The Prayer: Dear gods, of any name, please cease punishing us with this plague. Scour the earth of these wicked creatures, if not now, then at least before blackberry season. So be it.
Courtesy of some poor soul off the internet
Seed Ticks: For the experienced, two words that elicit immediate and involuntary scratching, perhaps even panic.
It is midnight, when I wake in my bed from a deep slumber, bolt upright, and make a mad dash to the bathroom with only the moonlight to guide my path. In the darkened corners of my sleeping brain, an awareness of itching or bites in my nether regions has brought me sprinting toward the light.
In the bathroom I drop my boxers and take a gander: it is not good. Dozens of red welts, each punctuated by a microscopic black spot, speckle my privates. The British food item of a similar name comes to mind as I give a horrified gasp. There is nothing to do but grab the tweezers and begin extricating the little buggers. One painful tweeze at a time.
Seed ticks, the larval stage of their full-size brethren, are born hungry. Before they can grow up to be big, healthy ticks that menace man and beast, they start off needing a blooded host. When they hatch out, they do so by the thousands, and if you are unlucky enough to brush against an emerging cluster, the larvae happily detach from their home — a blackberry bush or a low-lying tree branch — and attach to your body. Being shy and retiring creatures, they prefer and seek out the more private and sensitive tissues, taking multiple sampling bites along the way before burrowing in to feed.
They are almost invisible, so the first sign of their presence is often that midnight wakeup call. Some years ago, on an overnight at a primitive campsite, we received such a call: nestled in our sleeping bags, an ouch, an itch, a fumbled grab for the flashlight, the evidence dotting both of our bodies. We looked at each other and nodded, hastily rolled up our sleeping bags and packed away our tent, shouldered our backpacks, and hiked seven miles under a full moon to the jeep. Then we drove, squirming, an hour and a half back home … where we immediately went to work tweezing the bastards out of our skin.
Chiggers and Red Bugs: A merit badge of spring and summer you never wanted to earn.
You are 5 years old, proud of the three gallons of plump blackberries you picked with your family. But later that evening, around your waistband, behind your knees and between your legs, the red bumps begin to appear, soon followed by horrible itching. You would rather claw the flesh off your bones than endure any more. Mom and Dad call the kids together, all in a common misery. One at a time you are brought into the den, inspected wearing only your birthday suit, then doused with rubbing alcohol and calamine.
Recovery: The itching and scratching remain as a reminder, long after the culprits are gone, that the mighty are easily felled by the mitey. For treating both chiggers and seed ticks, Southerners swear by the aptly named Chigarid, a smelly camphoric first marketed in the year 1963. I travel with a bottle in my shaving kit, for to be caught far away from home in the midst of an outbreak is to contemplate dark thoughts indeed.
But for actual recovery time I’m reminded of the old saw about poison ivy: it takes 14 days with treatment or two weeks without.
Happy Blackberry Season!
cringe! and I was just ready to head outside and tackle winter’s disregard … having second and third thoughts…feel better soon!
Nah, I’m ok, for now. Just recounting the possible outcome of the spring.
Yikes. That sounds awful! We have chiggers in Wisconsin, and plenty of blacklegged (or deer), and dog (or wood) ticks. Lone star ticks are occasionally reported here, but are rare enough that the university encourages people to report sightings, and send specimens or images*. Our area is endemic for a variety of life-changing tickborne infections courtesy of the deer tick (Lyme disease, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, anaplasmosis, and spotted fever rickettsiosi), so we take precautions. But I never heard of seed ticks until reading this. I checked, and it looks like this is a “feature” of the Lone Star. Great. Winter has been my favorite season since I was a girl, but the reasons to prefer it keep mounting.
*http://labs.russell.wisc.edu/wisconsin-ticks/wisconsin-ticks/amblyomma-americanum-lone-star-tick/
Ha! That is one reason why we try and do most of our fencing in the dead of winter. Growing up in south Louisiana I do not recall every running into seed ticks. Chiggers, yes! So, seed ticks as a problem may be more prevalent in the upper south or mid-Atlantic. But, Sarah, they are to be feared.
I have already gotten ticks off me this year! They are horrible! I never remember seed ticks as a child. Now I spray my shoes, socks snd pants with permethrin. Don’t leave the house without it!
One of the kids who worked on the farm commented to me: who is smarter, the ticks or the humans, while watching me slather poison on my arms and legs. Good question. But, I’m with you, slather away.
the mighty are easily felled by the mitey
Don’t for a second think I didn’t see what you did there. On the one hand I want to congratulate… and on the other I want to object.
One supposes the little buggers have a theme song of sorts:
You have to bite, for your right, to party… [I’ll leave now…]
Indeed, even as those words flowed upon the page, I thought, will Clem object to my poaching from his skill set?
Please poach away. The language is better for it. Exercise benefits more than the athlete.
Just been bitten.
Ownusus landlordii.
Could be the weather, but I’m feeling under the weather already.
Late warming summer
A minuscule chigger swims
on the blackberries
For a peasant who is used to his ways (literally), forced displacement is quite unbearable.
For lords and ladies, voluntary re-placement of themselves is a way of getting comfortable.
More generally, the surface of this planet has been shaped by people trying to get comfortable.
It looks the part.
We had plenty of the “little bastards” in Oklahoma where I grew up. When I was a kid, I thought chiggers were worse than seed ticks, even though I was the family tick-magnet, because the itch seemed to last longer.
Thanks for the interesting trip down memory lane!
-Amy
Thanks, Amy. Chiggers were definitely the bane of my childhood. Unless it was raining we were not allowed in the house on Saturdays or summer days, except for lunch. So, there were lots of chances for “encounters”!
My brother swears by camphor as a tick deterrent. He buys Campho-Phenique and wipes it on his boots, the bottom 4-6 inches of jeans, his shirt cuffs, etc. and it does seem to do the trick. Of course, we seem to have just regular ticks here, not the “seed ticks” that you are describing and sound like a nightmare!
I may give it a try, thanks!