I have killed two of these this year

[Ninurta]

I was going to tell the horrors of ticks and the diseases they carry here, lyme disease, and TBE (Tick-borne encephalitis) Both of them can and have killed. TBE is found in the south in the coastal areas but is spreading inland, But im with BIAD, [b]Ninurta wins[/b]

The main tick-borne diseases here are Lyme's disease and Spotted Fever. I've got a friend who is still undergoing treatments for Lyme's Disease, months after the tick was pulled off. They aren't REAL prevalent - I've only pulled 4 or 5 off of me that had a good bite over the course of a lifetime. It ain't like it was in the jungles down south. I saw ticks there hanging off the bushes so thick they looked like clusters of grapes some times.

In years when ticks are bad, these days I go buy a couple of those flea-and-tick collars for dogs, and tie them off around my knees like garters when I go out into the wild. They've worked for me so far, after I stumbled across the idea one year during a flea infestation.

About a week ago, a bear hung out around my house for several days. You could smell it inside the house when it wandered through the yard on the north side of the house, where the heat pump is. I reckon that the heat pump picked up the scent outside and pumped it through the vents into the house. It made the cat all kinds of spastic and frantic.

One of the women at work told me the other day that she was going in to work early, and drove past my house, and there was a whole herd of deer in my yard grazing. A few years ago, when I was working early, I used to get up and go sit outside to drink coffee and smoke to get my day started, and I'd watch the deer in my yard. I reckon they got used to it, and figured out that I wasn't going to shoot them so close to the house, because after a while they just stopped paying any attention to me at all. There is a grove of paw-paw trees in the upper edge of my yard on the north side of the house, and they like to play there. Paw-paws are an Appalachian variant of the papaya, the only sort of papaya that grows this far north. Deer won't eat them, but I reckon bears will - but hell, bears will eat ANYTHING!

I've also got a couple of American Chestnut trees overhanging the house. they are rare now, since the blight hit them a hundred years ago and nearly wiped out the entire species. Those chestnuts do draw the deer in, though. They are a pain in the ass to shell out, though, because of the burrs on the shells. Sting like fire when the burrs nick you.

Magnolias are blooming now as well. The entire time I was growing up, just one county away, I never, EVER saw a magnolia. I never saw one until I moved to a more southern clime. Now, they are everywhere here.  I reckon there must be something to the global warming thing, although I can't force myself to believe it's "man made" global warming. Still, it is getting warmer. When I was a boy, an old man here told me how the rivers froze over every winter when HE was a boy, solid enough to take horse teams and sleds out onto them and cut ice blocks for the ice houses they had back then. Now I'M the old man, and I see species here that were limited to warmer regions when I was the boy. They've migrated north, it seems, with the warmer weather. I've only seen the rivers freeze over here a couple of times, where it used to be a regular yearly occurrence. Winter before last, we had a 3 week spell when the temperatures never got above 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and the rivers froze over then... but that is unusual these days.

Warmer temperatures mean more bugs and creepy crawlies in the summer months...

... because, in the end, the wild will win.

.