"AK Ticks"

Not quite an editorial, as it was originally intended, but amusing enough to convert into a Nuggets panel. And here I thought I had left this sort of regional subject matter behind when we left beautiful Maine.
Nope.

Last year a friend of mine posted a picture on social media of a bloated tick that he had found on his lawn, which was about a mile away down the road from our cabin. It's slowly been creeping up on people's consciousness that one of the most coveted benefits to living in the arctic is now no longer a geographic barrier:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says the number of ticks in the state is on the rise.
Alaska has had types such as vole and squirrel ticks that are found on wildlife, but newer to the state are two kinds of dog ticks, said Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen, a wildlife veterinarian.

UPDATE: The latest from the state can be read here:

An incident in mid-June, 2018, in Kodiak offers an example of another vector for ticks – birds. Robin Corcoran, a wildlife biologist with the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, reported that a seabird, a Northern Fulmar, was found in a parking lot in the city of Kodiak covered in ticks. She wrote, “Although we frequently encounter birds with lice this is our first experience with ticks, which we believed were very rare in Alaska. It was a massive infestation - estimated 300 ticks on this one bird.”

And if you think that the CDC's infamous tick-muffin tweet is a traumatizing image, you must have missed this little gem from Homestead Survival.

Sweet Dreams.