Kentville man collects ticks for science

Glen Parsons isn’t your typical collector. He doesn’t collect stamps or vinyl records. 

He collects ticks. 

The Kentville man started collecting ticks behind his home in 2019. At first it was for research, but now it’s for public awareness. 

Parsons is a retired wildlife biologist. Every May from 2019 to 2024, Parsons would spend ten hours on the trails near his home collecting ticks. 

He says he has always had an interest in creepy crawly things and having insect collections as long as he can remember. As part of his job, he says he learned more about how ticks depend on other wildlife for their life cycle. Then he was curious about what he might find in his own neighbourhood. 

“We have a beautiful park behind our place and lots of green space. We would start to see some ticks. So then I just naturally became curious and I wondered what the abundance and the general distribution of the ticks are here in my community,” Parsons said.

Tick collecting 101

Tick Collecting 101: make a flag out of an old white t-shirt on a ski pole. 

Parsons says dragging the t-shirt over vegetation is like an animal walking by and adult ticks sitting on vegetation with their legs out – or “questing”  – have something to cling on to. 

This technique was not invented by Parsons. He says he read about it in a research paper and thought he’d give it a try.

“That’s when I said, ‘I’ll just go out and just walk around learning the technique and seeing what I could find’. And lo and behold, I started to find some and right away it was much more than I expected.”

“I started to do random transects through the forest as opposed to the trails thinking, ‘Oh, if I’m finding lots in the trail system, for sure I’m going to find a lot in the woods.’ And it wasn’t. I started to find very few in the woods. 

Then Parsons says he realized that the adult ticks just drop off an animal, lay their eggs and they don’t move far. 

Capturing hundreds of ticks

“One of the things I’ve learned is that deer ticks are mostly around the trails areas. Just walking through the woods, you’ll find much fewer than right around the grassy edges of the trails.”

Then Parsons had a new plan — catch as many ticks in one area to reduce the population. 

“Well, that was foolish I now realize,” he says. 

“When I first started in 2019, I was getting a black-legged tick every 7 1/2 minutes. By the time I finished, at the end of five years, I was getting a black-legged tick every 2 1/2 minutes. I was literally capturing hundreds of ticks in the same general area. 

“I was not having any impact on the population, which totally made sense because I’m out for 10 hours a month in May. Meanwhile, all the wildlife, all the animals that are out helping the ticks contribute to their life cycle. They were around all the time, right? So, you know, me and my little kill jar didn’t work much for reducing the population, but I learned a lot and met a lot of people along the way.”

Parsons use a small plastic pill bottle with a tissue soaked in rubbing alcohol inside to kill the ticks he collects.

Black-legged ticks

He says black-legged ticks don’t like hot, dry weather. They prefer humid and moist conditions.  And that means, loving leaf litter close to the ground, not the tall grass we might normally think of for ticks.

On this day, Parsons finds four female black-legged ticks and one male black-legged tick in leaf litter on top of an almost dry puddle. Female black-legged — or deer — ticks are the most likely to carry Lyme Disease.

Parsons says he gave his tick collection from 2019 to 2024 to the Lloyd Tick Lab at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. 

Collection for science

“At the time, they were dissecting every one, keeping half frozen and then taking the other half and doing some analysis for disease presence. They jokingly called it the 500 tick project. 

“As I understand it, to have that many ticks over in the same area over multiple years. It was kind of a longitudinal study. So when they heard about what I was doing, I felt comfortable handing over my collection so they could do what they want,” said Parsons.

“I wasn’t going to do anything with them. They were just, you know, kind of a show and tell when people came to the house,” he said.

Another time, Parsons said he collected hundreds of ticks for a student at the lab who was doing research on tick brains. 

“They reached out and said, if it wasn’t for those things, we wouldn’t have had nowhere near as many data. So, you know, that was satisfying. 

MORE TOP STORIES