As I See It

Bill Sargent, The Daily News of Newburyport, Edition October 11, 2019

“Throughout the summer, I noticed flocks of egrets flying over my house at dusk. I mentioned this to a neighbor who told me they were on their way to a hidden rookery. But you could just see it from the top of a neighboring hill.”

“I drove to the hill and looked down into a heavily wooded valley. But one copse looked like all its trees were covered with white sheets. I figured if I drove down the hill, I should be able to get close enough to take a few photographs.”

“Sure enough, I found a culdesac and a path that led to a swampy pond. I peered through a screen of vegetation and saw that the trees around the pond were covered with hundreds of snowy egrets, great egrets, and great blue herons.”

“Guano from the birds had killed most of the trees and the pond was covered with a fetid scum of blue-green algae. All that I could hear were prehistoric “kronks” and grunts that made me think a velociraptor was peering at me from the other side of the brush.”

“Toward the end of the summer, the resident birds were joined by more egrets from Maine and Canada. They spent the day gorging themselves on minnows and frogs from the surrounding marshes and then would gather at the rookery for the night. By the end of the summer, close to 400 birds flew into the rookery every evening.”

“I started going to the spot at dusk to take photos of the birds against the late-summer sunsets. It was difficult for the large birds to avoid the trees that surrounded the pond so they would sideslip and stall as they made their descents through the vegetation to finally settle on a few tall, gangly sumac trees.”

“I made a point of wearing long clothes and drenching myself with DEET but every night, I was bitten by a few mosquitoes. I realized I was doing everything wrong.”

“I was going out at dusk when the mosquitoes were most active. I was standing beside the fetid pond where they laid their eggs and I was around hundreds of birds that the mosquitoes were possibly infecting with Eastern Equine Encephalitis, EEE.”

“The media was starting to carry stories about EEE, but I knew that it was rare and most of the cases were in other parts of the state.”

I figured our mosquitoes probably weren’t infected and getting a photo of a flock of egrets flying against a Wagnerian sunset was surely worth a few mosquito bites. I thought I was playing the odds. I was actually playing a game of Russian roulette.”

“On Sept. 16, I started feeling lousy.”

“I hadn’t slept very well the night before and I woke up with a headache, fever, and chills. I had just finished a long bout of difficult writing and felt that I just needed some sleep, but the next morning I read that Essex County had just gone on high alert because a man in neighboring Manchester had contracted EEE and would be dead within the week.”

“OK, this was serious. I berated myself for being so foolhardy and checked into a clinic, hoping they would tell me I was just being paranoid. Instead, they drew blood and set up tests for EEE, Ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, and Babesia. The results would come back within a week.

“Our local clinic doesn’t fool around with these arboviruses. Two-thirds of the people who live on some of our town’s streets have tickborne diseases and Massachusetts consistently has more cases of EEE than any other state in the nation. We already had 10 cases this year; almost a third of them would prove to be fatal.”

“I did some research and discovered that like tick-borne diseases, EEE is on the rise. Normally, there is only an average of seven cases of EEE a year nationwide. This year, there had already been 28 cases and Massachusetts led the way with 10. The disease proves fatal a third of the time in humans and 90% of the time in horses.”

“This was the worst year for EEE since the CDC first started reporting on the disease in the early 1960s. It also turns out that from the beginning, most of the work on EEE has been done by the U.S. Army.”

“The disease was only discovered 60 years ago and during the ‘60s, the Army had a cocktail of three similar agents sitting in an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. It was kept there, to be sprayed over Cuba in the event the United States decided to invade Cuba to rid the island of Soviet missiles.”

“The idea was that Cuban soldiers would spike a 105-degree fever, then come down with searing headaches and light sensitivity. The last thing they would want to do is pick up a gun to protect their motherland.”

“Like the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Laboratory, the Pine Bluff Arsenal also had an insectary. It is known researchers infected fleas with biological agents at the site.”

“Had they also infected mosquitoes with EEE and had the mosquitoes escaped to infect migrating birds like herons and egrets?”

“The Department of Defense is still studying EEE because of its potential as a biological weapon and its researchers are being vaccinated with one developed in one of the department’s military labs. I guess nothing could go wrong with the vaccine against EEE, either.”

“A week later, I received my results. I didn’t have EEE. Apparently, there was a 48-hour bug going around that mimicked EEE’s symptoms or that some lucky people only get the minor symptoms. Not much is really known about the disease because it had formerly been so rare.”

“But I decided I had more than enough photographs of herons and egrets. My friends said that it was ridiculous that our town had sprayed to get rid of the mosquitoes.”

“It made the whole town smell like a pig farm and the mosquitoes would die off as soon as we had two days of killing frosts anyway. They were probably right, but having had a close call, I appreciated our town’s proactive stance.”

Copyright © 2019 The Daily News of Newburyport, Edition 10/11/2019