Today was day three of tick flagging, a success overall. Amy and I first went to Hoffler creek, a beautiful nature walk, with friendly tree frogs, cool trails and a lot of wildlife...including ticks. Each trail is carefully labeled warning visitors of the overly friendly long star ticks. They get their name from the large white dot on the females back. After fighting our way through some spider webs, we gathered quite a few ticks, mostly lone stars as was expected but also some black legged tick nymphs. Ixodes nymphs look like itty bitty moving specs of triangular dirt; they're very hard to spot. After Hoffler we went to the Paradise Creek field site in Portsmouth. Expecting to find no ticks because of the trend over the years of finding little to no ticks here, Amy found a Dog Tick. Not sure what this means or indicates as of yet but its still really cool. Things are always changing.
Awareness of what is on the flag, and differentiating between plant matter and tick species is still developing but I am getting better at field identification and terminology. I have tomorrow to explore some light reading about ticks from Holly and then trapping this weekend for small mammals should prepare me for Mammology this fall. It is amazing me how much I have learned in the past few days and I'm sure my knowledge will only grow from here.
One final note...ticks are arachnids.
-Lexi
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