She steps out from behind a tall bayberry bush at the edge of the tawny field of summer. An involuntary shiver ripples over her flank. She twists her head looking back as a pair of fawns, dappled with white spots, follows tentatively in her footsteps. The dog on the porch is instantly alert, every muscle tensed in explosive readiness.
It is early morning; the shadows still long, a light mist gathered in the low swales; the yellow heads of tansy barely stir in the motionless air. But she senses us nonetheless and with her white flag flicked instantly upward, she bounds away followed by her offspring into the dark spruce at the edge of the field.
Timeless, you think.
But there is a darker shadow, here, stalking the islands.
It used to be, when lobstering was over for the season and traps were stacked ashore, island men went into the woods to fill their freezers with venison. They weren’t sport hunters; they called themselves meat hunters and their efforts made the long lean winters more endurable. If the truth were told, the hunting was better after the official end of hunting season when there were fewer leaves on the trees and you could track deer into the dense scrub, ideally after a light snowfall.
But hunting has fallen off on the islands as it has everywhere else. Fewer and fewer men actively hunt and the deer have responded. If you had foreseen this turn of events, you might have invested in a company that makes solar powered electric fences, for without them, you can barely produce a single tomato or zucchini on most Maine islands these days because the deer have become so prolific.
On islands, as elsewhere in New England, the clearing of woodlands for first or second homes creates more of a patchwork landscape, ideal for deer mice and meadow voles that inhabit the edges of field and forest. These species have also benefited from the trend of warmer winters during the last decade, meaning more ticks and more of their hosts survive from year to year.
To wildlife biologists, the increase of deer mice, meadow voles and white tailed deer is basically a good thing for lots of creatures in the food chain—think owls, raptors and coyotes. But infectious disease specialists refer to mice and deer as vectors for a nasty complex of bacteria carried by ticks, most notably a smallish, black-legged tick, known to scientists by the Greek-sounding name, Ixodes.
The problem is that up to an estimated half Maine’s deer tick population carry a spiral-shaped bacteria or spirochete known as Borrelia burgdorferi that causes Lyme disease. The symptoms of Lyme disease, which is officially diagnosed by an accompanying bull-eye-shaped red rash following a tick bite, include severe muscular pain and chronic paralyzing headaches. If untreated these conditions can progress to insomnia, depression and anxiety and as the disease spreads from muscles and joints to heart and brain.
This all may be more than you need to know unless you are one of the roughly 1,100 Mainers officially diagnosed with Lyme disease. Roughly 80 percent of these people are cured by a relatively straightforward treatment of antibiotics. Unfortunately upwards of half of the people who are infected never get—or never see—the red ringed rash and thus many do not know they are infected until very late in the game, at which point treatments are much more complicated, much less effective and much more expensive. For those who have not been diagnosed, they enter a netherworld of medical controversy, misdiagnoses and well-meaning suggestions of psychosomatic disorders.
These are also the people who want to know more than even the most well informed doctors and scientists know. Which quickly leads the rest of us into the world of highly informed patients (who have learned everything there is to know first hand), along with patient-advocates, naturopaths and conspiracy theorists, some of whom believe that the federal government is actively suppressing information on Lyme disease to the public for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies.
Against this backdrop, it is not reassuring to learn this week that the incidence of Lyme disease has likely been unreported nationally by a factor of ten, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means that there may have been over 11,000 cases of Lyme disease last year in Maine, almost 10,000 of which went unreported, which is, of course, steroidal fodder for the black helicopter crowd.
It also turns out that the deer tick, Ixodes, not to be confused with the much larger dog tick, can carry other nasty bacteria, causing such other debilitating diseases as babiesosis, rickettesiosis and anaplasmosis, which have some similar symptoms to Lyme disease, but do not respond to the antibiotic treatments recommended for Lyme disease. Sound complicated and confusing? That’s because it is.
So what to do? Well, the standard nostrums are to wear white clothing so you can see the deer tick more easily, tuck your pants into your socks when you got out walking (right!) and to examine your and your partner’s skin, armpits and groin for the tick, which is all well and good, until you recall that many New Englanders are descended from Puritans who were not big on having their naked bodies examined by others, no matter what perdition might lay in store. And because we also live in the age of the ascension of vegetarianism and the increasing advocacy of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it is not likely that we will see a big resurgence of the blood sport of deer hunting.
One island community, Monhegan, addressed the problem by hiring professional hunters to conduct deer culling campaigns, a euphemism for sharp shooters equipped with specialized equipment, including night vision goggles, to terminate them with extreme prejudice in order to protect human health. These campaigns, financed at public expense, were enormously controversial, but as is the case with many other thorny issues, island communities have become successful models for action when larger political processes become gridlocked.
Philip Conkling is the founder of the Island Institute. He now operates Conkling & Associates.