doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com UK pheasants, ticks, and disease

Another migrant from the far east.
The Longhorned Tick, native to Eastern China, Russia & Korea has made it to the Midatlantic states and the Northeast. It carries Ehrlichia chaffeensis which causes Human Monocytic Ehrlichiosis, usually spread by the Lone Star Tick (which is now widely distributed in the U.S.)
Just in time for summer

Given that driven shooting is a business and that pheasants are the primary target, I'm not at all surprised at 50 million pheasants are released annually. Given that a line of 8 guns will finish a decent day with somewhere between2-300 pheasants in the bag, and will repeat that for the next day or two as well, numbers will add up pretty quickly. And that's not counting the pheasants that manage to escape the anti-pheasant barrage.

Thank God for 'possums. They eat a lot of ticks.

My god, i love armchair ecologists.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1877959X21001333

Somewhere above, someone suggested that having a phD allows one to make things up. Not so. As the initials indicate, they only get to Pile things Higher and Deeper.

At least they know how to fact check.

I've always learned best from pictures
https://a-z-animals.com/articles/7-birds-that-eat-ticks/

OTOH
https://www.fieldandstream.com/stories/survival/wilderness-survival/what-eats-ticks

Apparently pheasants aren't big on ticks

And contrary to the narrative
https://www.gwct.org.uk/blogs/news/2018/april/pheasants-and-ticks-our-letter-in-the-courier/

The turkey that I just posted was entirely tick free. I spent some time looking him over for ticks because they are thick up there. But not a one on him. No grouse feathers in his gullet either.

Knowing what kinds of things a particular animal will eat is useful information, but that does not necessarily mean that the eater is impactful on the eatee on a population level. That is something that is often missed or ignored by the popular press articles. Figure out what has population-level responses is not easy. Not easy at all. (unless you have a big armchair at your keyboard... ).

Chickens are apparently more effective at tick control than introduced quail, which have a low survival rate
https://shelterislandreporter.times...land-third-year-for-tick-control-effort/

A different story for native bobwhite in the appropriate habitat
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0143622817306161

In truth, food preferences are relative, among other things. What is especially tasty in one scenario may be very low on the grocery list in another situation. Not only the presence of other foods affect how much of something you might eat, other factors will affect your choices as well, such as how dangerous it may be to eat it, how difficult it is to eat, and so on and so forth. That said, from the abstract of that paper I linked to, it seems that opossums do not care for ticks under a wide range of conditions.

As for the birds, maybe, maybe not. Possibly turkeys always love them.

Drew, you may find it useful to use scholar.google.com for searches to get to the original, primary literature. It is not the best search engine, but it is free and does reasonably well.