Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

August 13, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:45 a.m. 56 (refreshing) degrees, wind ESE 1 mph. Sky: clouds thinly streaked, a peach infusion. Permanent streams: upper, carries on in silence; lower, a husk of itself; empty on the surface, puddle dwindles to a moist suggestion. Wetlands: a bowl of thin mist hovers over the reeds; jagged treetops comb the morning sky; the breath of wildness, a landscape made more beautiful by moisture. A pileated agrees; tattoos a tree trunk. Pond: calm surface; gaunt, rolling fog; an unattended parade of methane bubbles, bantam half-domes set adrift, short-lived like random thoughts. Blackberries ripen and the very last of the red-flowering raspberries. Milkweed pods swell; leaves unchewed. Monarchs scarce, at least, in this valley. Fall webworm tents abundant; grow more prominent by the day; a spectacle of caterpillars, each almost an inch long.

DOR: juvenile white-footed mouse, big ears peppered with nymphal ticks. In the 1980s, I removed one or two American dog ticks (Dermacentor variabilis) from my collie each summer. Today, both German shepherds tested positive for Lyme disease, although both are asymptomatic. Before I gave them chewable repellents, I tweezed dozens of ticks off them March to November. I regularly vacuumed engorged, Lima bean-shaped ticks off the floor, tiny legs sculling the air like puppets on a string, one of evolution's most significant appendage-torso mismatches.

Recently, I asked Northern Vermont University biologist Allan Giese, a blacklegged tick specialist, what accounts for the dramatic increase in both tick species and populations in the Northeast, he answered unflinchingly. Climate change. According to Giese, there's been—and continues to be—a worldwide increase in ticks, which spread northward and into higher elevations. 

Gil Raynor, one of Long Island's premier birders died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, in the 1970s, a disease delivered by an American dog tick and misdiagnosed by the hospital staff. Beside spotted fever and Lyme disease, ticks also transmit babesiosis, which has malaria-like symptoms. Powassan, a viral infection that triggers encephalitis and averages seven reported cases a year, including a death a few years ago in Saratoga. Anaplasmosis, like Lyme disease, is also carried by black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis). It's the second most common tick-borne disease in Vermont, with symptoms including headache, malaise, nausea, and confusion, very similar symptoms to excessive livingroom quarantining.  

Ticks move like zombies; one speed, one direction, a stiff, endless, methodical forward plod . . . best described as creepy. Small spiders, often mistaken for ticks, are all animation, scurrying, and stopping, eight-legged windup toys that feast on ticks as well as sundry other small things.

A small vial of alcohol sits on my desk, an eternal bath for three pickled blacklegged tick nymphs, each no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, small enough to fit in a mouse's ear . . . three tiny alarming arachnids, a gift from Alan Giese. The Northeast has the highest rates of Lyme disease per capita in the country.  But, if we truly understood tick biology, we could reserve the worst of our primal fears for the dark night. Mother ticks do not pass the spirochete bacteria that causes Lyme disease to their eggs. Larva hatch clean and only later pick up Lyme disease from feeding on the infected blood of white-footed mice and chipmunks, the most competent reservoir hosts (as well as on ground-feeding birds). Only nymphs and adults pass the disease to us.

Spraying pesticides around your yard might have the unintended consequence of killing spiders, a principal predator of the blacklegged tick. Then, ground-feeding birds like robins and thrushes carry ticks onto your property long before the spiders recover. Desiccation kills blacklegged ticks, which is why they avoid pine woods and on sweltering August days retreat under moist woodland leaf litter. Drought decimates blacklegged ticks; they avoid mowed lawns, even uncut meadows, the domain of the thicker-carapaced American dog tick. 

Giese has never suffered Lyme disease. He's never even been bitten. Here's his formula for safely traipsing around outdoors: carry a change of clothes, cook your field clothes in the car-carrier or at home in the drier for ten minutes; take a shower. A rough washcloth removes embedded nymphs, which swirl down the drain like so many flecks of dirt. 

Hummingbirds chase each other around the feeder, in and out of the cherry tree. Red-breasted nuthatch announces its presence (and doesn't stop); house wren in the pines, a rickety-rackety song. Pewee shortens its song, a half a plaintive whistle; one red-eyed vireo still has something to sing about. Goldfinches, flashing yellow, dominate the soundscape. Red squirrels busy themselves in the pines, both white and red; harvest cones ahead of the crossbills.

Robins, silent but active, transport blacklegged ticks . . . preen robin, preen.