Well, once again, it’s Tick Time. They hang out on tall objects (mostly dead weed stems and the sides of buildings) with their little front legs outstreched, and grab on when someone brushes past unsuspectingly. They don’t bite right away, so we usually find them when they are still crawling around looking for a place to latch on (at this time of year, every little tickle and itch becomes suspect). The ones we have around here are good old Dermacentor variabilis, which some people call a “dog tick” and others call a “wood tick”, while just about everybody calls it an “eeewwww” when they find it crawling up their leg.

You can actually tell the males from the females pretty easily. The males have a hard, patterned body, while the females have a sort of “shield” structure behind the head, and the abdomen is unpatterned and kind of leathery.

The reason for the difference is pretty obvious: the females have to have a stretchy enough abdomen to do this:

This one was on the dog, by the way. It could have gotten a lot bigger, this one was picked off before it was finished[1].

[Edit: Jeremy pointed out in the comments below that I misidentified the engorged one. The legs and the shield-like structure behind the head (the scutum) on the engorged tick are both black, not reddish-brown legs and light-colored scutum like the other ticks on this page. This means it is some other kind of tick, not a wood tick. And, as it turned out, we have since found more of these, and they were positively identified as deer ticks by the Michigan Department of Agriculture. These are the ones that carry Lyme Disease, among other illnesses. Uh oh.]

They normally don’t stay on a human long enough to get this much blood, the victim usually notices they are there long before this point. Sometimes, the ones on the dogs get to be as big as grapes[2]. I can see where a small mammal, like a squirrel, getting more than a couple of female ticks could easily start having problems with blood loss.

With the amount of blood that they get, a successful female tick could probably lay a few thousand eggs without much difficulty[4]. Even if we managed to get them all eradicated from the yard somehow, it would probably only take one passing deer to drop an engorged tick to completely restock them for the next spring.

Wood ticks like these are distinct from deer ticks, which are smaller and more likely to carry disease (particularly Lyme disease, although they evidently transmit other diseases of deer that are communicable to people, like brucellosis). According to reports from the neighbors, the deer ticks are just starting to colonize this area, so we’ll probably be seeing pictures of them at some point. Wonderful.

The neighbors who used to live in our house (and who have lived on our road for at least 50 years) say that the wood ticks weren’t a problem in the past, either. They evidently migrated into the area sometime in the last 30 years or so. They really like the boggy bottomlands north of the house, anybody going into that area this time of year is almost certain to pick up anywhere from 3 to 10 ticks in just a few minutes. Sometimes I think we need a “decontamination chamber” at the entrance to the house, where people coming in would stop and thoroughly brush down to remove any ticks from their clothing. Disrobing and fumigating would probably work, too, but that seems a bit extreme.

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[1] There are a lot of methods that people bandy about for removing ticks, but we normally just grasp them firmly and pull them off. Bug Girl has a nice bit about removing ticks, and links to the instructions from the Center for Disease Control. In general, this boils down to needing two things: Calmness[3], and a pair of tweezers. Grab the tick as close to the victim’s skin as possible with the tweezers, and pull firmly until it pops off. If you expect to get a lot of ticks, there are these things that look like tiny crowbars, called “tick twisters”, that work pretty good, too. But, you can’t usually count on having access to the fancy tools, while you can always be pretty sure of being able to lay hands on some tweezers. When you pull off a tick that has latched on, they usually just pull a small bit of the dead surface layer of the skin off with them, and as long as they haven’t penetrated to the blood supply yet there isn’t even a wound. If there is bleeding, disinfecting the wound is an excellent idea. Any tick bite that draws blood should be taken seriously enough to have a doctor look at it, or at least keep under observation for symptoms of disease. Once ticks are off, they are quite difficult to kill, crushing them is almost impossible – it’s like trying to crush an apple seed. And, if you toss them in the trash without killing them, they’ll just crawl back out and wait for you, to take another go at your circulatory system. If you aren’t sure what kind of tick it is, it’s a good idea to save it in a little bottle until you can be sure whether it’s a disease-carrying kind. We generally are pretty sure about what we’ve got here, and just want to get rid of them. So, we usually take drastic measures like cutting off their heads with a pair of scissors, or dropping them in a small cup of bleach. That generally finishes ‘em right off.

[2] One year, we had a stray dog that S. picked up in the woods that was covered with ticks. He had hundreds, dripping off him like bunches of grapes. We doused him with medicated shampoo and kept him in the back of the truck until they all dropped off and died. It was pretty appalling.

[3] Don’t panic. Don’t Panic! DO YOU HEAR ME? DON’T PANIC!! I WILL NOT TOLERATE PANIC!!!

[4] If you want to see how many eggs a female tick can lay, have a look at the first picture on this page. The text is in Portuguese, but the picture pretty much speaks for itself, don’t you think?