As Skaneateles town supervisor, Charlie Major faced several interesting challenges, the most publicized of which was The Case of the House That Wouldn’t Stop Growing, when he finally had to order a home razed when the owners refused to comply with town regulations and the remodeling plan that had been approved.

That bit of trouble reflected a bit on the reputation of the town, but there was another problem that threatened the reputation of the lake, which to many is a far more serious matter. You see, when I was growing up in the1940s and ‘50s, Skaneateles Lake was considered so clean that some folks believed you could drink its water untreated. Well, that soon changed . . . thanks to ducks.

Ducks and Canada geese have become an annoyance throughout the country, but there was something particularly unseemly about what ducks were doing to the lake that Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, a native of Central New York, once called “the most beautiful body of water in the world.”

IN AUGUST 1991, Charlie Major decided to do something about those dirty ducks. He organized his forces and formulated a plan. He told the Syracuse Post-Standard, ``We knew who was going to trap them, who was going to pick them up -- we were all set to go.''

The object was to eliminate “duck itch,” a condition that for swimmers became an even bigger concern than the late’s notoriously cold water (caused by long, frigid winters, the depth of the skinny lake, and its location between rows of hills that minimize exposure to sunlight). To get rid of the itch, you have to get rid of the ducks.

Village Clerk Sally Sheehan explained to the newspaper that the scientific names for the problem caused by the ducks are cercarial dermatitis and schistosome dermatitis.

``It's an acute, non-communicable, cutaneous inflammatory response due to penetration of the skin by (certain) parasites,'' she read from a medical description.

THE PESKY PARASITE is produced when duck excrement interacts with snails that live in the lake.

``When it leaves the snails, it attaches to anything that's around, including humans,'' Sheehan explained to Post-Standard reporter Ellen Roberts. Sheehan claimed she had experienced the problem, but with her it was “just a mild rash.” She said others, particularly children, were left with itchy, ugly welts.

So Charlie Major set out to eliminate the ducks, and put a positive spin on his plan in this statement to the newspaper:

``We were going to take them to a resident in a neighboring town who has a farm, and he'd slaughter them, or have people come and slaughter them -- people who are homeless, people who need food. These ducks are the best eating duck you can find -- they only ingest bread and corn, so they're good and fat -- very good eating.''

HE ADMITTED he had staged similar, but smaller operations in the past, trapping ducks in the wee small hours and giving them away, sometimes to restaurants. And for a few years this was Charlie Major’s little secret.

But then the federal government found out about it and said a permit was necessary for anyone who intended to trap the ducks, considered a migratory bird. This contradicted — but superseded the state’s classification of the ducks as domestic birds.

The federal permit would allow Charlie’s group to trap the ducks, but not have them killed. They would be transferred to a wildlife refuge. Also, reports would have to be filed, which would require a duck count and some verification that the problem caused by these birds was severe enough to warrant the action.

And that’s why Charlie Major began taking boat rides along the lake shore, taking a head count of the ducks he saw.

INTERESTINGLY, there were few complaints from swimmers during the summer of 1991, but Charlie told the Post-Standard there were enough incidents to consider closing the town beach.

Town officials also asked people not to feed the ducks, which is easier said than done. Anyone who has ever been to any place frequented by ducks knows humans love to toss bread, crackers and peanuts at the animals. The more the ducks are fed, the more ducks will be attracted to the location. I once saw a television report on a waterside neighborhood in West Virginia where a resident began feeding a small group of ducks in her front yard. Within a few months there was a large flock of ducks on her front porch, almost demanding to be fed. It was like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

In the meantime, swimmers were advised to move out from shore into deeper water, swim and move around rather than stand still, and to wipe themselves dry, since it was possible to actually wipe the parasite off the skin. But just in case, keep some calamine lotion handy.

THE PROBLEM either has greatly diminished over the past 19 years or Central New Yorkers have developed tougher skin or have learned to live with the itch. I found few recent articles on the subject, and some of those were about Oneida Lake, a huge, but relatively shallow body of water north of Syracuse.

My guess is duck itch will always be with us ... because people love to feed ducks. And ducks just love to be fed, but after gobbling down all that food, they have to ... well, you get the picture.

Of course, you could simply blame the whole thing on those damn snails.

— JACK MAJOR

(This experience may have prepared Charlie for what to do when, several years later, a hawk landed at this lakeside camp and decided it was just the place he wanted to spend his summer vacation. As days passed, the hawk became perhaps too tame. Photo, top of page. Charlie took the hawk on a drive to Ithaca where Cornell University naturalists had a little heart-to-heart talk with the bird and released him back into the wild.)