Ticks & Chiggers--a study
- Thread starter bobpbx
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Farmer folk of European ancestry sometimes get teased for having pale "chicken" legs. Really, though, how can you call them chicken legs without lots of little bumps all over them? Well, here's a new equation guaranteed to cause more than mere anxiety:
Cluck cluck. (Scratch scratch.)
Farmer plus chiggers equals chicken legs.
Cluck cluck. (Scratch scratch.)
Always referred to my dads ghostly white legs as chicken legs.Somebody ate one of them,he only has one left:-(
‘Alarming’: Unexpected pathogen spread by infected chiggers found for 1st time in North Carolina
‘Alarming’: Unexpected pathogen spread by infected chiggers found for 1st time in North Carolina
Wildlife researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found a novel pathogen for the first time in North Carolina that is carried by chiggers.
The photo of that red creature looks doctored. How can they be that big and yet not noticed on your skin (as people say)?
Red velvet mites are from the family Trombidiidae, while chiggers are in a different (but more or less closely related) family, Trombiculidae. The latter are only about half a mm long.
When I was a kid there would always be these small red bugs coming out of the broken concrete of my aunts back steps. Were they red velvet mites?
After all of the depressing (but informative) posts about ticks hunting us, for once here these blood-sucking monstrosities are the ones on the menu. The article is from Field & Stream. The link in the article about opossums is also worth checking.
What Eats Ticks?
(I'll pass on the fire ants, though.)
What Eats Ticks?
(I'll pass on the fire ants, though.)
Well, I've got lots of wild turkeys roaming my property. Still have plenty of ticks though. I think I read that geese also eat ticks?
I saw one site that claimed that a single wild turkey could eat 100,000 ticks in its lifetime. According to the Field and Stream article, though, wild turkeys are not overly effective in knocking down tick populations.
A quick check online seems to confirm that while geese will eat the occasional tick, they are primarily herbivores. Guinea fowl and chickens are reputed to be better tick eradicators.
When it comes to Fire Ants, though, all questions should be directed to manumuskin.
A quick check online seems to confirm that while geese will eat the occasional tick, they are primarily herbivores. Guinea fowl and chickens are reputed to be better tick eradicators.
When it comes to Fire Ants, though, all questions should be directed to manumuskin.
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I saw one site that claimed that a single wild turkey could eat 100,000 ticks in its lifetime. According to the Field and Stream article, though, wild turkeys are not overly effective in knocking down tick populations.
A quick check online seems to confirm that while geese will eat the occasional tick, they are primarily herbivores. Guinea fowl and chickens are reputed to be better tick eradicators.
When it comes to Fire Ants, though, all questions should be directed to manumuskin.
I would think that smaller birds would be more effective at killing off ticks (the one outdoor thing I'm afraid of, especially in the NJPB!). A tiny tick isn't worth the energy expenditure of bending down the head to grab it for a big animal like a goose or turkey. Flood the place with little birds, including ground birds like chickens.
Flocks of wild turkeys enjoy vandalizing my property, they go down my little trails, dig up all the dead leaves from both sides of the trail and dump them in the middle. Basically, they bury the trail by heaping piles of dead leaves on it. They can do this to hundreds of feet of trails in one afternoon, requiring a fair amount of work with a rake to open the trail back up! They scratch up the ground on either side of the trail during this process and it makes me wonder what they are foraging for. Acorns? Bugs? Roots? Maybe it's ticks?
Anyway, the ticks are pretty much gone here once we get into August. I often see reports from others about getting ticks in the late summer, but it almost never happens here. So, maybe the turkeys are eating my ticks?
Anyway, the ticks are pretty much gone here once we get into August. I often see reports from others about getting ticks in the late summer, but it almost never happens here. So, maybe the turkeys are eating my ticks?
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Speaking of turkeys - I came across a little wildlife powwow off Quaker Bridge Road on Saturday morning. A bunch of turkeys and deer eating corn or some kind of feed, while a black cat looked on. I guess I interrupted breakfast.
Could be almost any morning in my yard (but there's no corn and the cat is orange and white)
I think it has a lot to do with where you go, although it's possible that there was some kind of program to improve their numbers after your time in the Pines. I didn't see them very often myself until I moved to my present location. But my property borders on the Maple Lake WMA which now includes the big formerly-private Estell Manor Preserve where I believe they may have bred them for hunting. @RednekF350 can probably tell us more about all of this.
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Possibly, as I didn't go down that far south. I went up north to the intriguing big green mostly blank spot on the Esso or Mobilgas road map centered around Chatsworth, Rt 72, 539, down to Batsto. I don't believe John McPhee mentioned turkeys in his late 1960s book, The Pine Barrens either.
I see turkeys in the woods out here in southern Arizona up on Mount Lemmon at about the 5,000 foot altitude (Mt L goes up to over 9,000).
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Indeed, there was exactly such a program. Fish & Wildlife reintroduced wild turkeys here in 1977, following over a hundred years of deforestation and overhunting. The program was very successful. There were already enough birds to support a spring hunting season by 1981.
37 years ago 22 wild turkeys were reintroduced in N.J., now there are 20,000: Guest column
Males, or toms, are polygamous and often mate with several hens during the course of a breeding season. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology so colorfully describes it, courting toms “puff themselves into feathery balls and fill the air with exuberant gobbling” to attract the ladies.