Go away on vacation and everything goes crazy it seems.
Well, maybe not completely.
But connecting on a couple of social media sites I’m on I saw piles of spotted lantern flies in the streets of Toledo and carcasses of bucks — nice ones I should add — and other white-tailed deer in the fields and rivers of Paulding and Defiance counties and throughout Ohio.
It appears as I surmised in a column two weeks ago that when Michigan deer in counties across the border came down with Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease, or EHD, it would likely make its way to Ohio. And it did.
EHD is a viral disease affecting white-tailed deer caused by the bite of an infected midge, which is a type of fly, but it is not spread from direct contact of deer to deer, nor is it communicable to humans from deer, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and other online sites.
There is no cure for the disease, but a killing frost stops it with the die-off of the flies. And also, according to the ODNR, the outbreaks are usually at the same time of droughts. And guess what we’ve been enduring lately? At least my Toledo front yard is practically a dry, brushy brown rug.