What’s the deal with all the ticks this year in Okanagan, Kamloops

Tick season is here and social media feeds in the Okanagan and Kamloops are flooded with panic about lyme disease and a higher prevalence of these nasty hitchhiking blood suckers.

Kevin Kazakoff is an expert at QFI Pest Control and he said it’s going to be a bad bug season, including ticks, because of the mild winter.

“We’re gearing up for a really busy spring and summer for that very reason. We’ve had two back-to-back mild winters,” he said. “It kept them alive because of the absence of that prolonged cold.”

Since the start of March, there have been 106 reported ticks in Kelowna, 36 in Kamloops, 20 in Vernon and 15 in Penticton, according to eTick.ca, which is close to the figures from last year.

However, relative to 2022 those numbers are significantly higher. In 2022 over the same time frame there were only 63 reported ticks in Kelowna, 28 in Kamloops, 16 in Penticton and nine around Vernon.

The Southern Interior had more reported ticks than the Lower Mainland last year, with 757 compared to 586.

The manager of Black Mountain Veterinary Hospital said they are seeing more pets come in with ticks than is normal for this time of year.

Kazakoff said that most people think of lyme disease when they think of tick-borne diseases, which is typically carried by the deer or black-legged tick, but in the Interior it’s more common to see ticks that carry things like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

“Identification of the type of tick is really critical. A lot of people, as soon as they hear ‘tick,’ they automatically associate it with something that’s going to affect them long term,” he said.

There are mosquito control programs in B.C. that spray a larval control in still water to control mosquito populations, but Kazakoff said ticks aren’t as easy to control.

“They’re hitchhikers, so you’re going to come across them in the open or out in nature,” he said. “We can’t go out and just spray or fumigate in nature just to control things like you would for mosquitoes. There’s not really a lot that we can do as a structural pest control company.”

As any source of information on ticks will tell you, it’s important to check yourself and your pets thoroughly after coming inside.

“I had a lady pick up a tick, bring it in, and it happened to be a tick that laid eggs. And so she woke up one morning to a bunch of baby ticks, climbing up her wall and into her bed,” Kazakoff said.

“We had to take apart the bedroom and found out that under the bed in the bed frame, the mother tick laid a bunch of eggs.”