Carroll College Biology Professor Grant Hokit is standing in a small meadow full of long grasses and berry bushes in the Swan Mountains just outside of Condon. He’s leading a team of three tick surveyors.
“We’re just doing a combination of what we call dragging and flagging where we’re walking the trailside here and sweeping the vegetation,”Hokit says.
To find and collect ticks smaller than your pinky nail, Hokit doesn’t need high tech equipment.
"Using some PVC pipe with white flannel cloth,” he says.
He sweeps that cloth across the brush like a broom.
The ticks this time of the morning are usually questing. They dangle off blades of grass, sticking their legs out waiting for a passing mammal or human.
“There we got one," Hokit points out. "So, that came off of this bit of sedge grass right here. We simply pick them off with our fingers and then we’ve got vials that we pop them in.”
This one is likely a Rocky Mountain wood tick, but it will go back to Hokit’s lab in Helena for identification. Hokit will then send them to state epidemiologist Devon Cozart, who will test them for diseases.
“The more we know about what’s in Montana, the better we can inform our physicians, and the better help and care you can receive,” Cozart says.
Earlier this year, surveyors found three deer ticks in eastern Montana for the first time. That species is famous for carrying Lyme disease. It also hosts plenty of other deadly pathogens.
Cozart says deer ticks aren’t guaranteed carriers of Lyme. That same goes for all ticks species.
“Usually it’s like a rodent that might be carrying, for example, Rocky Mountain spotted fever," Cozart explains. "So the tick will feed on that rodent then will get the pathogen as well.”
She says that’s why it’s also important to test native ticks like the Rocky Mountain wood tick. That helps the health department figure out which diseases the local tick population is carrying and identify high-risk areas. Then the department lets doctors know what to look out for among their patients.
Montana is among a small group of states that are actively looking for new species and testing ticks for diseases.
Chelsea Gridley-Smith is the director of environmental health at the National Association of City and County Health Officials. She has been polling nearly 500 health departments around the country.
"We identified that 25% of local vector control programs do some sort of tick surveillance," she says.
To Gridley-Smith, that number is pretty low. More departments are interested in starting tick surveillance, but there’s not always enough money to pay for this work.
Many local and state health departments rely on a cheaper, passive approach. They ask the public, veterinarians and doctors to send in ticks for identification.
“It does provide a little bit of information about what ticks are actually interacting with people and animals," Gridley-Smith says. "But it doesn’t really get into the details, or the weeds, of how common … are those ticks in that area and how often do those ticks carry pathogens.”
In the sunny meadow outside of Condon, the team is tallying their count: Seven ticks.
All of the ticks found today were native species. Hokit says he doesn’t have enough data to say whether deer ticks are breeding in eastern Montana. That’s largely because his budget and team to do this work is small.
But he is trying to narrow down the search. He’s using data on climate and vegetation to predict where deer ticks might thrive in the state. He has his eye on northwest Montana.
“The Flathead Valley is a prime spot to land," he says.
Hokit says it's likely a matter of time before deer ticks and the diseases they carry spread across the state.
