It’s tick season!
Actually, my friend Larry from the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension would correct me by saying, “It’s PEOPLE season. The ticks never went away.” By “people season, he means that time of year when the days get longer, the temperatures are warmer and WE start spending more time outside in areas where ticks wander around looking for snacks.
Have you got the heebee jeebees? At the mere mention of “ticks” my skin begins to tickle and I swear I can feel things crawling on me.
Ticks are a serious concern here on the Cape, and I know several dog owners who have already found a few hitchhikers and free-loaders on their pups. Dog ticks, deer ticks, lone star ticks… We have them all.
Larry Dapsis from the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension and That Girl from Cape Country 104
I was chatting with Larry this week about concerns that the tick population seems to be exploding. He shared an interesting factoid with me: You can predict how bad a tick season will be based on the acorn count from 2 years ago.
Sound strange?
The mini-explanation makes a lot of sense. If there is a bumper crop of acorns, there is plenty of food for the rodents to eat. If the rodents are fat and happy, they spend the season celebrating. The following season there is a mouse population boom. With plenty of mice, there are plenty of hosts for small blood-thirst arachnids (yes, ticks are arachnids – I looked it up). If the ticks have bountiful cocktail season, the following year, there will be a creepy-crawly population boom.
Perhaps Larry Dapsis can explain it better. He is the expert, after all. He has also produced a 10-part video series online at the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension website about ticks. You might want to take a little time and learn what you can from Larry before the weather really warms up and “People Season” kicks in!
WARNING: There may be some parts of this video that make you squirm.
For more information, please visit The Cape Cod Extension website. There are plenty of resources there including instructions on how to report a tick bite and how to to send it in for testing.
You can also visit www.TickReport.com for more information.
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