morning around sunrise, Josh Blouin was standing outside of an old general store in Island Pond, Vermont, 16 miles south of the Canadian border, getting ready to—hopefully—see a moose.
Unlike other ticks, which may spend a few days on a host, transmitting disease in the process, winter ticks hunker down for the season, molting from larvae to nymph to adult over the course of five months, not spreading disease but consuming large quantities of blood. Moose calves, which are about six months old at the onset of winter, and pregnant cows are unable to make enough blood to replenish their systems. By spring they are anemic, malnourished, and disoriented.
“Winter in Maine has been shortened by about two weeks,” notes biologist Lee Kantar, who has spent the last 15 years studying moose for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “That’s a dramatic change in climate.”