The light winter had made the ticks thick this year

My little dog Damnit this came home and he rolled in cow manure so i bathed him and i pulled 18 ticks off him from his feet to his head, i check him everyday an get 2 or 3 off him.when i was cutting a Black Oak up this week in my neighbors yard i found 2 on me . If your out check yourself very good .

light winters don't breed ticks, hosts do.
hosts such as increased wildlife populations
we thank the two previous seasons before last Fall of high oak nut production with high squirrel, deer and turkey populations. Last year's low oak nut count decimated populations here so those high tick populations are looking desperately for hosts. Hopefully the tick population also drops in kind.

It's nice to have high wildlife counts, but those high populations also support high populations of ticks.

Short Winters might help them get some more time to get a successful cycle in.
But they have to find hosts first. More time and more hosts increases populations for next year. With two year life cycles a tick population explosion will follow behind that of it's hosts.
So if you have a big population this year you need to examine host populations during it's past feeding stages. Last year and the year before.

Dogs will often tend to sniff along game trails. Game trails can be where populations are highest.



if they are out there, as soon as the ground temperature approaches 45 degrees they become active

Not any problems up here yet, more worried about the lack of rain.The brook is down at what is normal for late August.

zap

I don't know if they are more numerous here,but they were definitely earlier than normal. I had one on me after hiking back in Mid- March.Have gotten several off since. Out here, surrounded by state forests,tick checks are a part of life. Lymes disease is very prevalent here and I'm very fearful of it. Ditto on water levels being below normal,fire danger elevated. Having been watering my garden, an unheard of event for April.

The pair of them been on this for a month and we ended up pulling a full tick of Emma the other day

very bad last year here and looks the same again this year?

loon


http://www.canadavet.com/k9-advantix-C87.aspx

Had 4 ticks on me in March.. luckily they were still crawling. None on Murphles yet.

Watch out for Lyme, I was surprised in December when Murph was diagnosed, and then treated.

Murphy had it Dixie?

Yep..along with kidney stones.

It was a lovely vet bill, as it was an emergency clinic visit.

vinegar, mix it with grape juice to kill the taste

if you can ingest an ounce 3 times a week you will become inpalatable to ticks. and its actually healthy from what i read. those of us old enough probably remember a fad product called "jogging in a jug" it was basically vinegar and white grape juice. im not certain how the vinegar acts with your body chemistry (PH maybe?) but it apparantly makes you not so tasty to ticks.

wife and i were up on the blue ridge parkway today, i took one off her after we got home. she wont do the vinegar thing i do, see post above , far as i can tell it does work i seldom ever find a tick on me and its usually early in the season before i start my regimen. and i spend a lot of time in the woods, yard etc.

I don't think Murph's doing that, Mike

I might, but Murphles. no way

i use frontline on my dogs, seems to work very well, much better than a traditional collar

Boy the ticks seem to be really be getting bigger this year.
Twice so far, I found a tick crawling up Bella's leg, also found a dead one on the bed.!!
Nasty buggers!

that sounds like the wine an old Italian man I used to know made, smelled an tasted vinegar an knocked you on butt with one cup.

first the ants (which were harmless), then i get a tick bite and some good poison ivy, now tonight, my kid gets a tick on his head that i find when i bath him. this was after a quick walk through the backyard. i liked it better in the winter haha!

We had our yard sprayed by Tick Ranger and haven't seen a tick in a month. We were pulling them by the dozen before hand. Also learned that ticks in this part of CT are not the least afraid of Frontline so we've had to switch to Vectra after both Newfs got a tick borne illness and we had 30 days of doxycyclene X2. Not fun.

Lived in the woods here for 10 years, the wife picked up her first tick 3 weeks ago. Found 4 on the dog last fall, only had 1 or 2 in the past 10 years on other occasions.


What is Tick Ranger?

It is an outright epidemic anymore! I can remember playing on the farm as a kid, building cabins and forts in the woods all year ling and NEVER EVER had a tick. That's back when there was actually wildlife in this area, LOTS OF IT. Now you are lucky to see a deer in the woods. You take a 5 minute walk in the woods around here anymore and you are COVERED in ticks!

Still plenty of wildlife up here . . . but until just three years ago ticks were pretty much only seen on the occasional pet.

This concerns me since I have been doing some work outside in the yard. I live in the country and my yard is always full of deer.
This may be a stupid question but how do you know if you have them on you....especially areas on your body you can not see?
Do they itch? Do they bite?
I have to do some googling to see what one looks like.

Edit...found a good site..

Gamma, the juvenile ticks are VERY hard to see, they are as small as or smaller than a sesame seed. Big thing is to just check yourself very good while outside working (I usually find them crawling on my pantlegs), and check yourself really good when you shower at the end of the day. Yes, they bite, problem is you won't even feel them doing it.

Gamma, Check yourself or better yet use Off! or other repellant before you go out. My wife found hers under her arm the next morning. Not sure if it came in on the dog or was there from the previous day.


Worst part is the insurance industry doesn't recognize that Lyme disease may need years of antibiotic treatments if it gets to advanced stages, usually thetick bites and leaves the host and the host never knows they got bit. The most they pay for is two weeks and some doctors are loosing there liscences because the don't prescribe within the recognized "guidelines" Tick are not necessarily bad, Lyme disease is.

My brother had it, it's not pretty.

Trouble is, the ticks in our area are not affected by anything with deet in it. You need to use a product that has Permethrin in it, but you do NOT put this bug repellent directly on your skin, you apply it to your outer garments and allow it to dry before wearing them. The products called Duranon, No Stinking Ticks, and Sawyer are a couple from the top of my head. This affect the nervous system of the tick and kill them on contact but are purportedly harmless to humans if used as directed. I won't hunt anymore without having it on my clothing because the ticks are so bad around here it isn't even funny.

We have a high tick population in our area as well. I never get them, wife get them all the time. We use front line and tick collars on the dogs. The combo seems to work well this spring so far.