Alright.
I've heard people complain about ticks in New England for ages, but up until my return to Maine a few months ago, I had only ever--in my entire life--seen two ticks. One was a tiny nymph that I discovered (in Massachusetts) within about an hour of it attaching itself to my toe, and the other was a squat, adult male I came face-to-face with while naked at The Vineyard. (That’s a story for another time…)
Now that spring has arrived and, for the first time at my new house, I'm out and about mowing my very own lawn, ticks are a constant threat.
The hunter I tried to shoo off my property this fall warned me that the giant pile of leaves we had dumped in the woods just past the edge of our lawn was going to be a tick breeding ground. He said our woods were a big, fat tick danger zone already and that the leaves would make it worse. Of course, he also said that getting up before dawn and spending time in the freezing cold sitting up a tree so as to shoot a deer through the heart with an arrow was a great way to spend time, so…you can see how I may have been dismissive of his judgment. As with all the other tick complainers I'd heard over the years, I thought he was just being alarmist. It turns out the young hunter knows from whence he speaks. (At least when it comes to ticks.)
Ticks breed in leaf piles. One female deer tick lays approximately 3,000 eggs per season. They hatch later in the summer. I know, I know. You think we’re idiots for just dumping our leaves in the woods. But hear me out. We closed on our house October 28
th. There were several season’s worth of leaves on nearly an acre of lawn. Most of those damnable trees, by the way, are actually the trees of our neighbors, but their overgrown branches dump massive volumes of leaves onto
our lawn. We were trying to get moved in, clean the place up, buy furniture, fix all the freakin’ things that were wrong (damn you, Tinkers!) and just generally settle in—plus get the yard squared away before it snowed. Oh—and after the first week we were both back to working full-time.
We estimate that we could have filled more than 100 large yard waste bags with leaves. Instead of doing that, we piled tarps and wheelbarrows high and dragged them into the woods. It seemed a wise idea. In fact it even obscured some of the rusting car parts and 50-gallon drums marked “Chemicals” that were, as it turned out, rusting away on our property. Instead of going to a landfill, those leaves, we believed, would just decompose out there in nature, the way God intended. Turns out—God also intended that they host a few hundred thousand ticks.
Phooey.
Ticked off
The first tick I discovered was last week. It happened quite by accident and I almost lost my mind.
I was sitting at my computer. I work from home and had mowed the lawn for 20 minutes during my lunch hour. Back at my desk, I idly scratched an itch on my forearm and then, almost without thinking, I looked under my fingernail—AAARGGHHH! There was a *giant,* scary, gangly-legged tick wiggling its icky arms at me. AHHHHHH! I yelped and flicked it away.
The cat sat looking up at me.
Is it time for a treat?
No. It’s time for a flea bath.
Shit.
To say I was
freaking out is not quite the right way to describe what I was feeling. The expression “having an aneurism” comes to mind. I mean, from the outside, I looked fairly normal and I was remaining mostly calm. But on the inside, a rapid domino-effect of adrenaline-fueled cellular explosion was taking place, so that I was rapidly growing more jittery and more upset. I felt a dozen ticks crawling on my body. I pictured that one, creepy red-backed tick crawling into my bed at night looking for warm, dark mammalian spots to belly up to the bar. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!
Find the tick- find the tick- I have to find the tick!
Inhale.
Exhale.
Okay.
Search and destroy
First, I searched the floor, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. (Fuck! Double fuck!)
Then I tried to enlist Peter’s help, but he basically didn’t see a problem. Read:
He didn’t believe it was a tick.
I knew it was a tick. And, if I couldn’t find it, I was going to vacuum every surface within 15 feet of “the incident.” I was going to vacuum and vacuum and vacuum until I was
sure I had sucked up that tick. About two minutes into the vacuuming, I found the tick. There it was, just lumbering across the floor, all big and slow and leggy.
Oh,
gawd(!) What now?
I tried to squish it, but I swear it just laughed a little Jabba the Hutt laugh.
Now that I had evidence—the captured tick (yes, it IS a tick!)—Peter and I consulted. It was decided that we would ball the little villain up in a couple of tissues—tightly, securely, fucking federal penitentiary maximum security—and then flush it.
Technically, I triple flushed it.
About an hour later I still felt like I was going to need a Xanex to finish my work day.
Ticks and leeches. I cannot
have that. No. No. NO.
Constant vigilance
Now, whenever I mow the lawn, I wear my old soccer socks, the tall sturdy ones I wore when I played in the Golden Gate Soccer League in San Francisco. They’re white and they stay up over my knees. And they are excellent at revealing ticks.
Today, I found one (when I walked near that leaf pile…sigh…) and flicked it off my sock. And then when I got inside, I pounded out my shoes like you would to get the sand off after a walk on the beach, but instead...ticks. I used the tissue prison/triple flush method again.
Calm, but still exploding with adrenaline inside, that’s when I decided: enough. In the words of the sergeant from the “War is the H-Word” episode of
Futurama, “War were declared.”
A little research, a few credit card purchases, and a lot of false-alarm-itches later, I had knowledge, weapons—and a plan.
My enemy is slow and predictable
Even though I am, by nature, an organic-vegetable-eating be-kind-to-earth’s-creatures capture-each-spider-and-relocate-them-outdoors kind of gal, the gloves are off. I don’t begrudge these ticks their dinner, I really don’t. But it will NOT be me. Or Peter. Or our cats.
My defensive stance has a multi-pronged approach. We defend from all possible sides.
Step one: Keep the ticks off my person.
I will continue to wear my over-the-knee white socks whenever I mow the lawn. I will see if I can find another pair, for back up. And, those socks are going nuclear.
It turns out the best
acaricide is something called
permethrin, which apparently doesn’t really bother most mammals and birds, but which is highly toxic to cats. Yikes. Nevertheless, I have purchased
SAWYER® PREMIUM CLOTHING INSECT REPELLENT 24 oz Trigger Spray via Amazon.com ($16.02), my intention being to douse my lawn-mowing-tick-deterrent socks in it—without killing my cats.
We were already checking for ticks after every outdoor activity, so we’ll also continue to do that, of course. And the cats, even though they stay indoors, have been treated with Advantage flea and tick treatment.
Step two: Reduce the population, part I
I have also purchased permethrin in the form of
Damminix Tick Tubes ($28.95). It turns out that it’s *mice* not deer who are responsible for spreading Lyme disease in the tick population. If you keep the ticks from coming into contact with mice on your property, you can potentially both reduce the tick population and reduce the Lyme-disease-infected tick population.
We have on our property what was generously billed in the real estate listing as a “garage.” We call it, “the mouse house.” The door doesn’t open without a crow bar; one of the windows is busted. And, while we’ve only ever seen one of them (a blind and abandoned baby that I rescued from the driveway and returned to the mouse house), the place is, we presume by the looks of the nests, poop, and apparent mouse “activity,” inhabited by one or two mice.
Tick Tubes are essentially wads of cotton doused in permethrin. The mice take the cotton back to their nests and it wipes out the ticks without harming the mice. They didn’t mention any danger to cats…but since we keep ours indoors and we don’t expect stray cats to come in contact with the mouse house nests, I feel confident enough in this plan to move ahead with it.
Step three: Diminish their habitat
I had been letting some of the grasses on the edges of our lawn grow tall, but no more. Ticks like tall grass, which means I am on a mission to eradicate all possible habitats that could be appealing to ticks within ten feet of our living areas. (Ticks apparently have a
nine-foot migration zone.)
We will also stop dumping our leaves and grass clippings in the woods. From now on, the lawn clippings either go into the compost or get mulched right back into the lawn, which, it turns out, is
really the best thing for the lawn, anyway.
Step four: Create a barrier to entry
Sometimes called an “eco-zone,” it is, it seems, possible to create a barrier
between your outdoor living areas and the tick habitat—in our case, the woods. Some public officials in Fairfax County, Virginia have prepared this
helpful document (.pdf), which illustrates the point.
If we lay down a three-foot-wide layer of cedar chips between the “tick zone” and our “safe zone” then the ticks are unlikely to be able to cross it. We haven’t yet decided if this is an economically viable route for us to take yet, since it would really take a LOT of cedar chips to create an effective boundary.
Step five: Discourage deer from entering our “safe zone”
Because ticks can hitch a ride on deer, it’s also important to keep the deer from coming into our yard. Fortunately, the herd of deer that live in our woods have access to lots of food and water and healthy habitat during the warm months when ticks are feeding and breeding. Even in the winter, we never saw a deer or any sign that the herd in our woods ventured into our lawn. This may have something to do with the hunter and his tree stands that are within sight of our back porch…or it may be that they have enough food where they are.
In any event, everything I’ve planted thus far on the property is deer-resistant. My vegetable garden will be small and fenced off in a way that will make it hard for deer to get to. Tinier wild vegetarians will be a bigger problem—although not so much of a tick-related one.
We may also employ some old tricks like soap or human hair to keep the deer at bay.
Step six: Deal with the leaf pile (aka Reduce the population, part 2)
We are still strategizing the best way to handle our leaf pile. Encase it in concrete? Burn it? Douse it with poison? Shovel it into hundreds of bags and try to foist it off on the landfill? The perfect solution has not been identified. But don’t be alarmed if you drive by and see us wearing white hazmat suits (I do own one) and carrying torches.
If you’re looking for more information on ticks and how to deter or remove them (from yourself, your pet, or your property), these Web sites are helpful:
American Lyme Disease Foundation, Deer Tick Ecology
Helium Home and Garden, What to do with grass cuttings
The National Capital Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Association, Securing Your Environment
Fairfax County Fight the Bite, Lyme Disease and Ticks (.pdf)
This blog post is copyrighted 2010. If you are reading it on Facebook and the hyperlinks didn’t come through in the import, visit the original for the fully-functioning version here [http://graychase.blogspot.com/2010/06/tales-from-rural-maine-ticks-vs-humans.html].
