NATCHEZ — When they descended on Egypt, it was called a plague, and while the gnat problem in the Miss-Lou might not quite be of those proportions, state agriculture officials aren’t afraid to call it an “outbreak.”

“Southwest Mississippi is being torn up with them this year,” Adams County Extension Service Director David Carter said.

Why they are particularly bad this year is a mystery, but Carter said some environmental factors may have played into it.

“These gnats breed underwater, so the river being up could have something to do with it this year,” he said. “But sometimes it’s just a fluke.”

Though the miniature flying pests are commonly called buffalo gnats, they aren’t really gnats at all, and while they can be gray, tan or greenish, entomologists refer to these members of the Simulidae family as black flies.

Even though they’re downright annoying for anyone trying to spend time at a backyard barbeque, they can be deadly to other creatures.

“We have had several reports of birds dying, from poultry to hawks,” Carter said.

When the gnats bite, they release a small amount of venom into their victim.

And a lot of little venomous bites add up.

“Sometimes poultry will die of toxic shock from the bites,” Carter said.

But the gnats can kill birds another way — asphyxiation.

“Other (birds) have died of suffocation because the gnats flew down their nose,” Carter said.

Other than the somewhat impractical practice of constantly spraying for the pests, Carter said the best bet to protect poultry would be to keep them in a structure of some sort with a fan keeping the air circulating.

As far as people are concerned, there’s not a lot they can do to fight the swarms of blood-sucking flies.

Insect foggers can mitigate the gnat presence somewhat, and repellents with DEET have been known to have some effect, Carter said.

“With the DEET, where with mosquitoes you could apply it and be good for a couple of hours, with these gnats you have to apply it more constantly,” he said. “Their volume in numbers is what makes that stuff somewhat ineffective.”

The other thing to do is — because these gnats are daytime feeders — to stay indoors and out of wooded areas until sundown, Carter said.

The good news is that the pests don’t have a long life cycle, and when the temperature starts to stay in the mid-90s, the gnat presence will start to drop off.

“Just hang on a little longer,” Carter said. “We have probably five weeks here where it will get really bad, but once it gets really hot and humid, they will die off.”