After Five Years Without A Single Buck, My Mare Tried To Throw Me On A Trail I'd Ridden Two Hundred Times And It Wasn't The Trail's Fault.

The variable I never accounted for nearly cost me my collarbone and broke my trust in a horse I've owned since she was three.

It was 2:14 on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July, and the woods were quiet except for the sound of Bella's hooves on the packed dirt.

I've ridden this loop two hundred times. I know every root, every shaded curve, every spot where the trail dips down to the creek behind my neighbor's property. Bella knows it better than I do. She's eleven years old, sweet, and the kind of horse barn owners point at when they're trying to sell you a boarding contract.

She hadn't bucked since 2021.

Then she heard it.

A low droning sound bigger than a bee, slower than a wasp coming from somewhere behind her left shoulder. Her ears pinned flat. Her whole body locked up.

I had about a second and a half to figure out what was happening.

Then the deer fly landed on her flank.

What Happened Next Took Me Three Days To Process

She half-reared. Came down sideways. Then she actually bucked.

I grabbed mane. I lost my right stirrup. I felt my hip slam into the cantle and thought, very clearly, this is how people break their backs.

She crab walked twenty feet sideways into the brush, snapping branches and trying to bite her own ribs. I got her stopped, somehow. My husband, on his bike twenty yards back, caught up and killed the fly with his hand.

That's when I saw the size of it.

I didn't know it yet, but the thing that would get me riding again wasn't another bottle of spray. It was a small clip shaped like one of the insects flies already recognize in the summer sky.

A female deer fly's mouthparts are built for cutting instead of piercing, which is why a horse can feel the bite the instant it happens.

It was as big as my thumbnail. Black. Ugly. With a snout that looked too serious for something that small. My husband held it up between two fingers and said, "Sarah, this thing is built like a drill."

I rode the last fifteen minutes home with my heart in my throat. Bella stopped four more times to try to bite her own belly. By the time we got back to the trailer, she was lathered, frantic, and not the horse I knew.

I cried in the tack room.

My Trainer Told Me Something That Stopped Me Cold

I called my trainer Mike that night. He's been working with trail horses for thirty-one years. I expected him to tell me Bella needed more groundwork, or that I'd let her get away with something.

He didn't.

He said, "Sarah. I get this call every July. From people whose horses haven't bucked in years."

He told me deer flies and horse flies don't care about training. The female flies need blood to lay eggs. Their mouthparts cut — they don't pierce. The bite hurts a horse the way a needle would hurt you, except nobody warned the horse it was coming.

"You've trained Bella for predators she can see. You haven't trained her for one that lands without warning. No horse can be trained for that."

I asked him what I was supposed to do.

He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh.

"You've already tried everything I'd tell you to try."

He was right. I'd been using the $34 fly spray. It worked maybe forty minutes before her sweat washed it off. I'd tried wipe-on. Same problem. I'd put a fly sheet on her in the paddock and the flies still found her. I'd tied fly bands into her mane — they helped at the barn, but on the trail, the flies still came.

I told Mike I was thinking about not riding her again until October.

"Don't do that," he said. "Drive out and see Dale. He's been doing something different out there."

Dale's Setup Looked Like Nothing Special

Dale is sixty-eight, semi-retired, and runs a small trail-riding outfit out of his property an hour south of me. I drove out that Saturday.

When I pulled in, his three horses were grazing in an open paddock. It was 84 degrees and humid — perfect deer fly weather — and they were calm. Tails moving, but not the violent, exhausted swishing I'd been watching Bella do all summer.

I asked him what he was doing differently.

He walked me out toward the paddock and pointed at the fence line. Clipped along the top rail, every twenty feet or so, was a bright green dragonfly on a long flexible wire. Detailed wings. Slim body. Big eyes. Every time the breeze moved through, the wire bounced and the whole thing bobbed like it was hovering.

There were more of them on the barn — one on a stall door frame, one hanging off the handle of his grooming tote, one on the trailer latch.

"That's my no-spray corner," he said.

I Thought It Looked Like A Toy Too

I almost laughed. A plastic dragonfly on a wire? After all the sprays, sheets, bands, and barn hacks I'd tried, it looked too simple to be worth taking seriously.

But Dale wasn't selling me magic. He was showing me a visual trick — one that didn't smell, didn't touch the horse, didn't need batteries, and didn't wash off when she sweated.

That was the part that made me listen.

Then He Told Me How It Actually Works

Here's the part I didn't know, and I've owned horses for twenty-two years.

Deer flies and horse flies rely heavily on sight. They notice shape, size, contrast, and movement from a distance before they ever get close enough for anything else to matter.

That is the simple idea behind BarnFly Clips: place a moving dragonfly silhouette near the fly-heavy areas riders already deal with — saddle bags, stall doors, grooming totes, trailer handles, fence lines, and tack-room setups.

It isn't a spray. It isn't a smell. It is a visual cue.

The dragonfly shape is the whole point.

Dragonflies are natural aerial hunters of small flying insects. BarnFly Clips borrow that recognizable shape — long body, four translucent wings, visible movement — and turn it into a simple clip-on decoy for barn and trail use.

"It's not a spray and it's not a smell. It's a shape — placed where flies keep showing up."

The clips Dale was using are called BarnFly Clips, from BarnFly Co. Three parts, and that's it: a realistic dragonfly decoy with a 5.3-inch wingspan, an 11.8-inch flexible wire that lets it bob with air movement, and a metal alligator clip that grips a saddle bag strap, a stall door frame, a tote handle, or a trailer latch in about five seconds.

A BarnFly Clip on barn gear. The long flexible wire lets the dragonfly bob with movement, which helps create the visual decoy effect.

I asked Dale what it cost. He told me. I bought four on the spot.

Two Weeks Later I Took Bella Back On The Loop

I clipped one to my saddle bag strap before we headed out. It bounced along with every stride, doing its little patrol.

Bella didn't give it a second look. That was my first worry, honestly — that I'd solved one spook by introducing another. But it's silent. It doesn't flap, it doesn't buzz, it doesn't smell like anything.

She stopped twice on that ride. Both times to drink at the creek, not to bite at her own belly.

I want to be careful how I say this next part, because I'm not a scientist and I didn't run an experiment. What I can tell you is what I noticed: her tail moved like a normal tail. She didn't pin her ears. She didn't lock up. She didn't try to bite her own ribs. For the first time since the second week of June, I rode my mare without bracing every time I heard a low droning sound behind me.

I still keep fly spray in the tack room. On the worst weeks of August, I still use it. BarnFly Co. is upfront that this is a visual deterrent — a decoy — and not a pesticide, and I'm not going to tell you otherwise.

But it's ten seconds of effort, no spray smell near her face, nothing to wash off when she sweats, and it goes back on the hook at the end of the season and comes out again next June.

If you ride a horse you trust — and you've ever felt that trust crack the second a fly landed on her — you already know exactly what I'm talking about.