We are back in Bear River and it feels great to be here! a month has gone by and this time, everything is green, birds are singing, and the tick counts are in the millions.
I have to talk about ticks again because I’m slightly obsessed and fascinated, all at the same time.
You may recall that we had encountered dog ticks just over a month ago. It was a fairly hysterical meeting as far as I was concerned and I could have sworn that I put 3 of them in a sealed jar to get identified by friends. No use getting hysterical over the wrong insect. (although my internet sleuthing tells me that like other 8 legged critters with fewer body segments, they technically aren’t insects).
Well, that jar had remained closed for all this time, and guess what? There are only 2 now and one of them is STILL ALIVE. That’s right, ONE MONTH LATER. So, in the interests of science I filled the jar with water and now, 3 days later, the live one is submerged, swimming, and clinging (eating?) the dead one. It is all so gross, but you can see my fascination. Well who wouldn’t be fascinated with something that is so darned prolific and that can suck blood like a vampire.
We have moved to this idyllic little house in the country and when I look out the window I see vistas of fields, woods, blue sky and probably by my reckoning, one million ticks in the grass, waiting for me to come out and play.
Our landlady Linda feels badly about the ticks and if it’s any consolation, she mentioned today that she hears that the tick count is particularly high this year. Linda is the type of person who will take on a project or an outcome and do it effectively and efficiently, so when I found out that even Linda couldn’t banish the ticks, I knew it was time to take even more serious measures. Surely someone could save me from the ticks? Folklore has it that ticks, like me, are snobs about cut lawns and much prefer tall waving grasses and meadows and natural looking surroundings. Which is one of the reasons we moved to Bear RIver in the first place–for that authentic country look. But hey, if I have to shave my head for the next 6 weeks in order to be able to feel Ok about going outside, so be it.
So, for piece of mind and to solve the problem, we called up Steve to come and please mow the grass, as he has done for Linda in the past, only this time, please double or even triple the lawn area.
Steve shows up with a riding lawn-mover, a weed whipper, and bare arms. He smiles and tells me that mowing the lawn won’t solve the problem, as we might be living in a tick ‘hot-spot’ and these ‘hot-spots’ move around all the time. Steve is unimpressed with ticks and while Larry and I are suited up like we’re handling hazardous waste, Steve wades into the high grass without even tucking his pants into his socks.
He says that ticks are part of the total lifestyle here and there is no way around it….you have to come to accept them and work around it. He spends a good deal of time assuring me that ticks will crawl on you for 2 days before they latch on. He says that he’d gladly live with double the tick levels if only there were no blackflies. (Which are out now too!) He even showed us how to burn the ones you pick off yourself, which is why there is a burning candle in this photo:
Seeing Steve out there in his beach wear gave me lots of confidence that I could spend the day gardening with my haz-mat suit on and some stategic squirts of DEET.
Thanks to Steve’s casual acceptance of these critters and his laisse faire attitude, Larry and I spent over 7 hours outside today gardening. We o-so-carefully checked each other over when we came in from gardening and picked off a dozen of them between us and a few off the cat..
But while writing this, 4 hours later, I found a tick under my shirt, crawling on my skin like a wind-up toy. It’s shaken my confidence again and I’m wondering if Steve does phone counselling. The good news is that he said they only last 3 months. I was too afraid to ask when the 3 months ends.
Nobody really tells you what childbirth will feel like and nobody really tells you about ticks in Nova Scotia either. Like Steve says, it’s just part of life.
