I joke that when I go for a run on the trails around my home in San Geronimo Valley, I'm doing tick surveys. Which is essentially true--one method of catching ticks for study is to drag fabric through grass, and the ticks latch on. That is what I do when my legs brush past grass and twigs.
I don't keep formal track of the ticks I find--or more accurately, the ticks that find me. Which is unfortunate, because there is a nice dataset there. But from my memory, what has struck me is the variability. Just when I think I see a pattern, and understand what is going on, and formulate a hypothesis, I observe ticks in places that confound that pattern. Or I hear about others' observations that don't match my mental model.
Take this year for example. I had not seen a tick until last week, yet word on the street (or fire road?) was it was a bad tick season. So I began putting together a hypothesis about the cold December, dry winter, and very wet March: that prior to March, ticks were scarce (at least, scarce in my surveys) in grassy areas where I was running because of the low growth and short grass. Since March the heavy rain impacted the ticks in these areas in some way, possibly washing them out of the grass and drowning them.
