Tick Storm Has Readers Pickin’ But Not Grinnin’

Payoffs, threats and force are necessary to get leads on hot fishing holes. But people will leave a lake while the trout are still biting just to tell me about an infestation of ticks.

Nothing gives cause for a therapy session like a few ticks crawling up your pants leg.

Got ticks? Let’s talk.

Last week, two women confided they were crawling with ticks after simply walking through the Pacific Lake area near Odessa.

“We didn’t even sit down,” one of them said. She wrinkled her nose at the thought of their bodies becoming a feast for two dozen watermelon seeds with legs.

The women had ducked into a restroom, removed their clothes and did their best to pluck off ticks that had invaded even the most remote portions of their anatomy.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“EVERY PLACE!” came the answer.

They felt much better for their drive back to Spokane, until one woman alerted the other to the tick that was crawling across her face.

This is not the season’s first report of ticks.

Personally, I picked up my first tick of 1997 while looking for ice-fishing possibilities at the end of February.

In early March, one of the newspaper librarians said ticks had latched on to members of her family.

The first week of April, I saw a family of anglers picking a cupful of ticks off their kids and dogs at the Quincy Wildlife Area.

Experts don’t know if this is a banner year for ticks. There simply isn’t anyone out there doing surveys to find out, said David Stiller, the Ticks ‘R’ Us man at the University of Idaho.

“If you’re getting more reports than normal, there very well may be more ticks this year,” he said.

Folklore says a hard winter will thin the tick crop. “Climate can have an effect,” Stiller said. “A hot summer can kill them from desiccation. But there’s more to it than weather.”

Indeed, an infestation of ticks this year could be the result of a bumper crop of mice two years ago.

Rodents are a tick’s first nursery. From the egg, the tenacious arachnids hatch as larvae no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.

If they find a host on which to feed - usually a rodent - they grow into the nymphal stage.

A nymph that feeds will become an adult tick. Nymphs that fail to find a host don’t die. They just endure a prolonged childhood.

At age two or three, fed nymphs become adults with a mission to suck blood and mate.

They hang out on grass or brush waiting for the first warm-blooded creature to breeze by: coyotes, marmots, deer, YOU.

Frequent checking can help prevent tick bites, because ticks usually scout a new home for 4-6 hours before attaching.

But if they go undetected or out of scratching or biting range, the female tick will latch on with her nasty mouthparts and feed until she bulges so large her legs can’t reach below her abdomen to walk.

After about two weeks, the female will drop off, lay her eggs and die.

Male ticks, on the other hand, see a warm-blooded body as a playing field. They like to hook onto a host, feed, detach, cruise the streets and look for chick ticks.

Unless he’s plucked off, licked off or scratched off, the male might stay on one host feeding, breeding, and generally having a great time for a month. Or he might move from host to host.

“This is one prime way they can transmit disease agents,” said Stiller, who, like most entomologists, owes his living to agriculture.

Ticks have tremendous economic impacts to the livestock industry. It’s only a sideline for entomologists to look into Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fever and Lyme disease in humans.

Do ticks have any redeeming value?

“None,” Stiller said.

The good news is that the ticks we’re currently encountering most likely are Rocky Mountain wood ticks, Stiller said, noting that the adults will pretty much have had their fill of our blood by the end of the month.

The bad news: “June through September is prime feeding time for the American dog tick.”

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review