To the Editor:
In last week’s letter to the editor (“Dose the deer, don’t kill them”), Lorraine Parish advocated for the use of four-poster feeding stations as an alternative to reducing the number of deer on the Vineyard. Four-posters provide corn to deer; when the deer come to feed, rollers apply permethrin to their heads, necks, and foreparts, killing any ticks in those areas.
Ms. Parish is correct that four-posters have been shown to reduce the number of ticks in an area. However, one big problem is the cost. While the initial cost is only about $400 to $700 per four-poster, annual cost to operate them can be substantial, since in addition to the cost of purchasing corn and permethrin, someone needs to refill the corn on a weekly basis, and a certified pesticide applicator needs to refill the permethrin roughly twice a month. One four-poster costs between $2,300 and $4,500 per year to maintain.
To be effective, there should be one four-poster for every 120 acres of habitat. The Vineyard is approximately 64,000 acres. To properly treat even the 10 percent of the Vineyard with the highest densities of deer or lone star ticks would require about 50 four-posters. Even if we use the lower annual cost of $2,300, maintaining 50 four-posters on Martha’s Vineyard would cost over $120,000 per year, and cover only 10 percent of the Island.
The estimated cost of maintaining the 250 four-posters need to cover half the Island would be between $575,000 and $1.125 million. It is hard to imagine spending $100,000 a year to control ticks, let alone the half-million to a million dollars a year it would cost to maintain four-posters on half of Martha’s Vineyard.
Thus, while the four-posters may be a viable alternative for small areas of the island, the high cost of maintaining them precludes their use as a primary solution to the epidemic of tick-borne illnesses on the Vineyard.
Richard Johnson
Oak Bluffs
Mr. Johnson is a biologist studying tick-borne disease with a grant from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. —Ed.
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