Ticks don't require forests. They can thrive anywhere that has shade, ground-level moisture, leaf litter or ground cover, and wildlife hosts. That includes most Long Island yards.
Finding a tick on your child after they’ve been playing in the backyard is alarming. You expect that kind of thing to happen while hiking or at a campground, but not in your own yard in a residential neighborhood.
But ticks have adapted extremely well to suburbia. Long Island is a great example of this. Ticks can live very comfortably in ornamental landscaping, tree canopies, and ground cover. It also doesn’t help that there are plenty of deer and rodents around here, and those are both common carriers of ticks.
Ticks don’t live in trees, and they don’t jump. In order to get a meal, they sit on low vegetation and wait for a host to brush past. This behavior is called questing, and ticks do this in shaded, humid spots that are close to the ground. A row of hostas along your foundation qualifies. And the same can be said of a pachysandra bed, mulched border, or the shaded strip between your fence and your neighbor’s property.
The other key element is wildlife, and there is a lot of that on Long Island. Mice, chipmunks, and birds are all good hosts for immature ticks, and they’re all over Long Island. White-footed mice in particular are efficient carriers of the Lyme disease bacterium, and they move through residential yards constantly, often along fence lines, under sheds, and through garden beds.
If you’re looking for a way to manage potential tick problems on your own, we have a video on the 6 C's of tick control, which include clearing leaf litter, keeping grass short, creating dry buffer zones, and reducing the ground cover and edge habitat where ticks concentrate.
If you're a Long Island homeowner and you’re tired of finding ticks despite not living near woods, Mosquito Squad of Long Island can help. The tick control program includes barrier treatments applied to the specific areas of your yard where ticks live and quest. A trained pro will walk your property and find out where the ticks are. Then they’ll treat accordingly and come back every 21 days so the tick population never has a chance to recover.
