The headline above is essentially the statement made by Maine’s head moose biologist Lee Kantar. Specifically he said, “Winter ticks have been documented in Maine since the 1930s. Periodically, there are peak years when the number of ticks increase substantially.”
In a weekly column in the Sun Journal by outdoor writer V. Paul Reynolds, he states that: “Biologists reported from tagging station information last fall that the tick count on harvested moose was the highest in ten years!”
Isn’t then the logical progression of questions to be asked as follows?
1. If winter moose ticks have been “documented” since the 1930s has there also been “documented” complications similar to those that are now supposedly killing Maine’s moose?
2. If we have been utilizing a moose hunting season, if only by lottery in limited numbers, to assist with the management of moose populations since 1980 when 700 moose permits were issued, during the past 33 years has MDIFW “documented” any irregularities in moose populations due to the winter tick?
3. Can we assume that checking for and “documenting” winter ticks on moose has taken place at tagging stations since Maine’s first modern-day moose hunt in 1980?
4. If, as stated above, the tick count on moose reported at tagging stations this year, was the highest in ten years, then there must have been higher tick counts prior to 2003?
5. If there have been higher tick counts on moose “documented” since 1980, what then was the result of moose mortality estimations during those times?
6. We know that so-called “scientists” during the 1970s were attempting to find ways of scamming money out of taxpayers by claiming that the world was going to freeze to death because of global cooling. That didn’t work so the same and other so-called “scientists” tried scaring people with global warming. If winter ticks have been “documented” since the 1930s and according to so-called “scientists” we have gone through a global cooling period, a global warming period, and are now entering into another global cooling period, how then can so-called scientists, wildlife biologists, environmentalists and all the other “ists” claim that global warming is the cause of increased numbers of winter ticks? Especially if we surmise that there must have been higher tick counts prior to the past ten years.
Without spending a great deal of time plotting data and thoroughly examining reports such as Lee Kantar’s 2006 report Status of the Maine Deer Herd and William Krohn’s Historical Ecology of the White-tailed Deer in Maine, it appears as though there may be a correlation between high tick counts followed the next year by a severe winter. I believe the last event similar to this year may have happened in 2002-2003. Of course if this is true, then one might be able to blow the global warming, winter tick correlation out of the water; which wouldn’t be a bad idea as I personally believe the global warming attribution to everything under the sun, pun intended, is nothing more than a poor distraction that wrongfully disrupts real and good scientific study.
One would also have to wonder if and what the similarities are in moose populations in New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota and Canada. It may be as simple as a natural event of warm, cold, ticks, moose and when there’s too many of some or all, things happen. Nature isn’t in balance. It’s a dynamic and changing existence – and with all of this, we must include the changing dynamics of the effects of predators.
