Like a matador swirling his cape, Patrick Roden-Reynolds pulled a swatch of white flannel this way and that on the grass and leaf litter in my yard. After a minute or so, he plucked 11 tiny ticks from the cloth with tweezers, and stuck them on a lint roller.

"It's like a plague," he said, peering at his haul. "Ticks are everywhere now."

I had asked Roden-Reynolds, a public health biologist, to inspect my yard because a lone star tick bit me as I was chopping wood last fall. It wasn't painful, but after several weeks I developed alpha-gal syndrome, an increasingly common allergy to red meat, dairy and other mammalian food products.

Like many on Martha's Vineyard, a resort island off Cape Cod that's teeming with ticks this year, I bid a sad farewell to hamburgers, bacon and lamb chops. No ice cream. No pizza. My medicine cabinet became a minefield of animal-derived byproducts, including gelatin capsules and pain meds with lactose.