If the plural of anecdote is data, I’ll add a data point - ticks here in my area of SE Mass (more specifically: my yard) are bad this year, the worst in maybe the last seven or eight years.
I’ve actually been attached-to for the first time in a decade or more, and my wife has gotten several, and that’s really just from working in the yard. We’re checking the dog much more closely as a result…she has that stuff on her that will kill them when they attach, but that doesn’t stop them from riding into the house and then dropping off onto (say) the sofa, where we’ve found five or six crawling about.
Guineas eat ticks but they tend to have a short life as semi-feral birds.
I have lived in tick country my whole life. Tuck in your pants, check frequently, and cultivate an acute reaction to the feeling of anything crawling on you. A fine-toothed comb for your hair is helpful.
Thanks, that’s good to know! We do have two cats at home. I’ll be sure to keep any permethrin-treated clothing well segregated from our cats when I get home.
All good advice. The thing is, we do take precautions when we go out into the woods, say for a hike, but then we don’t seem to get ticks. It’s when we’re back at the campsite, sitting around the fire on the well-cut down grass, or on the porch, when the ticks come to us. That’s why I want to turn at least the campsite into a tick-free zone. I’m typically an environmentalist, but I swear if I could get ahold of some black-market DDT I would carpet-bomb the camp perimeter.
I’ve heard you can set down a big white square of poster board on the ground in tick country with a chunk of dry ice in the center, and the ticks will gather around in a circle like the hominids around the monolith at the start of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. I might try that next time we’re up there. It might distract the ticks from us, and it would be interesting to see how many are attracted.
I may have overdone that part. I removed two ticks from my person last weekend. The first time, I felt something on my leg and reflexively brushed it off before my brain parsed “that was a tick”, and then I realized what I had seen. The second time I was relaxing indoors, and felt something on my back and reflexively brushed it off. Then I thought, “damn, that must have been a tick, I should find it and get rid of it.” So I got on hands and knees looking for it. I found it when I saw it climbing up my hand, and which point I again reflexively brushed it off, before thinking, damn, that was dumb, I want to get RID of it. So I crawled around some more until I found it again, and succeeded in picking it up with a pit of paper towel and flushing it down a toilet.
Yeah, it’s a good reflex, but it can be over-trained.
I’m overdoing it in a different sense-- getting phantom creepy-crawly sensations. Ever since I got back from up north, I keep feeling like something is crawling up my leg or my back, but when I check there’s nothing there.
Yeah, the complete muscle memory for ticks is: something crawling on me → freeze. locate. pin. pick off while making sure the tick doesn’t escape. destroy.
Everybody has the reflex to instantly brush off something crawling on them. It’s how we avoid getting stung or bitten by insects.
And drown-proof. Got home from a camping trip last summer, threw a load of dirty camping clothes in the washer and when the clothes came out there was a live tick that must have had a fun ride in there.
My family all have their favorite means of tick murder. I prefer crushing them against a hard surface with my fingernail, but when I’m picking dozens off the dogs, it’s quicker to submerse them in a dish of rubbing alcohol. Others prefer to tear their teeny heads off. In winter, one can always toss them on to the top of the wood stove.
You have them in the winter?!?! I definitely don’t want to live where you live. We typically have them in the spring and into early summer. Then we have a nearly tick free existence for months.
Not in the dead of winter but by April we’re seeing ticks, and there’s snow on the ground still. We light fires into May. They wane in late summer but get a fresh wind in fall.
I had a college buddy who bought some land in rural MO after he got married. He had two or three dogs and kept a jar of rubbing alcohol on the porch. He’d drop the ticks in the jar after he pulled them off the dogs (or himself). When the jar got full he’d toss it in his burn barrel while he was burning trash.
Just the sight of that tick jar was enough to squick me out. Some of those things were huge!
After several weeks of rain multiple times a week, I finally got to start painting the foundation with Drylock for exterior walls on Veterans Day. Within 2 hours I flushed 2 ticks down the toilet after finding them crawling on me when I went inside for a break. Having already had Lyme disease a decade earlier, it creeped me out enough that I put off finishing until early December.
Since tick season is once again upon us, I thought I’d wake up this thread from its year long hibernation to share a nice tick-related life hack I just heard about:
My friend was listening to the radio and someone mentioned taking duct tape and wrapping some, sticky-side out, around the ankle area. The person recommending this trick said they caught several ticks trying to climb up their legs that way.
I removed two ticks from my person last weekend. The first time, I felt something on my leg and reflexively brushed it off before my brain parsed “that was a tick”, and then I realized what I had seen. The second time I was relaxing indoors, and felt something on my back and reflexively brushed it off. Then I thought, “damn, that must have been a tick, I should find it and get rid of it.” So I got on hands and knees looking for it. I found it when I saw it climbing up my hand, and which point I again reflexively brushed it off, before thinking, damn, that was dumb, I want to get RID of it. So I crawled around some more until I found it again, and succeeded in picking it up with a pit of paper towel and flushing it down a toilet.
