You Need to See It to Believe it

“Last year was an awful tick season,” says Adam Carace, CEO, Pest-End Exterminators, Plaistow, N.H. “Ticks for the most part are relatively easy to control, and we rarely have callbacks. But last year was tick apocalypse.”

A customer called and said, “I don’t know what to do. My screen door is covered in ticks,” he says.

Carace at first wondered if this was a high-drama case. Really? “Can you send us a pic?” he asked the client.

Sure enough, hundreds of ticks slathered on the screen door looked like they were begging to get in. “We had no idea why,” Carace relates. “We were shocked.”

A one-time treatment knocked down the ticks, and the customer never had the issue again. “We joked that the only thing we could think of is that a bear or moose rubbed itself against the screen and all the ticks fell off,” he said.

A couple times every tick season, Gary Rottler runs into a “side” case. “We will treat the side of the house, and then walk around to the other side and see a hundred of them and it’s like, ‘What is going on here?’ We flush them out and then the side is black because it’s covered with ticks,” says the owner of Rottler Pest Solutions, St. Louis, Mo.

On a personal note, Rottler and his wife were watching their grandchildren and dog when they ran into their own tick issue. “The dog is on a flea and tick program, and I’m not sure if the juice wore off, but they jumped into bed and we saw a big tick on her the size of a dime,” he said.

Next steps: strip the sheets, triple-check the dog and a late bedtime.