out into the woods, take precautionary measures,
such as pulling your socks over your pant cuffs.
Maple Sunday—March 29—was the last day of our maple sugaring season. The sap’s still running but the sugar content has dropped to the point where the remaining firewood in the woodshed seems more valuable than the bulk price of grade C. We’re at about 85% of a crop. Considering the amount of warm, less-than-ideal sap weather we had this year in southern Vermont, the final tally could have been a lot worse.
My brothers, Trevor and Brendan, were both home to help with the sugaring on Maple Sunday. When the crowds left at 5:00, we snuck off to a swamp we used to haunt as kids to try and take in some spring wildlife. We would see black ducks, mallards, Canada geese, painted turtles, wood frogs, red-winged blackbirds, and a one-eyed muskrat, but all of these sightings were overshadowed by the wildlife crawling on our bodies. At the edge of the swamp, as we first changed into waders, Trev pulled a tick off his pants. Looking closer, he found another, then another. In all, between the three of us, we pulled over 30 ticks off our clothes – most of them black-legged ticks, the ones that cause Lyme disease. On the walk home, we picked up dozens more.
Growing up there were no ticks in the forest around the swamp. Now, thanks to a burgeoning deer population and a forest understory dominated by invasive species (honeysuckle, barberry, burning bush), it’s tick heaven back there. It’s unsettling to say the least. As the world changes, and ticks continue to propagate and spread north, it’s worth refreshing your memory about Lyme disease, and a tick’s lifecycle. We ran an extensive story on ticks and Lyme disease in the Spring 2008 issue. It is currently highlighted on our homepage as the From the Archive Feature, Tale of the Tick, and is always available for online reading in the Magazine Issue Archive.
As for the relationship between ticks and exotic plants, Jeffrey Ward, Thomas Worthley and Scott Williams recently completed a study on Japanese Barberry control and its relationship to tick populations in Connecticut. They found that both propane torches and herbicides can be effective in controlling barberry; they also found dramatic reductions in both the number of blacklegged ticks and tick infection rates in post-treatment plots.
Bottom line is, if you can control invasive exotic plants on your woodlot, you’ll reduce the number of black-legged ticks living there. It’s a win-win situation and an admirable goal for any landowner.