Time for Ticks

Today is the first day of spring, believe it or not.  Around this part of March, I start keeping an eye out for ticks.   Once I researched ticks, minimally.  I didn’t find data to answer even half my questions about them.  Either ticks aren’t a subject researchers want to explore (understandably- yuck!!!), or I didn’t look in the right places.  Because of my lack of information, I don’t know much about what makes ticks tick.  Still, it makes sense to me that their behavior could be triggered by the amount of daylight like other species, and that is why I start checking for them in March.

Regardless of what makes ticks arise and awake, my friend Gail has told me some interesting tales about them.  One winter, she pulled ticks off her laundry in January.  Another year, her husband brought one home after hunting in November.  I remember my Dad, who lived at York until age 14, recollecting that he pulled ticks off the horses in February.

And speaking of York, and without any research to back me up, I maintain York and Nelson are the tick capital of Lewis and Clark County.  One warm sunny March afternoon Gail and I decided to hike the Big Log Gulch trail near Nelson.  The trails near where we live were still snow covered and icy, so the  lower, dryer Nelson area seemed like a good choice for an outing.

 We had been hiking for a half hour or so when Gail said, “We haven’t seen any ticks yet.”  We started looking down at our pant legs to discover we each had about ten ticks on each leg.  Then we glanced at the grass along the trail, noticing a tick on almost every blade of grass within sight.  Some days our common sense takes a hike before we do, so we kept going for a couple miles until we reached a spring.  By this time we were covered with hundreds of ticks.  Oddly, my dog, Max, didn’t seem to pick up nearly as many ticks as we did, although he scraped every bush and tree and rubbed up against every bit grass.  He was running everywhere, while we hugged the trail.  Perhaps there is something to be said for hiking in a fur coat. 

In any event, I remember ending the day standing in my underwear at the trailhead while my hiking partner pulled tick after tick off me.  For some reason, she didn’t want me and the ticks riding in her truck.  I guess we get fussy as we age.  I went home, took a bath and found two more ticks floating in the bath water.   After dinner, I asked my husband to inspect my hair.  He didn’t perform the task with enthusiasm, so I ran a fine toothed comb through it and found two more ticks.  The old saying, “I went through it with a fine tooth comb,” never made more sense than it did that day.   

The moral of the story is two fold:

                                              1)  Watch for ticks, starting in March.

2) During “Iffy” spring weather, the ticks like warm      sunny places just as much as you do.