Life on Martha’s Vineyard is increasingly shaped by tick-borne illness. 

Many Islanders know someone with Lyme disease and are used to checking themselves and their kids for its tell-tale bullseye rash. Where to stock up on permethrin, a synthetic tick repellent, is typical dinner table conversation. In recent years, alpha-gal, a potentially life-threatening tick-borne allergy to red meat and other mammalian products caused by the bite of a lone star tick, has become so commonplace that it’s shaping cafeteria menus at schools and the hospital.

“It’s affecting quality of life in so many aspects,” said Island tick biologist Patrick Roden-Reynolds. “I’ve talked to a lot of people that are stopping hiking on the trails. They’re stopping gardening [and] anything that they used to enjoy.”

A new Island nonprofit, Tick Free MV, is trying to change that.

Deer are a major food source for ticks.

Ray Ewing

Deer are a major food source for ticks.

Ray Ewing

Officially launched on Dec. 4, Tick Free MV’s mission is to tackle tick-borne illnesses by reducing the total number of ticks on the Island, in part by targeting the Island’s population of deer, the main food source for ticks.

Virginia Barbatti, former development director for Island Grown Initiative, has been named executive director of Tick Free MV. The board of directors is co-chaired by Jeff Levy, CEO of Martha’s Vineyard Medical, and attorney and education activist Megan Chernin. Guiding the organization will be a growing group of senior advisors, including Mr. Roden-Reynolds and epidemiologist Lea Hamner.

Tick Free MV board member Isabelle Lew, partner at law firm Reynolds, Rappaport, Kaplan & Hackney, has been part of efforts to get the group off the ground since August. She said early conversations with experts and concerned Islanders made clear that it was time for all hands on deck.

“We sat down and looked at the current status of where things are on the Island and came to the conclusion that this would be a useful next step,” she said.

The Vineyard’s rates of tick-borne illnesses, such as Lyme disease, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and alpha-gal syndrome far outpace the rest of the commonwealth. The Island’s rates of Lyme and babesiosis are 11 times higher than the state average, and rates of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia are 185 times higher and 143 times higher.

Recently, the growth of alpha-gal on the Vineyard has been exponential. In 2020, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital recorded just two positive cases of alpha-gal. This year, the hospital recorded 724 positive tests in the first 11 months of the year.

Mr. Levy has seen the tick crisis unfold firsthand at his clinic, where 19 per cent of visits last summer were tick-related. While not wanting to understate the threat Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses pose to Islanders, Mr. Levy said that a rapidly rising alpha-gal rate has pushed the public health burden of tick-borne illness into terrifying new territory.

In fact, he’s convinced that the number of Vineyard-related alpha-gal cases is significantly higher than is currently recorded.

“Think about how many people test elsewhere,” he said. “People test at our clinic and don’t go to the hospital. There are people who go to Falmouth or other people who come here and visit and go home.”

Local tick biologist Dick Johnson, now on the Tick Free MV board, has been watching the situation worsen on the Island for the past 14 years.

He recalled taking a tick sample from Cape Pogue around 2014 that yielded more lone star ticks than he had ever seen in one place. In recent years, those numbers have continued to rise. Now, Mr. Johnson said scientists are regularly locating 40 or 50 lone stars on a single property at a time, all over the Vineyard.

“The last three years have just exploded,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s some kind of critical mass, and suddenly they are everywhere on the Island.”

Mr. Roden-Reynolds, tick biologist for the Island’s boards of health, said he’s seen a dramatic change in how ticks have been affecting quality of life on the Vineyard over the four years he’s served in this capacity.

Attempts to boost hunting have been done in the past.

Ray Ewing

Attempts to boost hunting have been done in the past.

Ray Ewing

“Our public health burden with deer ticks and Lyme disease was already bad enough — some of the worst in the state,” he said. “And now, with lone star ticks and alpha-gal concerns, it’s just reached a boiling point.”

He pointed out multiple factors that could be contributing to the timing of the rise of lone star ticks on the Vineyard. The Island’s ecosystem, composed of grasslands and forests, is ideal for ticks. So too are the Island’s increasingly warm winters and temperate summers.

But if the cycle is to be broken, Mr. Roden-Reynolds said, intervention must start with winnowing the Island’s density of deer.

Deer are considered the primary host for adult deer ticks and lone start ticks, he explained. While ticks regularly bite a variety of animals, including birds and small mammals, ticks seek out deer as hosts that will allow them to reproduce and complete their life cycles.

He noted an “extreme overabundance” of deer populating the Island at a density far above state recommendations. While the state recommends a deer density between 12 and 18 deer per square mile, MassWildlife places the Vineyard’s density at over 55 deer per square mile — the highest deer density in the commonwealth next to Nantucket’s.

“By reducing the density of deer, you essentially reduce chances for the ticks to reproduce and create new ticks the following year,” he said.

Mr. Levy confirmed that culling the Island’s deer population is one among many of Tick Free MV’s objectives, undertaken in order to restore the herd to ecological balance. To this end, the organization has made boosting hunting a priority.

Tick Free MV is partnering with Island Grown Initiative and the MV Hunt Club to encourage deer hunting by offering a monetary incentive for every deer donated to the Share the Harvest Program. The partnership will provide hunters with $100 for every buck and $150 for every doe donated.

“We’re recognizing that [hunting] is a time-consuming activity,” Ms. Lew said.

A similar program was run by the MV Tick Program, but was scrapped in 2024 because few people took advantage of it.

Tick Free MV is also trying to expand the Island’s use of deer damage permits, which allow people whose crops or property are affected by deer to hunt them as pests. To date, there have been zero deer damage permits issued on the Vineyard.

“It’s nuisance removal, so the hunting regulations don’t apply if there’s a deer damage permit in place,” Mr. Levy said.

After the hunting season concludes in early 2026, Tick Free MV will conduct a thermal drone survey of the Island to locate deer population hotspots. The group has contracted deer management company White Buffalo, which also offers managed white-tailed deer hunts, for the survey.

“That will assist, I think, culling efforts by hunters,” Mr. Levy said of the drone survey. “It also ought to give us... a sense of the absolute size of the herd here, so that we can understand what we are working against.”

According to Ms. Barbatti, Tick Free MV has not at this point made the choice to contract White Buffalo or another company for an organized cull.

“We have to get the information first before deciding what we want to move forward with,” she said.

Tick Free MV is not alone in identifying deer density as a crucial part of tick-borne illness reduction. Just last week, the state held a summit on the crisis with local tick experts, including Tick Free MV affiliates, where Beacon Hill officials announced an expanded six-week winter deer hunting season. An additional 10-day deer hunting season will also be held in September 2026, and the state is considering opening hunting on Sundays next year.

But there is no tick-reduction panacea, say members of Tick Free MV. 

While Ms. Lew called deer population management the group’s “foundational starting point” for tick reduction, she said it will need to be accompanied by other interventions. Tick Free MV is formulating a three-to-five-year plan that will address solutions targeting mice, for example, with the specific goal of reducing the spread of Lyme.

“This is going to have to be a toolbox of many tools, and looking at deer is one of those tools,” Ms. Lew said. “Based on the experts in the field, it seems as though that’s a very important tool, but certainly not the only one.”

The topic of thinning the Island’s deer herd is a sensitive one for some Islanders. Despite receiving mostly positive early feedback, the group recognizes that the community has a range of perspectives on deer and tick-borne illness management.

“We know that there are going to be people who are uncomfortable, and we understand why,” Ms. Barbatti said. “We’re going to talk with them, and we’re going to be in dialogue.”

For Ms. Barbatti, a successful Tick Free MV needs to powered by the community. 

The organization will rely on donors across the Island to support the group’s initiatives. While Tick Free MV waits on its official 501(c)(3) status, the group’s fiscal sponsor is the Martha’s Vineyard Community Foundation, which is collecting immediately tax-deductible donations on its behalf. Tick Free MV is also accepting direct donations, which will be retroactively tax-deductible.

Though the group anticipates a long and winding road ahead, it hopes that at the end lies a safer, healthier Island.

“We’re doing this as neighbors, as fellow Islanders, as people really wanting to come together on something that’s become such a big problem for all of us,” Ms. Barbatti said.