If you go outdoors often, you will occasionally find a tick crawling up your leg.

If you take your dog, you will occasionally find an army of ticks, crawling all over the place.

Some places seem lousier with ticks than others. I didn’t find a single one after Evan, Ben and I took a nice long walk along the Wapack Trail recently, not even on Ben. Evan and I used bug spray, which may have helped. (It didn’t entirely deter the black flies, Evan noted).

After walking around the Arched Bridge area in Dunstable for just over an hour one evening, however, I pulled more than a dozen ticks off Ben, my clothes and myself. They were brown, all between one and two millimeters long, and as best I could tell they were all young dog ticks. I don’t fear dog ticks, knowing they don’t carry Lyme Disease, but that doesn’t mean I care to feed them.

Tick killing products such as Frontline work well for killing ticks (though like most pesticides, they probably aren’t healthy for you or your pet). Still, a little poison won’t stop the little buggers from leaping onto your dog. If the tick realizes your dog is deadly before it bites down, it will look for a better place. You, for instance.

You can use that instinct to your advantage, but the strategy isn’t pretty. You have to be the bait.

I combed through Ben before we got back into the car, and sure enough, I found a few in his fur. I found many more after I finished with him, crawling around the outside of my pants. They were easy enough to spot, pluck and flick.

Once home, however, I found a bunch more ticks hiding inside my clothes, and a few on me. Ticks are sort of shiny, so with bright light even the small ones can show up clearly on you, or your clothes.

A few days later, we found another one, crawling across the kitchen table. This one was definitely a deer tick (the adults, by the way, are bigger than I’d been led to believe).

So much for long sleeves as bug repellant; next time, I’m sticking with DEET.

http://www.lymenet.org/

http://www.tickencounter.org/education/tick_identification/