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Tick removal

Muskrat said:
dedicate a pair of pants for hiking and spray them with permethrin.
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I get most ticks while mowing, clearing and using my own 11 acres. I've had tick disease twice, my wife has had it, and so have all my dogs. I've sprayed clothes, tents and camping gear with permethrin, which seems to work, but got tired of repeating this process. So, I watched for sales and bought myself two pairs of permethrin treated socks, one pair of pants, one long sleeve pullover shirt, and one long sleeve button shirt. These clothes are supposed to retain their permethrin treatment for up to 50 washings.

The important thing is to have your pants tucked in your socks, have long sleeve shirts and wear a hat. The ticks often come down from branches above. When your clothing barrier is treated with permethrin, that's about the best you can do.
 
Glenn's advice is correct but in the 17 years we lived in CT near Old Lyme ( Madison) we never wore long pants in the summer and long sleeve shirts and hats were not our summer wardrobe. We had woods (50 acres ) and the orneriest sawgrass in one acre. This was from 1983 -2000 maybe prehistoric years

Not gotten Lyme disease. Yes the dog tested positive when we came to Maine.. but tested positive every year. She was a Maine dog ( but raised in CT)and the vet thinks she was a carrier of erlichiosis. Ticks carry more than one fun thing. She lived to 14 years ( not bad for a Golden..need another Golden ASAP)

Glen mentioned ticks often come from above.. I agree. We have em in Maine and the first thing that feels suspicious is my head.. I remove a fair amount from my hair. They are all woodies. But we have a lot of deer.

My EMS partner in CT got very ill from Lyme.. Bradycardia to the point he was almost in cardiac arrest. This was in the 80's and Yale was the right hospital to be in.. They did the first clinical studies of Lyme disease.
 
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Central VA has a lot of ticks and lots of my guys get sick. We survey land and spend lots of time outside. Lymes. Lone star allergy. Rocky Mnt. The big ticks are easy if you pay attention and go after the initial sting. It takes a while to transfer the juice and you want to get them when you feel the bite. YOU DO. Drop your pants and pull it when you feel it bite. (Hopefully you're not beside a highway. But you'll learn not to care.) For seed ticks, or the nests that you run through in high grass and pines, we use duct tape. There will be hundreds of them. You'll miss some and probably be pulling them off for weeks, but if your pants are positively CRAWLING with tiny ticks you can barely see, apply duct tape and yank, amazing. Seriously. On hairy body parts it will work as well, but, there will be pain. Chiggers are worse, as it's mostly the big ole ticks that spread the nasties. Chiggers are impossible and have to run their course. The first night will be sleepless and awful.
 
The deer ticks are surprisingly small, like pin head size, and hard to see or feel compared to wood ticks. Before I moved to Ak. in 90' I never had a tick in Pa, now you can't avoid them. I think they came up from Virginia.
 
Finding and pulling the thing off before 24 hours passes is critical... otherwise you and your close friend the tick will start exchanging bodily fluids... and we all know from the movie Dr. Strangelove, how vital and necessary the protection of our precious bodily fluids really is.

Maps showing high-risk areas, US and Ontario... the men in white coats waving test tubes have shown that risk may be 7X higher in areas where natural forest cover has been fragmented into smaller patches by development. So spending time where forest cover is near 100% may be a way of reducing risk. And more natural... that's what we want, isn't it?

White-footed mice are the biggest reservoir of Lyme disease since they prefer fragmented forest areas so do your part to safeguard the nation's precious bodily fluids... to make this world a better world, carry mouse traps. This will also make you sleep better at night since mice have cold feet and feeling those frigid little feet on your face will wake you up, unless you've been drinking heavily.

Risk maps...

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/20/map-lyme/

http://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/eRepository/Lyme_disease_risk_areas_map.pdf


Why is Lyme expanding? The CDC paper, written by Kiersten J. Kugeler, PhD and colleagues, doesn’t speculate. Other research, though—especially at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in upstate New York—has documented that Lyme is more likely to occur where suburban development breaks up existing forest. Their work has found that, the smaller the chunks an ecosystem is carved into, the greater the chance that the most important animal in the Lyme-disease transmission cycle, the white-footed mouse, can flourish without pressure from predators.
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Well, maybe not doomed if we all stock up on guns and ammo and declare war on white-footed mice. Also DEET, ticks hate DEET (at least our Canadian government up here says so, but that might be to keep tourism going).

Unfortunately, googling shows that logged-over areas seem to support more white-footed mice... and unfortunately, I wasn't able to copy and link. danged scientists....
 
If the little nymph ticks (we call them seed ticks here in TICK central) transmit disease, then we are truly doomed and I will begin changing careers so's I can spend my days inside. Their nests are awful and will leave you quite literally crawling with hundreds of invisible mites. We assure each other the nymphs are harmless. We must. If the opposite is true, we would rather not know, and will continue to assume that it is the adult ticks that will transmit the nasties. (If you know otherwise, please keep it to yourself.) Back in the day I feel like there was a "tick season," sort of like "chigger season" when the chiggers build hotels in the Queen Anne's Lace or the second half of summer season when the yellowjackets start to get angry and, if disturbed, will chase you like kamakazes for long distances through the woods. Any more ticks are a constant. Certainly they almost, but not quite, disappear in the winter. But I sometimes wonder if it doesn't get cold enough here in the southeast anymore to kill them off, or perhaps they are simply evolving and adapting to the cold. Another awful thought. Winter is our favorite season for lack of violent insects and poisonous, or briary vines. Some areas are certainly more prone to ticks then others (we have found the worst areas to be planted pines and tall grasses, planted pines they will rain from the sky), and when we spend time in those high population areas, we put our bodies on high alert, atune to the slightest prick. If you don't catch it quick enough, they latch on and numb the area such that you don't feel their presence anymore. Then a visual inspection and removal is necessary. (Typically we wait for our significant others for such inspections as they need to be very thorough.) Of course we close up our clothing and in truly horrible areas we'll duct tape our sleeves and pant cuffs but most insects can find a way in, and then yellowjackets can sting right through a shirt and get all wrapped up in your clothing such that you can't shake them off. When we stir up a nest of yellowjackets after they turn angry, they'll be a posse of grown men running through the woods screaming like camanches throwing their clothes behind them as they go. We've got two guys who have developed the bizarre "red meat allergy" but one of them seems to be moving through it and is now able to eat beef steaks again without breaking out in hives and being wracked with horrible stomach cramps. I've already told them if I develop that particular form of heck, please shoot me immediately.
 
Another reason the canoe routes around my area are excellent......NO TICKS! Thank God, I hate those little basturds, had enough of them in Nova Scotia in every crack and canyon of my body. Way worse than leeches, although I remember watching an adventure race on TV, set in Borneo, where a participant called in to the Doc because a leech had crawled up his pee hole. I don't want no part of them leeches!
 
frozentripper said:
White-footed mice are the biggest reservoir of Lyme disease since they prefer fragmented forest areas so do your part to safeguard the nation's precious bodily fluids... to make this world a better world, carry mouse traps. This will also make you sleep better at night since mice have cold feet and feeling those frigid little feet on your face will wake you up, unless you've been drinking heavily.

/QUOTE]

I think the chipmonks are responsible for my tick problems. When their numbers were high there were a lot more ticks. My neighbor stopped feeding deer in his yard and it helped cut down on them. I read that birds are also spreading the "seed" ticks, so maybe bird feeders gotta go.:(

Luckily I haven't found one embedded in me yet, but after I pull a couple off of me I get paranoid and think I can feel them crawling on me for weeks.

Frzntripper I have to disagree with your above statement because I had been heavily drinking when I was awoken by a mouse on my head in a Fairbanks Motel. The mgmt. was very sorry and offered me a free night stay. No thanks.
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tick removal.. take a chicken with you.

Neighbors a little away got a a flock of chickens. Previously plagued by ticks, now there is nary a tick, but there are eggs. The chickens roam the yard ( and the street under supervision) but are in a coop at night because an owl favors chicken.

DEETing your visiting tick may make it regurgitate stomach contents into you just as leeches can.
 
I am sure glad I live in Alaska. The only ticks that I know of that we have are species specific to Snowshoe Hares, this tick is thought to carry tularemia. One of my Border Collies got sick after playing roughly with a batch of baby hares (had them all lined up on the path to the garden so, my wife could find them after she was done weeding). The dog tested positive for tularemia at the dog hospital. My bride is still in shock over the dead baby bunnies.
For my visits to tick country I spray my clothes with the Sawyer Permethrin Spray. I also bought a head to toe outfit of LL Beans bug clothes. The big bears that live in my home range don't bother me mentally as the tiny deer ticks inhabit some of the places I like to visit.
 
If I going deep into the woods here on Long island, I will give my clothes a once-over with some Deet...let it dry...then put them on. I know it probably not the friendliest chemical known to man but I can say for sure it even less friendly to ticks...fortunately never found a tick on me while wearing clothes applicated (sp?) with deet.
Good luck all and stay tick free! Ticks suck!
 
My advice-don't use deet on your clothes, use permethren which works. deet dissolves plastic including some synthetic thread in clothes.
Turtle
 
Went camping with the family last weekend and got my first tick ever (2 of them, actually). They usually don't like me, because I usually use deet and/or wear insect repellent clothing to ward off the mosquitoes. Since the mosquitoes weren't out yet, I was unprotected. Found the first one on my chest when I woke up in the morning, and was able to pull lit out with my fingers. Second one was discovered that night on my back, and that one required tweezers.

Last night, when my daughter was getting ready for bed, she came out of the bathroom asking, "What's this bump on the back of my head?" Sure enough, she had a tick attached there. Didn't seem engorged yet, so we're not sure if she got it camping with us, or picked it up at school that day (she goes to an outdoor, nature-based 4K program).

Just ordered a couple of tick keys.
 
used to get tonnes of wood ticks out in Manitoba -- but this past fall me and the dog have started picking up them Lymey southern ticks here on the outskirts of the GTA -- totally different beast! I'm just about to 'invest' in one of those small tick-spinner crowbar things -- they look good in the adds
 
Wood ticks are very common around here. Deer ticks not so much. I'll find dozens of wood ticks on me before the season is over (and that's when I'm trying to avoid them) but today I found only the 2nd ever local deer tick on me. I thought it was a small piece of dirt between the webbing of my fingers until it wouldn't wipe away. Must have been the nymph stage. Couldn't believe how small it was.

20170516_003 by Alan, on Flickr

Alan
 
Alan, keep an eye on that. Seriously. The tiny size is an adult deer tick, it just has not had a chance to gorge yet.

If you develop a red "Bulls Eye" around that bite, go see a doctor. If you develop body-ache or flu-ish symptoms, go see a doctor. Around my area, many doctors treat prophylactically if you have been bitten by a deer tick, even if there has not been time for symptoms to develop.

Lyme disease caught late can give you rhumatoid arthritis type symptoms that flare up years after the infection is killed.
 
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