On Ticks and Lyme Disease

It has become clear to me that people generally know absolutely nothing about ticks and the transmission of Lyme disease, but seem to think that they are experts.

I am no expert, but I certainly know more than the parade of ignorant clowns that commented on that NY Times article.

Here are the things that you need to know, in layman's terms.

The ticks that we are generally concerned with have a very simple life cycle. A cluster of up to a few hundred tiny eggs hatch into larvae that crawl up a short stem of grass or whatever is handy. At this point they have only 6 legs and are not infected with any diseases. Neither Lyme disease nor rocky mountain spotted fever nor ricketts or anything else like that is passed from the mother tick into the eggs.

The larvae are waiting for their first host. Usually this is a white-footed mouse. White-footed mice are everywhere and their bodies are extremely low to the ground, making them simply the most likely warmblooded thing for the larval ticks to grab hold of. If the nymphs don't get a host within a certain period of time, they will starve to death.

White-footed mice can carry Lyme disease. This is the stage where Lyme-bearing ticks tend to pick up the disease.

Sated and full, the larvae drop off 2 or 3 days later. They look like tiny, round grapes. Usually they fall off in a bedding area where the mouse or other host is sleeping or remaining still for a while. The ticks will digest their blood and grow a little bit bigger. They molt, shedding their outer shells and emerge from the process with an extra pair of legs and a little more size.

Now they want a bigger host. The newly larger ticks will crawl up higher vegetation to wait for a much taller animal to pass by. Sometimes this is a raccoon or a black bear or you or your dog. But most often in the eastern US this will be a whitetail deer.

Whitetails are where the action is for ticks. Deer are what they will feed on for the rest of their lives (which is usually only a few more meals) and it is where they will probably meet other ticks to mate with. Once a tick gets on a deer it has hit the jackpot. Because deer are somewhat social animals and they are creatures of habit that often use the same trails and bedding and feeding areas. When a bloated tick drops off of a deer, odds are that when it is ready to feed again it will be able to crawl up a blade of grass or to the end of a twig and sooner or later another deer is going to pass by and pick up some hitchhikers.

After mating, the female tick will lay her eggs on the soil where they will hatch the following spring and start the whole thing all over again.

I have personally found that when wearing a pair of jeans, bleached to near-whiteness, I can walk through a meadow on my property which is used by deer and see the differences instantly in the numbers of black dots that crawl up my legs. Walking along the path that most of the deer follow in that area, I will get up to 20 ticks on me from one end to the other. Wheras if I wander aimlessly through waist-high, standing dead grass that offers no useful food to the deer, I emerge with usually 5-8 ticks. Those few were probably picked up while going past bedding spots that the deer sometimes use in the tall grass.

Overlay a map of trails regularly used by white-footed mice (yes, they do have little paths that you might not know exist) with a map of trails used by deer, and there you have the primary geography of ticks.

A key fact that you need to take away here are that the teensy little larval ticks are not dangerous. They itch like hell and they usually come in clusters, but since you are the first host they can not give you any diseases. The bigger the tick is, the more likely it is that it carries Lyme disease. This is on account of the fact that it has rolled the dice again every time it encounters a new host.

It takes about 24 hours after biting for a tick to transmit Lyme disease to you. Get it off quickly and you'll be ok. It will still itch for a week or two, but you won't get sick. Note that you cannot get Lyme disease from eating the meat of an animal that had it. Venison is just as safe to eat as beef from cows that stand around in fields full of the same ticks from visiting deer.

Now that you've got a good idea of the life cycle of the enemy, remember it. There are, broadly, 3 different ways of getting rid of ticks in a particular area. Remove the white-footed mice as hosts, remove the deer as hosts, or kill the ticks directly using chemicals or diatomaceous earth.

'Removing them as hosts' can mean killing mice or deer, but doesn't necessarily. That could also involve swabbing them down with chemicals that repel and kill ticks. Or it could mean erecting a physical barrier to keep them out. Or perhaps encouraging the success of other species that hunt or directly compete with those animals for food and territory.

It is possible to affect the population of white footed mice within a relatively small area of as much as a few tens of acres. One can put out boxes of cotton balls soaked with chemicals that kill ticks and the mice will use that cotton to line their nests. On my own land, I have encouraged high populations of non-Lyme carrying meadow voles because they compete with white-footed mice and push them out of the area. This will reduce the number of larvae and nymphs that you have to deal with. But I do not think that simply reducing numbers of infected whitefooted mice on an area that one person can practically manage will have the effect of making a major dent in the number of Lyme-carrying adult ticks on the property in the long run.

That is because deer have much larger ranges than white-footed mice. Depending on the quality of the habitat, a typical Virginia buck during the course of his second year of life will range over an area of around 1,000 acres. Young bucks that are dispersing from their natal territories will travel even farther. Older bucks tend to have more compact home territories. I don't recall the numbers for does off-hand. But in any case, the deer on your property are spending a lot of their time on other people's land. Where they are picking up nymph stage and older ticks that dropped off of mice which you had no control over. Unless you are managing a truly huge piece of property, you cannot hope to make a meaningful dent in the recruitment of new ticks into the population.

What you might be able to do is limit the numbers of deer in the areas of the land that you most often use. The way that I did that, inadvertantly, was by fencing the 2 acres immedately around my house and not planting anything that deer really want to eat. I also have 3 dogs that run around inside the fence and generally discourage deer from coming within.

Sure, the deer could jump over. But deer are lazy and they won't bother unless there is food within. In several of my past homes, I had lush and inviting gardens full of hostas and roses and all sorts of other things that I enjoyed planting and tending to. Now I have 6 acres to manage and its all I can do just to keep the poison ivy back. Get rid of the plants that the deer are after and you'll get rid of the deer. Also remember that by mowing a large yard frequently, you are causing the grass to constantly send up tender green vegetative growth that deer like to eat. I gave up on mowing most of my property more than a few times a year. Consequently, the tall grass has developed thick, hard stems that don't taste very good. It is no longer a food source for them. So the deer stay out of the fenced area.

Within the fence, I have very low tick numbers. I won't say that it is zero, but it is shockingly lower than what I find right outside of the fence. Between the fence, the meadow voles, the dogs and the long grass I have found a combination that works with what I know about tick and deer biology to nearly extirpate ticks from the few acres where my kids play outside. Your mileage may vary.

[Photo courtesy of Waldo Jaquith under Creative Commons license]

Deer Hunting for Locavores and Foodies

I have noticed over the last few years that there are a lot of people out there who did not grow up hunting or shooting, but have expressed some interest in taking up deer hunting. After all, it is ethically the next best thing to being a vegetarian. 'Slow food' proponents and locavores are both groups of people who should logically have an interest in doing this.

With those people in mind, I am considering putting together a small semi-formal class on deer hunting from a 'slow food' and locavore perspective. This would be for adults who are total newbies to hunting and firearms. We'd be doing a series of workshops on topics such as deer behavior, ecology, firearms safety, hunting techniques, field dressing and butchering. Ideally, each student would get paired with an experienced hunter for an actual hunt towards the end of the class.

Men and women alike are welcome, as are people of all political persuasions.

Each year, thousands of whitetail deer are harvested in Albemarle County by local hunters. For the cost of a box of ammunition you can take up to 6 deer per year on a basic hunting license, yielding 35-50 pounds of low-fat meat per deer. Compare this to the price of meat at the grocery store and do your own math. By shooting, dressing and butchering your own meat you can guarantee that you are eating free-range, grass-fed, hormone free food that has never been near a source of e. coli. Just think of it as very slow food, doing with meat what you may already have done with vegetables in the backyard. The food miles can be as low as zero, depending on exactly where you live.

If anyone in the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area is interested, email me at Jack [dot] Landers [@] gmail [dot] com.

The 'Big Ones' Are in Your Own Backyard

Once upon a time I used to dream of going out west or up north to hunt 'real' deer and catch 'real' fish. Everyone who hunts or fishes knows about the hot spots where the deer or fish are really big or exceptional in quality. Since then, I've learned better.

The best place to hunt whitetail deer or catch fish is probably in your own backyard. I really mean this.

I hear people talk about how small the deer are supposed to be around here. Both meat and trophy hunters. And indeed I have seen many of those little deer under 100 pounds grazing near the side of the road. But think about it for a minute; aren't many of the deer most easily spotted going to tend to be the younger, more foolish animals?

Since I started scouting for deer in a more systematic way around my own property in Albemarle County a few years ago I have seen some truly exceptional animals out there. Fat does that put meat on my table and a number of 8 and 10 point bucks that I've been letting walk as part of my overall management plan to reduce deer density and produce fewer but larger and healthier deer. To find those bigger, older, more cautious deer I just had to get away from the roads and be very patient.

So how are you going to do that with a week in, say, Saskatchewan? Sure, there are deer that weigh hundreds of pounds up there. But you don't know the territory and haven't been scouting all summer. Odds are that you are not going to close the deal with one of those big deer unless you pay a fortune to a guide who has done all of that work for you. You'd be better off finding some land close to home where you can scout regularly on weekends or after work. There are fewer big deer around here, but you have more potential to actually find them when you live close by. And perhaps you could do everyone a public service by harvesting some of the smaller ones while you are at it.

I've been finding this summer that the same is true of fishing. Oh sure, we don't have chinook salmon or anything that dramatic. But as I am reminded every time I take off in a plane at the Charlottesville airport, the countryside is riddled with farm ponds of anywhere between 1/2 to 15 acres. A lot of those ponds haven't been fished in years and if you ask nicely the owners might very well give you access.

My parents have a few ponds on their property which my kids and I have been hitting about every other week. Once I'd given the structure some thought, considering where the light and shade were at various times of day, how the depth varied and where the underwater structure was, it occured to me where the best possible spots would be for bass and crappie. I took the time to cut a trail with switchbacks down a very steep slope to what looked like it had to be the perfect place to drop a lure. That's not something I would bother with on an out-of-state fishing trip, if indeed such an effort was permitted.

The result? My daughter and I have each caught black crappie of over 13 inches at that very spot. The one I got last Saturday was so big that we went to the trouble of seeing if it qualified for the state record book. It was a little shy of record book material in both weight and length, but that was one hell of a big fish regardless. And it tasted really good.

So you probably can't afford to take a float plane to some remote lake in Manitoba or try to draw a tag for the big woods of Maine. Whatever. You'll probably have better luck at home.

[The picture is my daughter, Ida, with her 13" black crappie last month. It fought like a champion and she brought it in all by herself.]

NY Times Clueless on ND Elk Hunt

An unsigned editorial in today's New York Times about elk hunting in North Dakota provides a classic example of people publicly spouting opinions about something that they clearly know absolutely nothing about.

Quoth the Times:

Senator Byron Dorgan’s idea — spelled out in a rider to an Interior Department appropriations bill that the Senate is expected to consider soon — is what he calls a “common sense” public elk hunt. The idea violates both common sense and the very idea of a national park.

To begin with, the proposal would legislate a management issue better left to the secretary of interior and the National Park Service. Worse, it would authorize an activity — public hunting — that is proscribed by the founding legislation for the national parks and their current management policies.

The Times completely misses the point that neither the National Park service nor the Secretary of the Interior has the power to allow a public elk hunt in that park. That can only be authorized by a piece of legislation making it so. So if a public hunt is to be on the table at all, by definition this would have to happen through legislation. In this sense, the Times' argument is misleading and somewhat disingenuous.

Then they continue later in the piece with this bit of nonsense:

Rocky Mountain National Park provides a better model. There, hired sharpshooters have culled cow elk in parts of the park that are closed to the public. This is a safer, more efficient and less expensive way of reducing numbers than shooting bulls, which is what most hunters do.

In the first place, the Times seems to be unaware of the fact that managed hunts typically provide hunters with tags that are specifically designated 'antlered' or 'antlerless.' Only the bulls have antlers. It is a very simple and routine matter to issue a certain percentage of the tags as antlerless, or perhaps even all of them if that is what the field biologists recommend.

There are two explanations for this statement by the Times; either they have no ideal what they are talking about, or they do know and they are deliberately trying to misinform people about how a managed elk hunt works. I suspect the former.

What about those bits about hiring sharpshooters being "safer, more efficient and less expensive?" Lets go one at a time here.

'Safer.' So hunting is unsafe? I have no national data at hand, but I see that the most recent data available online for the State of California show that in all of 2006, in the entire state, there were only 18 hunting accidents.

Data for 2007 from the State of Tennessee shows that there were only 19 accidents the entire year. Only 2 of those accidents involved non-participants and neither was fatal.

North Carolina was a little higher last year, coming in at 36 total accidents. About 20 of those did not involve a firearm but rather someone falling out of a tree stand. Falling out of trees includes all but 2 of the total fatalities.

Oh goodness gracious, we can't have people risking falling out of trees. We must print an editorial in millions of copies of the New York Times and bring federal legislation to a screeching halt because perhaps someone might climb up a tree in North Dakota and fall down.

These are very, very low accident rates when compared to the millions of people who go hunting every year. Even looking at it per capita, non-participants are more likely to be seriously injured by people playing football or baseball than by hunters. According to data from the National Safety Council, per 100,000 participants, people playing football are 271 times more likely to be injured than people who are hunting (link not available because NSC now charges for individual access to their library). And the American Academy of Pediatrics says that in 1999 alone, 100,000 people were injured on trampolines. Trampolines, football, horseback riding, you name it. Just about everything that is both fun and physical kills and injures more people than hunting does.

Thus the Times' claim of safety being an issue in managing the elk population in North Dakota is hereby debunked.

'More efficient and less expensive.' This is ridiculous on the face of it. Hiring sharpshooters costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, wheras a hunt open to licensed hunters will make money. Hunters will pay hundreds of dollars for an elk tag. We could sit here all day long listing off state parks, state and national forests and wildlife management areas that have managed hunts which make an operating profit. If the park officials are concerned that they have no idea how to manage the distribution of tags, I'm sure they could contact their colleagues who manage other public lands in North Dakota for help.

In Virginia, I pay a few dollars extra to the state's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries for a national forest stamp on my hunting license. DGIF collects the revenue, managing the licenses, and then they give that revenue to the federal Department of the Interior. I suppose that probably DGIF gets some cut for handling it for the feds. There is no reason why the park couldn't work out a similar arrangement with North Dakota's state wildlife agency. So they don't need to reinvent the wheel or spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up a new federal bureaucracy to manage this hunt.

What it comes down to is that the nice people at the New York Times just don't like hunting. They live in a big city and probably have romantic notions of what nature is like, with a corrosponding and uninformed dislike for the American hunting culture. So they just spat out this farcical editorial that pretends to make a case for a position that they actually only advocate based on gut reaction rather than logic. If that is the way that they feel, ok. But for crissakes people, at least think the thing through before you go ballyhooing about it. And if their real issue is concern about the suffering of an animal, that would be pretty hypocritical coming from the same people who ran this story today, which repeatedly refers to young butchers in New York as 'rock stars.'

[Photo courtesy of Alumroot under Creative Commons]

On Palin and Sanford

You know what Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford have in common? Basically nothing except momentary membership in the Republican Governors Association. Mark Sanford has a spine and Sarah Palin doesn't.

I've been happy to see that Mark Sanford still shows no sign of resigning his office as Governor. And I'm not saying that out of some backhanded hope of handing South Carolina Republicans an anvil for the next 18 months. What Sanford confessed to was not a crime and has no bearing on his ability to do his job as Governor. I am absolutely sick of this absurd expectation that every person holding elected office be a saint. Sanford is a human being and he screwed something up in his private life. Now I would like him to shut up about it and go back to being the Governor of South Carolina. I would not have voted for him, but he was elected to hold this office and has not betrayed any trust between himself and the people of South Carolina.

Sarah Palin. As it turns out, her critics were right all along. She is a frivolous person who has found herself far, far out of her depth.

I still firmly believe that in every town in America of even middling size, there are at least a few people who would make fantastic Presidents of the United States if the stars lined up just right to put them in that office. Mayors, fire chiefs, high school civics teachers and random well-read people with a firm grasp of human nature. That said, Sarah Palin is probably not one of them.

When the going got tough, she quit. Sarah Palin is a quitter. A quitty, quit-ish quitter who quits and quits and quits. There was no scandal and no great embarassment save the usual ill-informed tripe that comes out of her mouth every time she is asked a question. She just couldn't take the heat of being attacked by political enemies, being described by the 'main stream media' or the possibility of being a lame duck Governor (as if Governor Palin would ever have wanted for attention).

The talk of her running for President is now laughable. If she couldn't take the stress of being Governor of Alaska, it ain't going to get any easier being President of the United States.

Anyone who rants against the 'liberal mainstream media' as much as she does is definitely out of their league. Liberals thought the mainstream media was biased towards conservatives during the Bush years and now conservatives think that it is biased towards liberals. This is the way it goes - the media kisses the ass of whomever they see as more powerful at a given moment. If you want to succeed at the highest levels of American politics then part of the job is that you learn how to either manipulate or get along with the media. There are valid criticisms to be made about that media, but if you are running for state-wide or federal office then you just look like a whiny little wimp for bitching about it on-camera.

I can only shrug at the exit of Sarah Palin. It doesn't bother me as much as Sanford's resignation would, since it doesn't signify anything other than Palin's own weakness. My only regret is the loss of someone in public life who represents the legions of serious female hunters in America, the existence of which the the rest of the country has failed to notice. As for Mark Sanford, I hope that he hangs in there and completes his term.