The bloodsuckers will find you
There is a wildlife question that has bothered me for years. Well, maybe instead of being a wildlife question, it should be classified as an outdoor question. I have never known anyone who might be able to answer this for me.
I want to know how ticks and chiggers and bloodsuckers get through the day until some animal or human wanders into their habitat. I mean, what do they live on while they are waiting on us to come feed them?
The Mister and I took The Married Daughter and What's His Name out into the country a week or so ago to look at a farmstead that belongs to an absentee owner we know. We got out of the car and wandered around in knee-high grass and weeds, checked out some tire tracks left by another visitor, and tried to envision the place as it must have been a generation or so ago. The visit was brief, but enjoyable.
Several hours later I kept thinking something was crawling up my back. Shudder
But, what do you suppose kept it from just sinking a direct line into the first spot it found when it landed on my skin? I mean, it had to have been really hungry. And I figure it took a gander at the vast expanse of my backside and thought, "Whoo, mama, I've struck the mother load!" So why was it still crossing all that unoccupied territory three or four hours later?
Dumb tick. I plucked it off my shoulder and flushed it down the toilet. It should have plunged its fangs into the skin between my shoulder blades when it had the chance!
But let's go back to my original question. I'm pretty sure no one has been on that farmstead in quite awhile. What was keeping it alive while it waited on me to cross its path?
When I was a child my family went to northern Minnesota every August to my grandparent's cottage on a small lake. It was pretty rustic living. Outhouse, woodburning stove, no running water. We kids loved it. My mother hated it. If it warmed up enough during the afternoon we would go swimming in the lake. Now this was not a beach. It was just a lake with a mud bottom, lots of weeds, some clams and fish, and the dreaded bloodsuckers that sometimes attached themselves between our toes.
My dad always carried a little salt shaker with him. When one of us came screaming up the lawn thinking we might expire before we got help, we'd get hoisted onto his lap and he'd shake some salt onto the leach and it would gasp its last breath, let go of our toes, and die before our very eyes.
But how long had that bloodsucker been tunneling in the mud at the end of my grandfather's boat dock waiting for me to jump in so he could zero in on the space between my toes?
See? It's quite a puzzle, isn't it? I mean I am not a great outdoors person, so the parasites would probably all starve to death waiting on me to take a nature walk. And think of the gazillions of such organisms out there that are lurking around, just waiting for an evening meal.
How do they survive until we get there?
That is probably one of the things I am never supposed to understand. It's like human nature, weather, personality quirks, politics, and other oddities. Without them I wouldn't be able to fill this space week after week.
— SUSAN MARSHALL
