The Town of North Hempstead has a unique way of controlling its tick population.
WSHU’s Sabrina Garone spoke with Eric Powers of the Center for Environmental Education and Discovery in Brookhaven. He says ticks are a favorite snack of the bobwhite quail!
WSHU: Ticks and tick-borne illnesses, like Lyme disease, are prevalent on Long Island. What is it about the region that allows ticks to thrive, and how did you come to find that quails could be the answer to that problem?
EP: I think there's a lot of things that have happened. Climate change, so humans are changing the physical climate. We're seeing a lot of southern species come northward. Not just ticks, but many other species wreak havoc with our ecosystem. And also, humans have literally changed the landscape, fragmenting natural habitats and things like that. We can do the best conservation research and restoration that we can, but without education, it all kind of crumbles.
I first noticed the tick population was increasing in about 2000, 2001, when part of my job was to lead children out into the wilds of Long Island. Basically, we would hike a trail and look for wildlife — whatever the topic was for that day. We would come back and do a tick check. In 2001, I started finding a tick per class as we hiked this trail. The next year hiking the same trail, I started finding four to five ticks per class. So I started pulling together a scientific study to find which animal was missing because if the tick population rose, the ecosystem would be unable to counterbalance.
The thing that was missing was ground-dwelling animals, specifically bobwhite quail. This animal stays pretty small — about the size of a robin. It lives on the ground, doesn't migrate, it's native, and its main job is to eat small bugs on the ground including ticks. Why did we lose the bobwhite quail? Yes, it's a loss of habitat, but it also houses cats. The simple act of letting a cat go outside has tremendous negative impacts on our ecosystem. To the point where our quail population has crashed, and the ticks run a muck now. They don't have a predator to keep them back.
WSHU: And this most recent release of quail was in North Hempstead. Could you tell me why this location specifically? Is this a place where ticks are especially a problem?
EP: We actually have five release sites. The Town of North Hempstead has been tremendously supportive of our efforts. The town supervisor is very supportive of natural controls for pests. We learned our lesson with chemicals, right? Back in the 1960s with DDT, we ended up crashing our bird populations. I think we lost osprey completely on Long Island because of the use of a pesticide. So we know hosing down the environment with chemicals is not the right solution. The solution is restoring the ecosystem and letting nature do what nature does best. We also release Brookhaven State Park, Longwood Estate which is a Town of Brookhaven property, and right here at CEED. We're sitting here on 75 acres, most of which is natural habitat and much of which is being restored to native habitat.
WSHU: And this effort included some help from the local community as well, right? Could you tell me a little bit about that?
EP: The first 15 years of this project was just me funding it out of my back pocket. Now that I'm under CEED, they've officially adopted it. It's wonderful to have the support of a nonprofit. So, we rely heavily on school teachers, librarians, and private individuals to brood these eggs. They brood them for a few weeks before donating the two-week-old chicks to us. We have three outdoor pens that we raise them up to adulthood before release. We release them at about 10 to 12 weeks old once they've passed flight school!
WSHU: What does it mean to you as someone whose job is to educate the public about wildlife, to see the town and local groups coming together in this way?
EP: Oh my gosh, it just fills my heart with hope for the future and joy to see passion in other people. For a long time as an environmentalist, you kind of felt alone in the world, and now we see our community rally together to support this. This year, we had over 40 people helping to incubate quail eggs. That's tremendous! We had 1,700 eggs going into incubators in May. It just warms my heart, really.
WSHU: When it comes to our own health or the health of the environment — are there any other problematic species that you think Long Islanders should be more aware of?
EP: Well, the one thing I'd really like to get out there is that humans have done a really good job of growing green grass. That green lawn, to me, looks like a desert. A monoculture of just green grass requires constant mowing and maintenance with fertilizers, and here on Long Island, we're a sole-source aquafer. Anything we put on the ground washes down into our groundwater. We're going to be drinking those chemicals in 20 years or so.
Not to mention those chemicals leech into our waterways — we have dead zones in Long Island Sound! And that is a massive health hazard for humans. There's an organization here on Long Island called Re-wild Long Island, and someone from there said, 'We don't need wall-to-wall carpet with the grass; we just need an area rug!' So re-wilding parts of your lawn and restoring some natural habitat in place of green grass would tremendously support our wildlife, and that would have a huge positive impact on human health. A healthy environment equals healthy humans.
WSHU: I know people hear this all the time, but I think it's worth repeating — could you share with us some tips on how we can best protect ourselves from being bit by a tick if we're walking around in nature?
EP: The number one way that I protect myself from a tick is just the awareness that they're out there. Whenever I walk through a grassy meadow or something, I check myself to make sure nothing walking on me. And my best line of defense is actually clear tape! So whenever I see a tick on me I just stick the tick, fold it over, and it's now sealed in the tape and won't bother anybody else ever again!
