If you are in an area that you suspect might have a lot of ticks. Look at the tips of any grass stems for a little brown/black spot. They climb as high as they can and then kinda "stand up" and put their "arms" up and out and wait for something to touch them. Then it's off to the races to climb as high as they can... on you. They stop once they hit an obstacle they can't easily get around and dig in.

I spray my shoes with permethrin. That seems to almost totally eliminate climbers as I'm not walking through tall grass. You know they've gotten a deadly dose when they start walking in circles. I don't feel bad for them. My doctor told me that 85% of ticks in my area are positive for Lyme.

Once they reach your hair (unless you shave clean), even good luck may not be enough, very hard to spot and almost impossible alone

Mirrors or camera phones are handy.

I live in places where lyme is barely 5% incidence, and even that not everywhere. If it would be like 80% like some mention, doing week-long hikes alone would be outright suicidal. Better chances for retirement in base jumping.

I found two deer ticks (one attached) last fall. I always wear long pants and they’d just climb up till past my waist. They’re quite small.

They gave me one dose of antibiotics as a preventative. I worry about our dog. She got the vaccine and has some medicine that kills then, but I still found three on her.

I just pulled one [dug in] that I assume got on me meters away from a fully eaten deer carcass :/

Tweezed it out best I could, H2O2'd and lightly cauterized it then Neosporin'd, but still gonna have to play the bullseye waiting game AFAIK...

Got dang ticks!

Of course, these antibiotics are not without risk too.

It would be nice to see support for natural consumption of ticks by fowl (chickens, turkeys, quail, etc), marsupial, etc.

What exactly are you correcting here?

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/resources/FS-Guidance-for-Clinician...

Therr are also other tick borne illnesses that can be quite dangerous.

Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.

Kills ticks but also kills cats, so be careful. I have heard that once it is dry, it isn't a threat to your little furry friend, but I still won't risk it.

I have two cats and we haven’t had any issues that I could see.

I make 100% sure they can never be exposed to it when it’s wet, but they’ve been around me in treated clothing, escaped the house and walked through treated (dry) grass, been around dogs that have been treated with it, etc.

Given the number of people that have cats and dogs living together who are treating their dogs with it monthly, it seems relatively safe if used properly and cautiously.

Seems there are a couple of chemicals that act as anti-tick. We're using Seresto collars for our two dogs (no ticks in a decade of usage), which seems to be using Imidacloprid (anti-fleas) and Flumethrin (anti-ticks).

So at least there seems to be two ingredients, there are probably more.

But nice to see we’re finally getting for humans what pets have had for a while for ticks.

We began treating our boots with diesel to try to repel them. That worked to a point. It didn't take long to reveal the shortcoming in that method - diesel fuel soaks through the leather and easily enters the skin. It ruins the boot leather and burns your skin so that wearing anything on your feet is very painful so we abandoned that method.

After looking at options we decided to use cattle ear tags because each cow only uses one and it keeps them tick-free. After reading all the warnings about safe handling - wear gloves, avoid skin contact, potential reproductive harm, cancer risk, etc. - we decided that it made no difference. We realized that this had to be absorbed through the cow's bloodstream from the puncture on the ear and since every cow we had ever seen had an ear tag, this meant that this chemical was present in every steak or burger we had ever eaten so wearing one long enough to complete the part of the survey with the tick problem wasn't going to increase our risk of any adverse effects.

We bought a pack of tags and each hung one on a boot and never had another tick.

I don't have any known health issues to report here 40 years later. Totally anecdotal information from what is likely to have been a low-dose, short duration exposure event.

Not sure how true it is, but the marketing for the collars we use claims that eventually the chemicals spreads to protect the full body, even if the collar is just around the neck.

That’s what the medicated pet collars do.

Part of the advantage of collar-absorption is that you can use a molecule that readily breaks down/inactivates in digestion. And avoid sharp peaks in blood levels.

Tough woman. She is missed.

and how do you manage this?

AFAIK there has only been one documented case of it killing a kitten and it drank the liquid form, unknown quantity. Baby animals do not yet have fully formed livers to metabolize the sodium channel blocker. Insects on the other hand do not have a liver. They use body fat to detoxify but it isn't fast enough or volumetric enough to handle the sodium channel blocker in large amounts relative to their size.

Study of 286 cat/permethrin cases in London: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2007.05...

Study of 750 cases in Australia: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jfms.2009.12...

...we don't track this stuff nearly as well for pets as we do for humans but seems to have pretty robust evidence of toxicity.

https://www.amazon.ca/OnGuard-Pro-Perm-Residual-Non-Flammabl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Watch for long grass along deer trails. During a particularly bad tick year (Wisconsin) I could walk along the deer trail by our swamp and just count the ticks hanging out on the ends of the green swamp grass. I did not spend much time outside that spring.

Unfortunately one of them was a deer tick that dug into my armpit, so now I'm playing the "wait and see if it's Lyme" game :(

Interestingly, a "questing" tick has been found to be able to cross air gaps by leveraging static electricity:

    “We have now discovered that ticks can be lifted across air gaps several times larger than themselves by the static electricity that other animals naturally build up. This makes it easier for them to find and attach onto animals that they want to latch onto and feed from.

I find a ton of ticks around where I live and have experienced a questing tick by pulling them off of my dog before they attach and then carrying them on something. Sure you're not spotting them naturally but they will quest when given the freedom to do so. If you don't kill them immediately but put them on a leaf or something they will crawl to an end of it and start! If you're just interested in seeing how it looks

Not one bit or attached to any member of our family. And, we had plenty of kids in the low teens around the house. In fact, it was so "OK" to see ticks, that none of the adults made a fuss about them - so we grew up never being paranoid about them - in contrast to most of my east coast friends with kids

I have a hard time understanding how a tick bites a fully grown adult in summer weather. Of course if you are wrapped in massive layers of clothing and you can't see it coming at you, its something different.

Protip: If you take your city dog abroad -particularly a tropical area outside of the country- make sure your dog is very well tick-protected. East/West coast dogs can't handle foreign tick diseases. They don't have built-in inmunities. It only takes 1 tick from a farm/field you visited to give a deadly disease to your best friend.