Tuesday, July 03, 2001
Lyme Disease, West Nile Fever, poison ivy - Spring pleasures
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
This message comes to you from the Lyme disease capital of New York, Columbia County, which has the highest incidence in the state, and from the township of Taghkanic, whose twenty-four hundred souls had the highest infection rate, 2 ½ percent in 2000, a big jump compared to one percent in 1999. If you consider that our fair state has the highest incidence of Lyme disease in the nation, and that means the world, you might say that we live in the eye of the global storm.
.
My most important Lyme disease control tool is the lawnmower. Keeping the lawn
closely cropped discourages the field mice, main carriers of the poppy-seed sized larval state of the deer tick. They can be transferred to our two mousers, who in turn can bring them into the house and deposit them on the beds, the chairs and rugs Ugh!. The ticks, in both adult and larval states, sit on top of the tallest blades of grass, waiting for passers by to brush against them and pick them up - deer, humans, dogs and cats.
The deer are the FedEx, the long distance carriers, bringing the adult Lyme disease ticks from far away. Unfortunately, this family has been targeted by deer as their benefactors, growers of tasty evergreens and trees, part of the deer nutrition cycle in the hard winter.
This is my fourth annual deer report. Four years ago I tried to keep the Bambis away by spraying our young evergreen trees, not too successfully. The following year, we wrapped the spruces, hemlocks and pines with plastic netting, ditto. Feeling that drastic measures were needs, two seasons ago I invested in a load of two-by-twos. We surrounded each tree with five such tall posts and stapled five-foot wide burlap all around, with good success. But that winter was mild. This last winter the deer were starving, tore off the burlap, ate some of it and chewed the needles off the tree branches to the height of five feet. Our trees look like bottle brushes,
Next winter, if we decide to try and let the damaged trees recover, I’ll be wrapping them with five-foot fencing wire, maybe even barbed wire. No more Mr. Nice Guy! Stay away Bambis, and keep your mites off my grass!
Many of our neighbors keep guns and hunt. But the licensing for "harvesting" deer is limited, and their population growth exceeds ours. The state authorities, fearing the wrath of animal lovers, limit deer licenses severely. Some locals, such as our nursery people, have year-round licenses, to protect their forest of fine varieties of trees, and they eat venison regularly. Luckily, they like venison.
Being essentially non-violent and a firm believer in negotiated settlements, I had another venue in mind. If Diane Fossey could communicate with the gorillas in the mists of Africa, a bunch of foreigners, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same with my native animal neighbors, the Bambis?
Having studied up on communications theory, I clambered through the 50 or so feet of pine brambles that separate our two acres from the hayfield North of us, a frequent feeding grounds for deer. My garb was non-threatening khaki, and my companion was Daisy, the male of our two cats, although he faded fast, on errands of his own choosing. The time was right, just about dusk. And indeed, some two hundred feet away from my post at the edge of the woods a family of eight head, young deer and older does, was feeding in the field..
My arrival did not disturb them, until I made what I thought was a friendly noise, a mooing kind of call. The deer stopped feeding and watched me. The head doe, after a half minute of processing information, moved the herd towards me, quite a bit closer, stopped and snorted.. Expelled her breath in a longish passage quite loudly, she did, watching this human presence all the while.
To an experienced doe, humans should not be totally strange. There are these encounters, mostly with cars, but I and others have had individual events, where man and beast shave some interaction before the beast departs.
I was determined to lengthen the encounter, and snorted back. Not quite as imperiously, my snort was a bit humble but with a friendly tone. It seemed to have worked, because the deer advanced once more, and the big spokes-doe snorted again. I was slow in formulating my response, and tried the same low-key expelling of breath, with a long and two short tones, without moving.
Whatever I had done was wrong,, because the doe turned around and galloped off, slowly but determinedly, followed by the her gang, to continue feeding uphill, totally ignoring me.
I’m sure Diane Fossey has had days like that, but the cats and I are determined. Next time I’ll bring Benny the girl cat and let her try to do the talking. Meanwhile I’m looking for a sale of fencing at the Agway. They just finished refurbishing our lawn tractor while we were away in New York, and I have cut the grass and invested in calf length tube socks, easily examined for ticks. Next battle station, poison ivy control; I have several latex gloves, pilfered from my doctors’ offices. And mosquito control, clearing of their breeding grounds, standing water puddles, to limit the exposure to the West Nile fever (an infected dead crow has been found in the county).Let the hot summer begin!
This message comes to you from the Lyme disease capital of New York, Columbia County, which has the highest incidence in the state, and from the township of Taghkanic, whose twenty-four hundred souls had the highest infection rate, 2 ½ percent in 2000, a big jump compared to one percent in 1999. If you consider that our fair state has the highest incidence of Lyme disease in the nation, and that means the world, you might say that we live in the eye of the global storm.
.
My most important Lyme disease control tool is the lawnmower. Keeping the lawn
closely cropped discourages the field mice, main carriers of the poppy-seed sized larval state of the deer tick. They can be transferred to our two mousers, who in turn can bring them into the house and deposit them on the beds, the chairs and rugs Ugh!. The ticks, in both adult and larval states, sit on top of the tallest blades of grass, waiting for passers by to brush against them and pick them up - deer, humans, dogs and cats.
The deer are the FedEx, the long distance carriers, bringing the adult Lyme disease ticks from far away. Unfortunately, this family has been targeted by deer as their benefactors, growers of tasty evergreens and trees, part of the deer nutrition cycle in the hard winter.
This is my fourth annual deer report. Four years ago I tried to keep the Bambis away by spraying our young evergreen trees, not too successfully. The following year, we wrapped the spruces, hemlocks and pines with plastic netting, ditto. Feeling that drastic measures were needs, two seasons ago I invested in a load of two-by-twos. We surrounded each tree with five such tall posts and stapled five-foot wide burlap all around, with good success. But that winter was mild. This last winter the deer were starving, tore off the burlap, ate some of it and chewed the needles off the tree branches to the height of five feet. Our trees look like bottle brushes,
Next winter, if we decide to try and let the damaged trees recover, I’ll be wrapping them with five-foot fencing wire, maybe even barbed wire. No more Mr. Nice Guy! Stay away Bambis, and keep your mites off my grass!
Many of our neighbors keep guns and hunt. But the licensing for "harvesting" deer is limited, and their population growth exceeds ours. The state authorities, fearing the wrath of animal lovers, limit deer licenses severely. Some locals, such as our nursery people, have year-round licenses, to protect their forest of fine varieties of trees, and they eat venison regularly. Luckily, they like venison.
Being essentially non-violent and a firm believer in negotiated settlements, I had another venue in mind. If Diane Fossey could communicate with the gorillas in the mists of Africa, a bunch of foreigners, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same with my native animal neighbors, the Bambis?
Having studied up on communications theory, I clambered through the 50 or so feet of pine brambles that separate our two acres from the hayfield North of us, a frequent feeding grounds for deer. My garb was non-threatening khaki, and my companion was Daisy, the male of our two cats, although he faded fast, on errands of his own choosing. The time was right, just about dusk. And indeed, some two hundred feet away from my post at the edge of the woods a family of eight head, young deer and older does, was feeding in the field..
My arrival did not disturb them, until I made what I thought was a friendly noise, a mooing kind of call. The deer stopped feeding and watched me. The head doe, after a half minute of processing information, moved the herd towards me, quite a bit closer, stopped and snorted.. Expelled her breath in a longish passage quite loudly, she did, watching this human presence all the while.
To an experienced doe, humans should not be totally strange. There are these encounters, mostly with cars, but I and others have had individual events, where man and beast shave some interaction before the beast departs.
I was determined to lengthen the encounter, and snorted back. Not quite as imperiously, my snort was a bit humble but with a friendly tone. It seemed to have worked, because the deer advanced once more, and the big spokes-doe snorted again. I was slow in formulating my response, and tried the same low-key expelling of breath, with a long and two short tones, without moving.
Whatever I had done was wrong,, because the doe turned around and galloped off, slowly but determinedly, followed by the her gang, to continue feeding uphill, totally ignoring me.
I’m sure Diane Fossey has had days like that, but the cats and I are determined. Next time I’ll bring Benny the girl cat and let her try to do the talking. Meanwhile I’m looking for a sale of fencing at the Agway. They just finished refurbishing our lawn tractor while we were away in New York, and I have cut the grass and invested in calf length tube socks, easily examined for ticks. Next battle station, poison ivy control; I have several latex gloves, pilfered from my doctors’ offices. And mosquito control, clearing of their breeding grounds, standing water puddles, to limit the exposure to the West Nile fever (an infected dead crow has been found in the county).Let the hot summer begin!
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:49 AM 
