Ticks

While walking through the brush looking for tracks and sign in eastern Washington, several tick hitchhikers were picked up. I noticed that there appeared to be a couple of different kinds.

I didn't find a site that had what appeared to be exactly the ticks we found, but this site has a picture that makes me think these were dog ticks (Dermacentor sp). Based on this and other sites I saw, I think that the different looking ticks are likely the same species, but different sex.

Female dog tick (scale in mm)

Male dog tick

East Side of the Mountains

My hands are starting to recover a bit so I intend to start posting some from my recent trips, though still will probably not type too much.

The other week while taking time off from work to recuperate I did a bit of exploring south of Ellensburg. On the weekend we did some tracking near Wenatchee and near Snoqualmie Pass.

This picture is from the camping trip near Ellensburg. There were quite a few fancy flowers in bloom, hopefully I will get around to identifying them and posting about them later. The weather was good though a bit cooler than I was expecting - particularly with the wind. I managed to collect a couple of ticks, not surprising considering the places I was exploring, but didn't get as many as I did the following weekend.

Injured Reserve List

I probably won't post much for the next couple of weeks. I have tendinitis that makes computering a bit of a pain these days. I even have a couple of posts mostly written up that mostly just need a bit of editing, but the prospect of that much clicking and typing is daunting.

Hopefully I will get going again soon.