Starter Smallholders

James' blog about biting insects on The Good Life inspired me to add my own information on some of the pests of Latvia, specifically those that suck blood, prompted by spotting a leech in our pond, when looking for frogs with Oliver. Oliver thought it was a snake and became very excited. I thought it was disgusting and resolved that the pond was not, after all, ever going to be dug out for swimming.
Mosquitoes, of course, we have by the bucket load, and people with previous experience tell me that Latvian mozzies are particularly large and vicious. Despite the irritation of their high-pitched whine, the pain as they disengage and the unsightliness of the itching suppurations they leave behind them, mosquitoes are not the worst of pests. They tend to come and go with a timetable of their own and if you are prepared to move to a new task as necessary or go inside when their density reaches a certain intensity you can avoid the worst of them. Additionally, you do get used to them and both Rita and I have found that our ability to work with them increases through the course of each mosquito season.
Instead, the worst of local parasites are definitely ticks. Mosquitoes at least buzz and show their presence like a gentleman; whereas a tick lies in the long grass just waiting for a victim before silently crawling to some warm and intimate spot for several days feast, leaving no sign of its presence until it leaves. As if that were not enough to condemn them forever, they can also carry one of two diseases: tick-borne encephalitis and Lyme disease. The former is unpleasant, sometimes fatal and difficult to identify, characteristics that it shares with its carrier. The latter, Lyme disease, is uncomfortable but fairly easy to both spot and treat after a certain amount of time has passed. We are all inoculated against encephalitis, but there is not yet a vaccine for European Lyme Disease, so each tick-bite is watched carefully for several weeks. This is normally effective, and when I caught Lyme disease a couple of years ago, I spotted the tell tale rash almost as soon as it appeared. This year, though, there seem to be more of them, and more determined, as our usual precautions (long sleeves, tight clothes, boots, zippers instead of buttons) do not seem to be working. All three of us have had a tick already, and I have had three. Mine were not a great surprise, as I started to build a wattle fence that required me to go into the depths of our woodland to find the best hazel stands for posts; the fence is currently on hold until I visit a hunting and fishing shop to buy some industrial strength repellent to douse my clothes in. Oliver's were more worrying as he has not been in the woods or even in the long grass at the edge of the woods - the strongest suspects are the deer who drink from our pond, and I am thinking yearningly of deer fencing. Our main problem now is keeping track of where the bites were. Currently at a total of six bites between us we have had to start marking them as we find new ticks, and as the summer progresses may well end up with a collection of bright green spots giving us the appearance of a family with an exotic and little known infectious skin disease.

# posted by Mark @ 4:54 pm