The fear of tick attack is so widespread that someone once made a horror movie with that title. Poking fun at our tick phobia makes sense. Some people are so afraid of these tiny arachnids that they won’t step off pavement. That’s silly because its fear out of ignorance, not reality.
Here’s the good news: ticks don’t actually hurt you. The bad news is the pathogens they transmit while sucking your blood can debilitate or kill you. Yeah, pretty bad.

But there’s more good news. Ticks don’t drop on you from trees like their spider cousins sometimes do. They don’t leap at you like fleas. And they don’t bury their heads in your hide. You can easily prevent any tick attack with the right clothing (or none), a squirt of permethrin, and a bit of social grooming. Let’s clear up some more of these frightening old tick myths and see how easy it is to enjoy the outdoors without falling victim to these creepy crawlers.
Tick Attack Is Germ Warfare
Some 80 species of ticks call North America home. All suck blood in order to grow and reproduce, but not all carry diseases. Different studies have shown 1 in 20, 1 in 70 and even as few as 1 in 1,000 sampled ticks were disease carriers. So just because you suffer a tick attachment doesn’t mean you’ll get a horrible disease.
The 16 diseases ticks do carry include some that will kill you. The others make you wish they’d killed you. Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Powassan… And now there’s this red meat allergy syndrome some ticks are passing along. It makes you allergic to steaks, roasts, and venison burgers. For some of us carnivores that’s a fate worse than death. Speaking of venison, our deer may be a big reason there are so many ticks. All mammals and many birds host ticks, but deer are the perfect transport for carrying them far and wide. The more deer in your area, the more ticks, most likely.

The Real Tick Attack
So you have good reasons to avoid tick bites, and that’s easy because… ticks don’t bite. Dogs, bears and ‘gators bite. Ticks merely probe and suck. Painlessly. Here’s how a real world tick attack works. The vampire tick hangs out on the end of a grass blade, twig, leaf, or weed with its front legs opened and “questing” for a ride. If you brush past, those tiny front legs grab you and the hitchhiker starts climbing. Ticks almost always climb up. When they find tender skin without pressure (they need space to swell like a tick) they settle in and begin drilling for oil — red oil.
Now forget about that head burying business. Ticks attack by slowly probing under your skin cells with tiny, nearly microscopic mouth parts. The can’t gnaw a hole big enough to stick their whole head in. Sometimes they and your skin swell so that it appears the head is embedded, but it’s really just those minuscule mouth parts that are in you. Some ticks have sedatives in their “saliva,” but even without that, their drilling implements are so tiny that they almost always score a free meal without you feeling a thing — until your hand brushes against that weird lump on your nape. Aaaaiiii! A tick!

Okay, don’t panic. Okay, stop panicking. You aren’t about to die. Even though ticks are ugly, creepy, blood sucking vampires, it takes them 12 to 24 hours before they can inject you with any of the bad pathogens. And, prior to that, it usually takes them an hour to 12 hours to even start drilling. In other words, you have time to beat them before the tick attack succeeds. So keep your cool and do things right.
Avoid the Tick Attack
First, before you even discover a tick attack has been launched on your sacred personage, fend them off. Tiny larval ticks, called “seed ticks” by most outdoorsmen, live in leaf litter. Sit against a tree in turkey season or shuffle through the leaves hunting morels and you could encounter a swarm of them. I say swarm because they hatch from a central pile of eggs. Concentration station. They are teensy, tiny, black things almost too inconsequential to see. But they need blood to grow. And they can harbor bacteria, viruses, and protozoa bequeathed them by Big Momma, so they’re just as deadly as the ugly adults. Don’t sit or roll around in the leaf litter and you’ll avoid most seed ticks. Once on you, they don’t usually crawl far, so expect them around ankles and lower legs. But check everywhere. They are easy to mistake as “just a freckle.”
Nymphs and adults prefer taller brush, grass, and weeds. Avoid such habitat if you can. Hunters, birders, many anglers — heck, outdoors lovers of all stripes — have a hard time staying out of such cover because that’s where the action is. So here are your next defensive measures…

Step one: Dress for success. Wear light-colored, non-patterned clothing. You can see ticks easier on such fabrics. Then wear them in the “shingle system.” Tuck each layer of clothing into the one below it. A tick hits your boot and crawls to your sock only to discover your pant leg is tucked in, so it must climb all the way to your waist where — DANG! You’ve tucked in your shirt. So it keeps climbing to your collar. Uh oh. You probably don’t want to wear a balaclava in summer. But at least you’ve minimized the naked places where a tick can begin to dig in.
Step two: Spray a chemical barrier of permethrin on your clothing at the entry points. Ankle, waist, collar. If you’re smart enough to wear long sleeves, spray the cuffs. Permethrin is proven to repel ticks. I’m not so sure DEET is.
If your a summer clothing minimalist, be ready for thorough tick checks every two to four hours. This can be fun. Or not. Depends on whether you’re alone or with someone and, most especially, who that someone is. Sensitive people feel ticks crawling on naked skin, so shorts and tank tops work for them. But that leaves a lot more area for ticks to find dining sites. Table for two, please.
If you find ticks, just brush, flick, or pick them off. They won’t hurt you. They don’t bite, remember? And the pathogens are in their guts, not on their backs. But they do hang on for dear life, so you may have to scrape them off with your fingernails. A knife blade or credit card slid between you and the tick works well. Just don’t squeeze the main body of any that appear to have their mouth parts already attached. Explanation below.
Search and Destroy!
Regardless what you do or do not wear, conduct total-body tick searches at least every 10 hours. When you’re back from the outdoors, take a soapy shower. Lather up to slide those sick ticks off. Run a fine-toothed comb through your hair. Repeatedly. Ticks love setting up shop on napes, heads, and backs of ears, so check carefully and repeatedly there.
If you find a tick attached, slice it off with a knife or credit card. It’s like shaving off a stubborn hair. It doesn’t matter if the tiny mouth parts stay in. They’re inconsequential. It’s the pathogens in the tick’s gut you need to worry about. So don’t squeeze the main body. Repeat: don’t squeeze the tick’s body. That’s like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. You’ll squirt pathogens into your bloodstream. If you don’t like sliding a thin blade along your skin, use a needle-nosed tweezer to grasp the tick’s head right against your skin and pull it off. The little white patch of “skin” that sometimes comes with it is glue the tick pasted down to stay aboard.

Don’t just throw ticks out. Kill them. They can probably survive a trip down the sewer, so toss them into a jar of alcohol or clorox. Screw a lid on, just in case. Take no prisoners. Out of vengeance I slice ticks in half with my field knife, but that’s probably not a smart idea, given how it releases pathogens. So far so good, however.
If you think the tick has been attached long enough to inject pathogens from its gut (usually 12 hours or more,) save it in a zip lock bag in case a doctor wants to ID it. Different tick species carry different pathogens. Clean the “bite” site with soap and water and disinfect with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. Really, the tiny mouth parts rarely cause infections. If redness, swelling or a bullseye appear at the site, check with a Doc. Many tick borne diseases can be nipped in the bud. Most can be minimized if you jump right on them.

I once was injected with Lyme disease by a nymph-stage tick that left the red bullseye mark. Doc gave me the appropriate pills within five days of the tick attack. Blood tests showed I’d gotten the Lyme disease bacteria, but I developed no symptoms because the medicine knocked it out early.
Tick borne diseases are nothing to laugh at. But neither is it necessary to freak out and lock yourself in a antiseptic room all summer. With understanding, the right clothing, judicious use of permethrin, regular tick checks, and early removal, you should make it through a lifetime of outdoor fun. When you detect a tick attack, attack back!
As many as 27 ticks have been found simultaneously crawling on author Ron Spomer. None lived to tell the tale. He did.
Great reminders, Ron. This reminds me of a young grunt Marine who headed out on a three-day training op in North Carolina and (for whatever macho reason) chose NOT to have his fire team buddies check him for ticks. When we got back to base and went to the showers we heard a loud squeal as the kid dropped his trousers — revealing a belt of hundreds of feasting ticks in a line all around his midsection. Fortunately, I was not the Corpsman for his platoon, because removing all of those ticks took a really, really long time. I don’t recall him that particular Marine ever having to be reminded about tick checks after that, though!
Thank you for clearing up all the misconceptions! I work in pathology and you have done a fantastic article! Again, thank you very much, Erik Warren
Ron, these little P.I.T.A.’s can get you all year long, not just during the warmer months: case in point, I was deer hunting on a 20 degree day, the ground was snow covered, I brushed some snow off of a rotten tree trunk and sat down for a bit. Within ten minutes I had a tick crawling across the top of my thigh, apparently from butt heat warming a spot on the log. I have also viewed a creditable video showing moose feeding on young brush and having the heat of their breath bringing the little buggers back into action. Cold temperature doesn’t kill ticks, just slows them down. Thank you for another informative article! Myles
Good info, Myles. I’ve seen living ticks on game in winter, but have never found them on vegetation. They are quite cold hearty, for sure. Adults overwinter in leaf litter, rotting logs, and similar hiding places that help insulate them from cold, especially under a blanket of snow. They can emerge on warm days. About 20% die over winter. Wide temperature fluctuations seem to hit them hardest, probably because they emerge, only to freeze before they can get back into good insulating cover. Total population levels result more from abundance of mice and deer than nearly anything else. An abundance of food means high survival of ticks. Thanks for the info, Myles.
Ron, I forgot one thing in my previous post: about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, when Lyme Disease was making all the headlines, a drug company, name forgotten, came out with a drug that was suposed to stop it, like a flu shot. It consisted of a series of three shots, given weeks apart, by a doctor. Both my hunting partner and I jumped at the chance to become bullet proof. I don’t know if they worked or not but apparently the vaccine was not successful because it is not mentioned any more. The only problem is whenever I get tested for Lyme it comes back positive because of the vaccine. Do you or any of your readers remember the vaccine’s name? Thanks, Myles
I sure don’t remember it, Myles.
The vaccine, called LYMERix, was licensed in 1998. By 2002 SmithKline Beecham had withdrawn it from the market. https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-lyme-disease-vaccine
Good article. Up here in Northern Michigan they’ve gotten horrible. I never remember er even seeing a tick when I was a kid. I get them weekly now. The black legged tick has moved up into areas never seen before. I learned that if you can wait a minute before cleaning your deer as the body temp drops the ticks start to leave. Also, most of us sportsman have a dog or two. Keep up their treatments as well.
Thanks Ron :
Nice article, I just learned a bunch. Great job and I hope you keep them coming.
home one week from Eastern Saskatchewan bear hunt. ticks were terrible. i used permethrin (spelling)
spray on my gaiters, the ticks jump off. I never had a tick on me while the other 3 hunters in camp found numbers of them.
my guides blue jeans were full after baiting. Gave them the spray and no ticks after that.
i hate the nasty little buggers.
There you go folks. Confirmation from a hunting veteran. Permethrin it is.
Please please please take heed of the information provided here! My mother did not, and three years ago she contracted Lyme disease. She was only diagnosed two weeks ago, so she has some pretty severe damage. You do not have to see a bullseye rash to have Lyme disease!