Startling new numbers on the growth of the tick population

Ticks are back. With a vengeance.

Mike Scheibel, natural resources manager of Mashomack, said the tick population there is up more than 200 percent over last year.

Speaking at Tuesday’s Town Board session and later with the Reporter, Mr. Scheibel said these were startling figures. And it isn’t just anecdotal findings — even though Mr. Scheibel said those numbers were off the charts — but scientific fieldwork that produced the jaw dropping statistics.

Last June 28 in what’s called “a tick drag,” where a large white cloth of corduroy-like material is dragged across sites, a sampling discovered 185 “lone star tick nymphs” at separate sites, Mr. Scheibel said.

Using the same methodology last Thursday at the same sites, 645 tick nymphs were booked.

Mr. Scheibel said that any kind scientific sampling has to be as standardized as possible. At Mashomack last year and last week, the same two samplers worked the exact same 30 sites. It was a two-person team, with one person dragging the cloth and the other timing it to exactly 30 seconds a drag.

“I did 15 and was timed and the other person did 15 while I timed,” Mr. Scheibel said.

The methodology of counting the tick population was introduced by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, which set up the “4-poster program”  for three years beginning in March 2008.

Developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1990s, the 4-poster applies a “tickicide,” permethrin to deer where the ticks concentrate: their heads, necks and ears. Evidence gathered during three years of tests on Shelter Island, experts say, show the 4-poster worked, with kill rates of more than 90 percent.

But that project, privately funded at $5,000 a unit, had a total of 60 4-posters. Now, with the town budgeted at $75,000 for the anti-tick program, there are only 14 units town-wide and four at Mashomack.