A female deer tick is seen in November 2003 on the corduroy flag used by researchers to collect ticks along a trail through Crescent Beach Park in Cape Elizabeth. (Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer)

The chills came first and they were intense.

Having felt healthy just minutes before, I now lay in my bed shivering so fiercely, it felt almost like a seizure. Getting up was out of the question, so I just pulled on as many blankets as I could find. Heap and heaps of blankets.

Still I shivered and shook. I felt as cold as I’d ever been and yet I was feverish. As the hours advanced, I entered a kind of twilight world of delirium, gawping at strange things I thought I saw in a dark corner of the room.

I was flattened. Down for the count.

For three days this went on. My temperature shot up to 102, so I’d feel burning hot one minute, Arctic cold the next. All I could eat was soup, and I did that with trembling hands.

I’m a guy who rarely gets sick, so this was humiliating and strange for me.

Malaria? West Nile? Withdrawal from liquor or some terrible drug?

Nope. Just the result of my flesh being invaded by a tick so small it would be barely visible to the naked eye. A stinking deer tick I had picked up God only knew where or when.

Anaplasmosis, that’s what I had, an affliction I’d never heard of and still can’t pronounce half the time. It wrecked me for most of a week, subsided, and then came back a week later for a rerun.

Then I started taking antibiotics and within hours of throwing down my second dose, I felt human again. It was over as quick as that.

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But not everyone is so lucky. There’s Lyme disease out there in the world of poisonous ticks and Lyme is an infection that can impact, not just a week or two, but the entirety of a person’s life.

As many as a half-million Americans are diagnosed with Lyme each year, compared to just a few thousand who contract anaplasmosis.

In Maine, the rate of Lyme disease has increased more than tenfold in the past 20 years, and it continues to rise. This, experts said, will be another record-breaking year for Maine.

“We’ve really been pretty much steadily increasing our reported cases for the last, you know, 20 years,” said Griffin Dill, director of the Tick Lab at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. “We’ve had a little blip here and there where it kind of levels out or dips, but for the most part, especially over the last five years, we’ve been going up and up and up for the number of reported cases.”

And while there’s no sign that the threat of tick-borne illness is taking the luster off the enjoyment of Maine’s outdoors, it appears that more people than ever are thinking about what’s lurking out there that could spoil their fun.

Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center in Portland, uses tweezers in April 2016 to pick up a deer tick off a flag in a wooded area off Charles E Jordan Road in Cape Elizabeth. (Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer)

‘A BITE OF SOME SORT’

Lyme, caused by the borrelia burgdorferi bacterium carried around by deer ticks, also known as blacklegged ticks, can spread to the joints, nervous system and heart if left untreated.

The lesser known anaplasmosis is a pretty fine reason to get your de-tickification ritual fine-tuned, as well.

I almost certainly came across that one poison-packing tick while on a hiking trip somewhere between the White Mountains and Baxter State Park. To pick up the critter that did me in, I stomped through a lot of wilderness in some far-flung places.

A Livermore Falls woman named Shelly, on the other hand, didn’t have to leave her backyard.

Her boyfriend, Bill, tells the story.

“A bit over a month ago my girlfriend, Shelly, found a bruise on her leg,” Bill said. “She showed it to me and said she thought it was a bite of some sort. It was as big as a silver dollar and an angry purple-black color. I saw that it had two spots in the center that could have been bite marks. We at first thought it may be a spider bite but I noticed that they were quite far apart and one was deeper than the other. We drew a mark around it to see if it would spread. It did not.”

A week later, Bill and Shelly were off to see their grandchildren for a weekend. At one point during the drive, Bill was talking to Shelly, but Shelly wasn’t responding.

She wasn’t responding at all.

“I reached over and shook her,” Bill said. “She didn’t respond. I was becoming worried but didn’t want to show too much emotion since our grand kids were in the back seat. I got quite concerned and gave her a good shake. Still no response.

“I quickly pulled into a driveway, threw the Nissan in park, jumped out and threw open her door,” he said. “She didn’t move. I started yelling. … I checked her and thankfully found she was breathing, although it was quite shallow. I was about to run to the driver’s side to go to the emergency room when she made a loud gasp and opened her eyes wide.

“I asked her if she knew where we were and she did. She was disoriented and I swear it looked like she couldn’t move the right side of her face. I told her we were going to the hospital but she insisted that she wanted to go home. I hesitated but went ahead with her request. She slowly came out of it and by the time we got home she seemed all right, but extremely weak and dizzy.”

Two days later, though, Shelly took another turn for the worse. This time, she was ready to go to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with anaplasmosis.

“A very dangerous and possibly deadly disease for anyone over 60, which we both are,” Bill said. “She was prescribed doxycycline and has since slowly recovered. We live on a 10-acre piece of land and are outside quite often. I had Lyme disease so we are both quite vigilant about tick checks whenever we come in from a day out there, yet this one escaped detection.”

There is no doubt in Bill’s mind that she had picked up a deer tick right on their own land, where Shelly likes to toil in the orchard or the gardens.

And now she ventures into those areas only warily, her life’s pleasures forever altered by the presence of these arachnids, some as tiny as the period on the end of this sentence.

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A TICK FOR ALL SEASONS

Ticks, man. By this point everybody knows that these bacteria-laden creatures are everywhere and that they are nothing to trifle with. These creeping vectors of disease creep onto your body and bury their heads in your flesh, potentially delivering nastiness such as babesiosis, relapsing fever, Powassan encephalitis and something called alpha-gal syndrome that can cause a potentially fatal allergy to red meat.

To name just a few.

Ticks don’t jump or fly, they just hang out on dangling leaves or blades of grass waiting for some unsuspecting beast or human to come lumbering by so they can climb on.

A single tick can bear multiple diseases at once, which makes them seem more like comic book super villains than just wee parts of our ecosystem.

When one ponders all of those diseases on top of more common ones like anaplasmosis and Lyme, it’s hard not to imagine our sprawling fields and beautiful forests as one big wilderness of poison.

Is there good news? Are the incidents of tick-borne diseases at least leveling out these days?

Nope.

In 2025 alone, the Tick Lab is seeing a 15%-20% increase in submissions of deer ticks, which correlates with data from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We’re on track to go up in the number of recorded cases and break last year’s record, which broke the previous year’s record,” Dill, the lab’s director, said. “It certainly appears to be a relatively rough year as far as tick encounters and the number of tick-borne illnesses go.”

Ticks can withstand extreme heat and cold, and they can endure long periods of starvation. They are difficult to remove once they latch on and they are even harder to kill.

And if you’re inclined to think of ticks as just a summertime threat, you can forget that notion. A couple years ago, Dill was sent a deer tick that had been removed from the flesh of a young boy who had been out sledding on a warm day in January.

“Unfortunately,” Dill said, “we’re seeing the ‘tick season’ really expanding on both ends. The warmer and shorter winters are really allowing them to be active in much of the year. We’re seeing ticks being submitted to our lab in all 12 months. With the deer tick in particular, if it’s above freezing, they can be active. And if it’s above 40 degrees, they can be very active. So if we have a stretch in the middle of January or the middle of February, when it’s 45 degrees for a week or two — which is becoming more and more common — we can and do see them becoming active.”

At this time of year, from late August and through September, typically, there tends to be a small decrease in the number of reported tick encounters.

So, that’s some good news, right?

Not so much.

“The adults will become active really heavily in late September through October and into November, as long as temperatures allow,” Dill explained. “We’re used to mosquitoes going away and black flies going away when we hit fall, so oftentimes, that can of bug spray goes away too. In reality, fall is one of the most active times for ticks — and deer ticks in particular.”

Ticks present the kinds of horrors that might make a person inclined to stay close to home just to keep away from the critters. But these days, even that is no surefire measure to steer clear of the creatures.

“People may look at the tick issue and say, ‘Well, if I’m not going out hiking or hunting or fishing in the middle of the woods, it may not be an issue for me,’” Dill said. “What we’ve really found from our tick submission program, which also includes a survey for each tick that is submitted, is that most of the people that are sending in these ticks are acquiring them right in the home landscape, doing things like yard work and gardening and playing outside and taking the dog out for a quick walk around the yard.

“So it’s really just getting in that mind frame of taking those precautions anytime we’re outdoors. Getting in that habit can really minimize our potential for encountering ticks.”

In spite of the horror movie-style threat of ticks — deer ticks, dog ticks, woodchuck ticks and Lone Star ticks are just a few of the varieties found in Maine — there is no real indication that fewer people are venturing into the woods each summer or that fewer tourists are coming to Maine.

“We hear anecdotally, every now and then, from someone who is giving up gardening, or giving up turkey hunting because of the ticks,” Dill said. “It certainly gives people some pause, but for the most part, I don’t think it’s keeping people from enjoying everything that Maine has to offer.

“And that’s really what we try to reiterate over and over through our outreach at the Tick Lab. There are simple precautions that can be taken to minimize our risk of encountering ticks and acquiring tick-borne diseases. Things like the use of repellents and protective clothing and gear, and getting in the habit of conducting frequent and thorough tick checks anytime we’ve been outdoors. Those simple steps go a long way.”

Common ticks found in Maine are seen in May 1991. Top row, from left, is ixodes dammini, the deer tick that transmits Lyme disease, as a nymph, an adult male, an adult female and an engorged female. Bottom row, from left, is dermacentor variabilis, the “American dog tick,” as an adult male, an adult female and an engorged female. (Jack Milton/Staff Photographer)

THE HORROR STORIES

There is no shortage of people who wish they had taken such precautions, and are now more than happy to share a story or two about their own encounters with the creatures in the hopes of saving others the agony.

“My husband was bit by a tick in July 2020,” a reader named Marcia said. “He was hospitalized and it took them 2-3 days to diagnose him with anaplasmosis. He was wicked sick. He has COPD and this exasperated his breathing issues. He was in the hospital for nine days. Luckily he made a full recovery. We now have our yard sprayed for ticks and mosquitoes. We’re not going through this again if we can help it.”

“My husband had a tick in his belly button eight years ago and had to go on antibiotics and even after the tick bite cleared up,” a reader named Tammy said. “He started having terrible reactions to other bug bites that his personal care physician couldn’t explain, so after getting a referral to a dermatologist he finally got a diagnosis: prurigo nodularus, and it all started with a little tick the size of a period.”

Freeman Tony, now living in Dresden Mills, was bitten by a tick 23 years ago, in a time when there was far less public education about the dangers of Lyme disease. He soon started experiencing a headache that he says made it feel like the lining of his skull was ablaze. On top of that, he was lethargic and had pain in his elbow joints.

“When I started experiencing symptoms, naturally I went to the doctors and was misdiagnosed,” Tony said now. “Finally they put me on a regiment of antibiotics which knocked it down considerably, but had to have more antibiotics which took care it. I missed a month of work. I had the bull’s-eye rash but didn’t know much about Lyme then. For about 10 years after I could still feel a small amount of discomfort at the bite location.”

One woman who wrote to say that because of a bite, likely from the Lone Star tick, she developed an allergy to red meat. “Damn things made it so I can’t even enjoy a good hamburger or a rib eye anymore,” Sheila said. “I have a hard time with protein now.”

Most of the people heard from are older folks, and that jibes with the data.

According to reports from the Maine CDC and Tick Lab, people over 65 are contracting tick-borne ailments in Maine at a much higher rate than younger folks. The general thinking is that the older we get, the more weakened our immune systems become. And older people are more likely to have other ongoing medical conditions, which can make reactions to tick bites more severe.

Dill, at the Tick Lab, believes there might be other factors, as well, for why the 65-and-older crowd gets plagued the most by ticks.

“This is likely a result of these age groups spending more time outdoors than young and middle-age adults, thus having more opportunities to encounter ticks,” he said. “Given the tiny size of ticks, it can also be a challenge to find them on the body.”

The group with the second highest rate of infection from ticks are those between 45 and 64 years old.

A deer tick is magnified 80 times using an electron microscope brought to an honors biology class in February 2011 at Deering High School in Portland by staff from the University of Southern Maine. (Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)

‘ALLIGATORS OF MAINE’

As of Aug. 19, according to the Maine CDC, there have been 2,555 cases of Lyme reported in Maine since the start of the year, along with 1,137 cases of anaplasmosis and 264 of babesiosis.

Babesiosis, as it happens, has been on the upswing in Maine, rising slowly over the past 10 years. As with Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, babesiosis is transmitted through the bite of an infected deer tick. And like those other diseases, this one can cause fever, chills, headache and fatigue.

It can flatten a person, in other words.

There are no signs this trend will reverse anytime soon. No miracle remedies have been offered and most experts project that the number of tick-borne diseases will just rise and rise into the unforeseeable future.

The reason for this worsening tick invasion depends on who you ask. Some say it’s climate change. Other insist it’s just that more people are taking up outdoor activities.

So, what are you going to do, friends? Give up hiking, fishing, hunting, gardening, bird-watching and mowing your lawn?

Dill says no, we don’t have to eschew our favorite outdoor pastimes in fear of ticks. He backs that notion up with a whole host of prevention remedies available on the Tick Lab website, extension.umaine.edu/ticks/. The website itself is replete with pretty much everything you need to know about ticks — and maybe a few things you never wanted to know.

The website also features plenty of tick data, including tables where one can drill down by county or individual town for a more up-close-and-personal view of where ticks are doing the most damage in Maine, and how.

I agree with Dill. I haven’t stopped hiking or rolling around in the grass like a dog for fear of ticks, even though I was so thoroughly humbled by one earlier in the summer.

It’s the same with Shelly and Bill in Livermore Falls. They still venture into their gardens and the wilderness around them, but they do so with ticks — which Bill refers to as “the alligators of Maine” — always at the back of their minds.

Has it always been this way?

Many old-timers will tell you that back in their day, they could roam the woods, roll in the grass and run through long fields all day long without ever having to worry about tick-borne illnesses. They paid no attention to the buggers and they never got sick.

There was a time, in other words, when the biggest menaces in the woods of Maine were mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-ums, gnats and a bunch of equally annoying critters that would fly in your face and try to suck your blood without causing any serious long-term harm.

Now, on top of ticks, the CDC is warning that some mosquitoes in Maine have tested positive for the West Nile virus, giving you one more thing to worry about while you fish for striped bass, tend to your garden tomatoes or amble your way to the top of Old Speck.

The outdoors has become a more dangerous place and this fact threatens to cast shadows over our joy while we’re out there on our various pursuits of happiness.

My advice? Arm yourself with a can of bug dope and some dollar-store lint rollers, kids, and get thee to the wilderness.

Give up doing what you love, brother, and the bloodsuckers win.