MENDOCINO CO., 6/30/26 — Tick season, most people figure, is a summer thing. In the oak woods around Hopland, scientists have spent the better part of 40 years showing that’s backward thinking. Here the tick that spreads Lyme disease is out all year — crawling up grass stems in the dead of winter — and the one most likely to make you sick is too small to notice.
The bugs are active year-round here, and the worst stretches don’t line up with beach weather. Adult western blacklegged ticks — Ixodes pacificus, the species that spreads the Lyme bacterium in the West — are most active on the north coast in the dead of winter, climbing grass stems along trail edges from about Halloween through spring. The nymphs — immature ticks that drive most human cases of Lyme — take over in spring and early summer.
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