Why nearly 40,000 caramel-scented rabies vaccines landed around Burlington last week

Last Friday, Owen Montgomery spent the day in a helicopter, flying over Burlington and surrounding towns and dropping more than 30,000 packets of frozen rabies vaccines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services program that Montgomery works with does this every summer to try to manage rabies in raccoons, skunks and foxes across the state. But this is the first year in over two decades there’s been an extra vaccine drop in Vermont. That’s because of a localized rabies outbreak in Chittenden County wildlife.

“It all started in March of 2021 in Williston, there was a skunk at a housing development,” Montgomery said. Since then, about two dozen raccoons, skunks, and foxes have tested positive for rabies in the greater Burlington area. Before that, there hadn’t been a rabies case outside a bat in the region in years.