fly annoys me, and you can imagine people trying to eat and have these flies around them in their homes.

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