Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lots of ticks this year

Earlier in the year it was the little ones about half the diameter of a stick pin head .
For the last couple days we had a couple of good soakers , yesterday went into the woods to retrieve SD cards .
Holee [bleep] ! Took my clothes off down to the boxers , hung them outside .
Went in and set on the couch and the crawleys started . Got five regular ticks off me and just one off the mutt that went with me . WTF ?
No little ones , them fuggers dig in quick .
Kenneth

Had one crawling on me yesterday, looked like the normal brown dog tick but had a white dot dead center on it's back.
Never seen any like it before.


Edit: just DDG'd it Lone Star Tick
First I've ever seen here in Virginia

Bad year for ticks here in the NC mountains. I am killing one or two a day.

Ticks are keeping me out of the woods here in PA.

Middle Tennessee they are also bad this year.

Too dry here for many ticks.

Yep , got an oddball like that on me yesterday .
Cant count the numbers I have pulled off me over the years . Catch a lot of them crawling and a lot after they attach . A few that I couldn’t get the whole thing out and eventually disappeared under the skin .
I would guess well over a hundred bites , have been tested a couple times , don’t know how I couldn’t have been infected , but they say not .
Sometimes their bite scabs and itches for a month or more , some onary little critters .
Kenneth

I got the telltale rings on my thigh from a tickbite. Got in quick and the meds cleared it right up

Ticks are clearly down on our area this year, possibly due to fire ants, I’m told. I hope it stays that way.

I've picked way more than my fair share of ticks off me this year.

Not as many here as usual.

I started spraying clothes with Sawyer and letting them dry in the sun. Wearing those socks, pants, and shirts in KS with a lot of ticks present. Zero ticks on me.

Plucked one off last week. Just now healing up.

Eastern Oregon has em bad this year. We picked off 4 while picking mushrooms.

Kenneth66: Myself and my Spring Black Bear Hunting partner had a very successful Hunt up in the NW corner of Montana in late May just past.
Not only did we bring to bag a very dandy Black Bear but we set a record for removing ticks from our clothes/skin!
And we used spray on Tick Repellent virtually every morning and afternoon.
First day I removed 12 from my person then the next day I found and squished 15 ticks!
Then after that I lost track.
Puzzling though the 10+ year old Bear we harvested had NO ticks on his pelt what so ever?
What part of the world are you encountering the ticks in?
Use care - I have endured both Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme's Disease!
Neither of us endured an embedded in our skin tick though - perhaps that is due to the heavy application of Tick spray?
The ticks we did find were literally crawling at top speed across our clothes/skin.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Ticks seem to be more prevalent after some wet weather, if it's been dry for a while the ticks aren't near as bad.

I have gotten 4 off me in the last 2 weeks that were already berried up. I would cut grass, go take a shower and they had already berried up that quick.

One word for you guys: Permethrin.
My brother-in-law has an outside job with the USDA and he uses some stuff called Ultra Shield EX. He gets it from a farm store in a 32 ounce pump spray that they make for horses. Way less expensive that the spray bottles at Bass Pro.

I have a prescription for Doxycycline 100MG tablets that I have in the car and in my kit when ever I'm in tick areas. 2 capsules knocks out the Lymes bacteria if a deer tick has been embedded for more than 24 hours. You would be wise to get that same prescription.

The COOP has "cattle spray" (Permethrin) in a concentrate that I dilute down to spray the cows for flies etc. Probably a dozen years ago I started diluting closer to the permethrin concentration found in ready to use products and spray appropriate outdoor equipment and clothes and let it dry. It works.... I keep a spray bottle on the front porch of the permethrin mixture in case I need it for a pair of jeans I haven't sprayed or when headed out on a hunt with friends who may not have an effective tick spray.

Had 7 latch on me in one day a couple months ago.