A World of Ticks

One aspect of being outdoors that we never had to watch out for while living in Southern NM is ticks. They just don't have them there. Sure they have a bunch of other dangerous plants and animals to watch out for, the ones that usually get the limelight being cactus and rattlesnakes. But these have never bothered me ll that much. But as soon as we arrived in Tennessee, we started seeing, and getting bitten by, ticks. If it was just a little bite, leaving nothing worse than an itchy spot, I wouldn't care so much about ticks. Gross as they are, they wouldn't be cause for much worry. But as carriers of Lyme disease, they've got us pretty concerned.

I don't remember being overly concerned about ticks growing up in New Hampshire. In fact, I barely recall ever seeing them, except maybe on our dog. Lyme disease is pretty nasty, often with long term chronic problems, but since we weren't getting ticks, it wasn't forefront in our minds. It's a different story here in Tennessee, where it seems that every time we go for a walk in the woods, whether on trail or not, we end up with ticks crawling on our clothing. Levin had one bite him on his back our first week here, a tiny nymph stage tick, the worst one's as far as Lyme disease is concerned. I got one on my leg only a few days later, and two more bites in places I'd rather not mention on the blog a few weeks later. Since my dad was here for those first few bites, he got us a prescription of antibiotics as a preventative measure against Lyme disease, and Levin and I both took our doses. He's sending us more soon, and I suspect we'll gobble it up like candy.

As if to make matters even worse, one of the species of ticks here, the Lone Star Tick, has a relatively new disease it can pass on, the Heartland Virus Disease. This is one of the tick species that is actually pretty easy to identify and I was almost reassured by noting that some of the ticks we were getting were these ones. But if I was assured that the Lone Star Tick doesn't carry Lyme Disease, I need to be worried about another new, and potentially fatal disease as well.

For now it's a matter of being extra vigilant. Pretty much all the geocaches I am interested in going after are in tick infested forests. I've never payed attention to the geocaching.com tick attribute,  before but I sure will now. And tick checks when we get home are routine. All part of learning to live, and geocache, in a new area.