Ticked Off, Part 2

Last of all—and the most common mite in our neck of the woods—is the wood tick; usually called the American dog tick or the brown dog tick (who’s brown—the dog or the tick?). The American dog tick goes after both people and dogs. The brown dog tick only goes after dogs. The wood tick’s bite is the least troublesome for me. It itches for several days, but nothing like a chigger bite, and it won’t send me off to the medical system for antibiotic shots. (Now, parts west of here have to deal with the nasty Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever from this tick, but as the name implies, it’s not a big problem in our little Appalachians.)

The wood tick perches on the tip of a blade of grass or twig, patiently waiting for a mammal to wander by. Patience is truly its forte. A tick may go for years—even a decade—sitting out there, waiting for its warm-blooded meal. I can’t imagine how stoical this tick must be—or how bored. (It can’t even play tick solitaire.) This information causes me to envision a wood tick, tenaciously waiting a couple of years on its blade of grass, and then finally seeing a human coming its way. It gets so excited that it loses its grip and falls to the ground, just as the human walks ticklessly by. It slowly crawls to the blade tip once again, even hungrier, to settle in for another couple of years. The thought of the tribulations of this poor tick almost makes me want to take off my clothes and go out and lie in the woods… almost.

Virtually every bit of advice I’ve read about wood ticks tells you to gently pull an imbedded tick out of your skin, not touching it (it’s dirty!), but using rubber gloves or tweezers, and very carefully easing it out, lest its head or mouth parts break loose and fester in your hide. In over a quarter century I’ve never had a tick lose its head, either in me, my spouse, or our dogs… and we’ve pulled hundreds of ticks from us and thousands of ticks from the dogs.

With their thick doggy coats, we may miss seeing a tick for several days (sorry, I’m not going to minutely inspect every square inch of my dog’s dirty hide, several times a day). So by the time we find them, the ticks are often bloated up to several times their hungry size—looking like tiny purple zeppelins. Even after that long, the head has never come off for us.

Many people are seized by arachnophobia, but I’d rather deal with any of the many kinds of spiders we have out here, than their “mitey” cousins: ticks and chiggers. At least spiders do something useful, by preying on insects. Hmmm, I wonder if I could train them to trap ticks.