I was chatting with Skip about ticks (arachnids and Democrats), and he mentioned having a severe problem (in his yard) with the former. It got me thinking. Last year we had it bad where I live (Southern NH). This year – few to none.
Skip lives in the Lakes Region, a little over an hour away, so location and environment have a lot to do with it, even in the same state; the caterwauling of attention-seeking climate cultists, not so much. But Lyme disease is a nasty business, easy to treat in dogs but not so much in people. The threat of it serves the political left as an opportunity to rob people blind by blaming it on climate change: ticks, Lyme, everything.
I’m not immune to Lyme Disease (no, I don’t have it), but I am immune to the hyperbolic caterwauling of the Dems and progs that snap like twigs every time the weather changes. This is New England. Climate change could be every five minutes – in which direction is anyone’s guess. Yes, it changes, and so far, not in any way your climate models predicted.
Half the time, you can’t get next week’s weather right.
I also, as you likely know, have a shorthaired white Labrador (American Yellow Lab) who does everything in his power to wander everywhere in my yard he might find ticks. As such, he sets the baseline for the tick-related observations in my neck of the woods.
He’s on preventatives, so he’s not in danger. We are not, so we check him, dare I say religiously, and he likes the attention.
Last April, we picked two to four off the dog every time we went outside. That added up to – on some days – maybe a dozen a day. Every day. This year we saw a few a week—nothing like last year. The month of May has been a bit more frequent but nothing exceptional—one a day over one week, but fewer in any of the others.
It has been nothing like 2022.
Skip, on the other hand, appears to have had a lot of ticks in April but likely few, if any, in May – he treated his yard.
Absent the chemistry, there is no right or wrong rhyme or reason to it. Activity depends on many things in the biosphere, and none of them have anything to do with your corrupt Western lifestyle unless, by a tick, we mean a Democrat. Your comfort offends them, but that’s not the topic today.
Here’s another point of interest that I find interesting. Unlike previous years we have had few to no black flies. In a typical April/May, I can’t step outdoors without being swarmed. We’ve seen very few this year, and I’m not complaining. Black flies are a plague on all our houses. But I don’t know why we’ve had fewer this year by a large margin than any other year I can recall. Wait, Climate Change!
And while I’m at it, the mosquito menace is also less daunting this spring than in previous years.
That’s been my experience. Yours might be different.
