The creepiest of body-burrowing bugs, ticks, are not easy to kill. They have no known natural predators and have cold-insulating, life-protection tricks that would leave David Copperfield in awe.
They are wily. They can seemingly parachute from the towering heights of hillside trees, hitch-hike on dandelion seed or catch a ride across an overgrown pasture on a mouse's tail.
That's how I discovered my first burrowed tick of the year ... in January, in the Catskills, on a warm 50-degree day following a week of sub-zero temperatures.
Basking in the sun-filled warmth of a late-morning hike, it was only in passing that I gave my attention to a wayward briar .. easily two years old by the way it grabbed and gripped my leggings. The one thought that crossed my mind was "I wonder if that was a tick-pricker?" I immediately and foolishly dismissed the thought. It was, after all, the end of January in the Catskills and we were still on the dark-side of winter's hold.
How wrong I was!
Ticks acclimate. Those sons-of-blood-sucking-guns move water out of their cells before a freeze can rupture them.
They use things like leaf litter and snow to insulate themselves. The nerve!
Despite my long pants, tucked-in-t-shirt and layered long-sleeve shirt and vest, an opportunistic tick swabbed my stomach with its built in anesthesia and burrowed into the sensitive skin on my belly.
I didn't follow my own rule of immediately disrobing and showering following a hike, because it was winter - January in the Catskills.
I figure that little bugger got a three-hour long meal before I noticed it.
Sadly, I was afraid to smush it - and it felt cruel to burn it. Instead, after pulling it out, I counted body parts, multiple legs, and head - just to ensure a piece of it was not still munching away on my insides - and washed it, with hot water and a splash of Clorox, down my sink.
Knowing a tick's resiliency, I'm almost certain it will ride the wave of a municipal sewer into the mighty West Branch of the Delaware River.
