Deer, mice, chipmunks, and birds are all hosts for ticks. As they pass through or over your property, they introduce ticks that will eventually become a self-sustaining population.
If you keep your lawn mowed, your leaves raked, and your edges trimmed but still find ticks, the answer is probably walking through your yard on four legs every night. All the woodland creatures that make Connecticut charming are also, unfortunately, very good at transferring ticks onto suburban lots.
Deer are the most visible host. A single white-tailed deer can carry hundreds of adult ticks, and as deer browse through your yard, eating and grazing, they drop ticks across your property. Deer won’t transmit Lyme disease directly, but the adult-stage blacklegged ticks that ride on them often can.
White-footed mice are another big culprit. Immature ticks (larvae and nymphs) feed heavily on mice. Mice also happen to be excellent reservoirs for Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. An uninfected tick can become infected after feeding on a mouse carrying the pathogen. Then it can transmit that to humans later on after grabbing the leg of someone who passed too close to a shed or stone wall.
Even if you managed to build a solid barrier that kept out all the four-legged tick carriers that roam Connecticut, there are still birds. Migratory and resident birds carry ticks across property boundaries with no regard for fencing or landscaping. A robin or song sparrow hopping through your yard can deposit ticks far from any wooded edge.
It helps to make your property less attractive to wildlife. You can do this by removing ground-level bird feeders, fencing in gardens where deer look for meals, and by sealing gaps around sheds and outbuildings. It’s also a good idea to clear brush piles. This can all make your yard less hospitable to animals that carry ticks inside.
If you are a homeowner in New Haven or Fairfield County and you’re tired of dealing with ticks, Mosquito Squad of New Haven - Fairfield County can help. With tick control treatments, the zones where ticks hide during the day are directly treated. Doing this can cut down on the tick population by as much as 90%, even when you can't control the wildlife passing through.
