DeWitt, N.Y.-- Be afraid–very afraid. Ticks plague Central and Upstate New York this season, death and illness reports have blanketed the region in the past few years.

Perhaps a blanket may be key to helping mitigate the problem.

It's what the The Cornell Cooperative Exchange in Onondaga County used when they conducted a tick drag in the backyard of a DeWitt home Friday to gauge how bad it may be. In just 15 minutes, three drags produced 20 tick nymphs in the small yard of Rich O'Neill, who says deer have been a stubborn problem for him and his neighbors. Deer carry the ticks in. Ticks carry dangerous diseases like Lyme Disease, and the rarer, but extremely deadly Powassan Virus.

"My wife and I haven't gone into the brush around our yard for years because we were afraid of ticks there," O'Neill said. "We were right."

The nymphs collected in O'Neill's yard are about 1/8th of their parents body in size–that's about the size of a poppy seed, says Kristina Ferrare, a CCE Onondaga Nature Resource Educator, and no less deadly than their parents in carrying diseases.

O'Neill and his neighbors hope to use the findings to help push for a culling of the deer that crowd their yards, dropping off the dangerous hitchhikers into their yards.

The CCE Onondaga Nature Resource Educators taught O'Neill and other resident volunteers from the Syracuse Eastside Neighbors group how to initiate drags and hopes to spread the technique to other neighborhoods and communities across the region to help stem the tick invasion choking the Central and Upstate New York.

свернуть