Tick Magnet

It's official....Mark is a tick magnet.

No, not a chick magnet (he'd probably like that)....a tick magnet.

This weekend we went up north to do some work on our hunting area.  We spent the day clearing brush, strategically placing salt blocks and mineral licks, and planting clover - all in the hope that this would make our hunting spots an attractive place for deer to hang out and making it easier to see and shoot them should they choose to hang out there during deer season.

The good thing was that the weather was nice - right around 70 degrees and sunny.  Not too hot, but not too cold.  Perfect weather for working outside all day.

Another good thing was that it is still spring - the mosquitoes have not yet come out.  (See my post last summer about how bad the mosquitoes are around here).

Besides the fact that this was a lot of manual labor and I generally am not a fan of manual labor, the bad thing was that spring is NOT too early for ticks and that the ticks are REALLY bad this year.

For those of you unfamiliar with ticks I have attached a link to the ultimate authority on them - wikipedia...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick

For those of you too lazy to read the wikipedia link - ticks are very small parasitic arachnids that feed on the blood of mammals (note that humans are mammals).  They do so by cutting a hole in their hosts skin into which they insert their head and begin feeding.  To ensure that they are feed their fill they inject an anticoagulant into their host.  Ticks can cause a variety of illnesses caused by infection from a variety of different pathogens.  In short, ticks are gross.

While I am VERY attractive to mosquitoes I don't seem to be that attractive to ticks.  THANK GOD. Did I mention that ticks are gross.  Mosquitoes are gross too but ticks are their own special breed of gross.

So far I have been very lucky to only have found a handful of ticks crawling on me life to date and thankfully none of them have been "attached".

Mark on the other hand has not been so lucky.

We literally picked over 60 ticks off of him.  I wish that I was exaggerating but I am not.  They were everywhere.  All over his clothes with a strange concentration on his underwear.  Luckily only a few had made it to this skin and luckily none were "attached".

On its face this makes no sense.  We are both living breathing mammals, we should be equally tick attractive.  I read that ticks find their host by detecting breath and body odors and/or by sensing body heat, moisture and vibrations.  I read Mark's tick attractiveness as the fact that he is a stinky, sweaty, lead-footed man with bad breath.

Tee, hee.

I am totally buying him a "tick magnet" T-shirt.