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All, Just some follow-up observations from the Round Hill area east of Annapolis Royal. I'm returning to this topic again because I find this of interest. We're now close to the end of May. In total, I think I may have removed 1 tick from myself and maybe 5 from my two Rough Collies (Lassie type collies). Granted, we've spent most of our time on my own property which is along a brook - deciduous forest, grasses, raspberry canes and some brush, and wetland plants along the brook. I am always in the tall vegetation and frequently take the dogs along the shoreline or for wades in the brook. Last week, I spent a couple of mornings cutting a path through raspberry canes and brush down by the brook, so it's not like I've been avoiding typical tick areas of my property. As for host animals -- There are deer all around my property (last spring, a doe had her fawns in the forest right behind my vegetable garden). Lots of other wildlife wander through. So, I'm kind of amazed by the lack of ticks so far this year. I mention this only because I wonder about the effects of certain kinds of weather. The winter before last, on this list and in some news articles that I read, there was speculation that the deep snow would shelter the ticks and they would be plentiful last year. While there were some in May 2015, they sort of konked out by early summer and I saw no others for the rest of the season, so the snow doesn't seem to have been advantageous to them - at least, not on my property. I was expecting things to rebound this spring as there were always a lot of ticks on this property in previous years. No rebound yet -- which is actually rather pleasant. Also, it seems that the few ticks I've found are all Wood (Dog) ticks. Still I wonder about the sparsity. Older people in this area that I've spoken to -- for example, my neighbours who just passed away this year were both 90 -- told me that they thought ticks seemed to move into an area and be bad and then go away after a time. We definitely had a boom year for them about 3 summers ago. They would even show up on my moth sheets at night when I was out photographing moths. By the way, I have not used Advantix on either of my dogs this year and used only 1/2 a tube on each of them in early spring 2015. Previous to that, I was treating each of them once in late April and then around early June. These days, I'm trying to avoid using it at all unless I think the ticks are really bad and warrant using something systemic. I am still vaccinating both of them for Lyme each year though. In any case, the lack of ticks on the dogs cannot be attributed to using a systemic product on them. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the summer goes. Bev Wigney Round Hill, NS
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