Publisher's Point Of View
Robert Allan Hooftallen

To say that the summer recently passed provided my family with odd and troubling challenges is pretty lean on drama.

When I left home Thursday morning to get to work pulling the Endeavor together, I was shaking my head wondering what this area is going to be like over the next decade or so, especially if this warming trend and mild winters continue.

My niece is far from an outdoor enthusiast; she's a fiveyear old little girl who fancies pretending she is a squirrel, not digging the ticks that infest them out of her head.

But that's what we were doing Thursday morning. When my mom was getting her ready for school, she found a deer tick buried in the back of her skull, far enough that its head was out of sight and its legs suspended in mid-air, but still pumping wildly trying to dig in further.

Clearly, the tick had found its way into her hair in the night because it wasn't found at bath time. It was mostly likely brought in by her dog or mom's cat.

From what I have gathered, though, she's safe from lyme disease, having already had it earlier this summer when she came down with flu-like symptoms and a bulls-eye rash in June.

And by that time we weren't strangers to its symptoms; my seven-year-old daughter had already had it as well. In fact, their antibiotic regimens overlapped.

I dug a tick from my stomach in late May and another from my arm a few weeks later. I never got the tell-tale rash or the flu-like symptoms, but about six weeks ago, the latestage symptoms struck me and I, too, had lyme disease, probably for about four months. I'm still trying to whip what's left of it, rather unsuccessfully, frankly.

And we don't live in the woods. We live in town. Our property borders brushy areas, but we spend no time that far up on our land.

As a child, I spent thousands of hours stomping through the areas we are now petrified to get near. When I got old enough to hunt, I spent every available hour from September to January in the woods.

I don't recall seeing my first tick until the early 1990s when I noticed them on a grey squirrel I had shot. A couple years later, Dad and I took our dogs hunting pheasants in southern Potter County where it meets with Cameron County and there were, literally, thousands of them.

We pulled about 100 out of each dog later that night.

Since then, the warming trend has enabled them to continue their move northward through Potter County. For the record, that's just my take- that they are thriving because we do not get the kind of sustained cold spells we used to get in winter.

Since I figured out what was ailing me, I have shared this story with dozens of people and it is just shocking how many of them have lyme disease, have had it or know someone who has had it.

I time this writing during the area's most active outdoors season purposely- not only to warn sportsmen about this growing scourge, but also to see if I can spark dialogue that may lead toward a focused effort to address this problem.

Almost all insect pest populations in Pennsylvania go through boom and bust periods, with the busts being brought on by natural enemies, often bacteria that kill the pests in huge numbers.

I have my fingers crossed for that to occur with deer ticks because if it doesn't, we're all going to be living with lyme disease. And what's bad about that is we have no idea what the long term effects of it are.

My daughter and my niece, both beautiful little blue-eyed blonde girls, far from "outdoorsmen," both carry the disease now. What does that mean for them in 20, 30 or 40 years?

No one knows, yet the tick population continues to just explode.

My buddy Oren shot a buck with a bow two weeks ago. He brought to my house so I could check it out. There were hundreds and hundreds of ticks on it- some looking for a place to burrow and hundreds of others already buried in the animal's flesh, in various stages of engorgement.

In my opinion, the burgeoning deer tick population is absolutely the single biggest threat to the human beings who live or play here, yet I don't hear the medical community speaking out. I don't see the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources even addressing the issue.

I bet if they ate timber instead of human blood, we'd be hearing a lot more about how big of a problem they are and what efforts were being made to annihilate them.