First Published in the Tri-Town Transcript, Nov 18, 2015
By Esther C. Baird
Well, the holidays are upon us. You may have an opinion about rushing Thanksgiving in favor of Christmas, or about what color the coffee cups should be, but I’m here to remind you of another little factoid. It may be the holiday season, but it is also, dear Regular Readers, still tick season.
I know, I know, what Tri-Towner isn’t aware of the tick hotbed we live in? But allow me to tell an illustrative tale just to make sure you fully comprehend the situation.
We were excited to take a family hike up in Bald Hill reservation, specifically the Crooked Pond loop. It’s a varied hike with water views, a challenging beaver dam crossing, (and by challenging I mean guaranteed wet socks), an inclined portion, and then a lovely meadow at the top.
It was such a pleasant meadow, that one of us decided to lie down in the tall dry grass for a little rest. I present, Blue Ears, our Bernese Mountain Dog who is 100+ pounds of dense, black, fur.
Cue the skittery, movie music. Do you hear it? It sounds like a swarm of nymph-stage ticks enveloping a giant dog. Of course we didn’t notice right away, we were too busy making our way back down and enjoying the fresh woodsy air. We were frolicking! All the while . . . tickocalypse was unfolding.
When we got home I decided to brush Blue, “because he’s a little muddy and has a few pine needles in his fur.”
Less reality-based words have never been spoken.
“Oh brother, a tick.” I sighed pulling it off, par for the course, but still annoying. And then I saw.
My brushing had activated the swarm. He was crawling. No, he was being crawled upon!!!
“A nest!!! He got into a tick nest!” I went into lockdown. “Nobody touch the dog! Nobody come near us!”
This had happened four years earlier, (also, it’s worth noting, in November,) and I knew the drill.
The horrible, nasty, and endlessly gross drill. There was no time to be squeamish, nor was there time to be pleasant, because let’s face it, no one else was going to pull the ticks off. This was one of those jobs that fell, like a bouncy ball into a septic tank, like throw-up onto a pillow, squarely into the Mommy Zone.
Blue and I gated ourselves in our mud room and I started pulling the itsy bitsy ticks off of him as fast as I could. I stopped counting at 45.
45!!!! I remained calm. I remained calm. OK, I began to lose it.
It’s not that ticks in general scare me – – I live in Boxford – – ticks happen. And I am ok with the occasional field mouse, mayhap even, as Regular Readers will recall, the random snake in the outer wall, but I draw the line at a swarm of baby ticks who could crawl forth and procreate.
That is my line, and they shall not pass!
And they didn’t. That’s the thing about ticks, as opposed to say fleas, they are singularly focused on biting their host, not exploring.
I sent an SOS to Blue’s doggy day care, The Natural Paw, and they scheduled him for a bath. It was too late to get the crawlers, but I needed Blue exceedingly clean for my personal sanity. He came back, shiny and fluffy and fabulously clean, with a note saying, “we found multiple foreign things in his fur”.
I bet. You could hide a space ship in his fur. A space ship carrying a nest of ticks.
It must go without saying, that hiking season for Blue is done – possibly for all recordable time.
We’ll return to our regular scheduled dog walks . . . on paved streets. So as you zip about to your various holidays celebrations, if you see us walking don’t expect us to move over. The middle of the road is how Blue and I will celebrate this tick season.