By Pete Fandel, Crop Systems Educator, U of I Extension

Have you been out in the woods hunting for shed antlers? Are you preparing for the upcoming turkey season, or the long awaited morel mushrooms? Usually during the early spring, I get a few calls from people who have been attacked by ‘turkey mites’. The stories I have heard were that turkey mites are especially brutal with hundreds of bites and severe itching that could last for weeks.  This confused me because I had never heard of a turkey mite.
I asked one of our Integrated Pest Management Educators, Doug Jones, about this pest.  He had not heard of them either, but agreed to pour over the literature to find out the biology of this dastardly villain.  He found no information about a mite that attacked turkeys and people alike.  So he changed the focus of his investigation and asked anybody who got turkey mites to send in a sample.  In every case the case of turkey mites was actually the first life stage (larva) of a tick.
Most of the ticks found in the United States are hard ticks (Acari: Ixodidae).  Of these most are three host ticks.  That is they require three separate animals to feed on in order to complete their life cycle.  A typical life cycle is: Eggs hatch, the tick larvae (usually with only 6 legs) crawl up grass, weeds, etc. and hold their front legs up in the air in order to grab onto any thing that passes by (questing).  Once on the animal they feed for a little while and then drop off the animal and molt into the next life stage (nymph).  They now quest for another host, feed and then drop off again to molt into the adult stage.  Now they quest for the last host animal.  Once aboard, the female begins to feed and the males seek the females.  Females will only become heavily engorged with blood (replete) after they are mated.  Once she is mated and fully replete, she drops off, lays her eggs and dies completing the cycle.
 Some important facts to remember about ticks are that they do not transmit diseases from mother to egg.  This means that a tick must feed on an infected host before it can transmit diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, Lyme’s disease, ehrlichiosis, STARI, relapsing fever, or babesiosis.  However, conceivably tick paralysis could be caused by any life stage, since it is not caused by a virus, bacteria, or protozoan, but by factors in the tick saliva.  
So what can you do to protect yourself from turkey mites ticks?  Wear long clothing with tight fitting cuffs.  Liberally apply tick repellents that contain DEET.  Application of permethrin based repellents to your clothing works well, but do not apply these directly to your skin.  
Check yourself or enlist a trusted friend to check you for ticks once you get home.  
Carefully remove any tick you find by grasping the tick as close to your skin as possible with tweezers and gently put pulling pressure on it until it relaxes its mouthparts and comes out whole.  
Pulling too quickly or hard can complicate things by leaving the tick’s mouthparts in your skin.  Burning a tick with a match is even worse; it causes the tick to regurgitate into you as its insides begin to boil.  It usually takes 12 to 24 hours of feeding before an infected tick can transmit a disease to you.   
See a physician as soon as possible if you start experiencing high fevers, unexplained rashes or a pounding headache after being bitten by any tick as these symptoms are common to all of the diseases that ticks can transmit.