- Jan 27, 2015
- 974
- 3,369
- 🏆 Honorable Mentions:
- 3
- Detector(s) used
-
Minelab Equinox 800
XP Deus 2
- Primary Interest:
- Metal Detecting
Hi everyone. Be careful and avoid ticks!
This is a public service announcement that the ticks are back, and we should all take the normal precautions against them. It's easy to forget to protect ourselves in the excitement of a new digging/exploring season. The backstory:
--------------------------
Yesterday I dragged my teenage son out of bed at 9AM for a hike into the woods behind our house (more on that in a moment). We know there are ticks in the woods and we take all the normal precautions:
- long pants and sleeves, no skin showing
- bug repellant (I hadn't applied permethrin yet so we used Deep Woods off yesterday)
- clothes off when we get home
- check each other, shower then check each other again.
Even after all that my son found one tick crawling on his back and got rid of it.
The second tick managed to bite/attach a few hours after the hike; we got it off and put antibiotic ointment on the bite (though it was a large tick and only attached for a short time, so very low/zero chance of Lyme).
I was lucky and haven't found any on me. My son had a good explanation for that: we were metal detecting in the woods, and my job is to swing the detector and dig the initial hole, while my son uses the pinpointer and Lesche to recover the target. That puts him closer to the ground/brush for longer periods than me.
The reason we were detecting this area is that it had an old village of about 5 houses back in the 1800's and early 1900's. It's about a mile hike from the house into a "preserve" that surrounds a drinking water reservoir. The reservoir was created in the 1920's by flooding the valley, resulting in those homesites being abandoned; there are the typical stone foundations that you'd expect to find in an area like this.
Why haven't we detected here before? Ticks. And the pack of coyotes that live in the preserve. And the black bear(s) that are in the area. Given all that, there have just been easier places to detect. But when I asked my son where he wanted to detect yesterday he said, "the preserve" - so we hiked.
What did we find? Across two trips (I went once by myself) we've found:
- a nice selection of buckles (one with silver wash and one with golden wash of some sort)
- two intact milk glasses from canning jar lids
- a curry comb (I think that's what that rectangular item is)
- a suspender clip, garter clip and concave button
- the little spoon says "Make better cake with Swans Down Cake Flour" and my research says it's from the 1920's
- a cool blue marble (I know nothing about marbles - is there anything special to look for?)
But we've only found one coin: a 1917D wheat penny. That surprises us...but maybe these folks just didn't have much money (or cared for it very carefully).
Anyway, thanks for reading this far (if you have).
Make sure to protect against ticks!
- Brian
A typical foundation in the area:
The hike back:
This is a public service announcement that the ticks are back, and we should all take the normal precautions against them. It's easy to forget to protect ourselves in the excitement of a new digging/exploring season. The backstory:
--------------------------
Yesterday I dragged my teenage son out of bed at 9AM for a hike into the woods behind our house (more on that in a moment). We know there are ticks in the woods and we take all the normal precautions:
- long pants and sleeves, no skin showing
- bug repellant (I hadn't applied permethrin yet so we used Deep Woods off yesterday)
- clothes off when we get home
- check each other, shower then check each other again.
Even after all that my son found one tick crawling on his back and got rid of it.
The second tick managed to bite/attach a few hours after the hike; we got it off and put antibiotic ointment on the bite (though it was a large tick and only attached for a short time, so very low/zero chance of Lyme).
I was lucky and haven't found any on me. My son had a good explanation for that: we were metal detecting in the woods, and my job is to swing the detector and dig the initial hole, while my son uses the pinpointer and Lesche to recover the target. That puts him closer to the ground/brush for longer periods than me.
The reason we were detecting this area is that it had an old village of about 5 houses back in the 1800's and early 1900's. It's about a mile hike from the house into a "preserve" that surrounds a drinking water reservoir. The reservoir was created in the 1920's by flooding the valley, resulting in those homesites being abandoned; there are the typical stone foundations that you'd expect to find in an area like this.
Why haven't we detected here before? Ticks. And the pack of coyotes that live in the preserve. And the black bear(s) that are in the area. Given all that, there have just been easier places to detect. But when I asked my son where he wanted to detect yesterday he said, "the preserve" - so we hiked.
What did we find? Across two trips (I went once by myself) we've found:
- a nice selection of buckles (one with silver wash and one with golden wash of some sort)
- two intact milk glasses from canning jar lids
- a curry comb (I think that's what that rectangular item is)
- a suspender clip, garter clip and concave button
- the little spoon says "Make better cake with Swans Down Cake Flour" and my research says it's from the 1920's
- a cool blue marble (I know nothing about marbles - is there anything special to look for?)
But we've only found one coin: a 1917D wheat penny. That surprises us...but maybe these folks just didn't have much money (or cared for it very carefully).
Anyway, thanks for reading this far (if you have).
Make sure to protect against ticks!
- Brian
A typical foundation in the area:
The hike back:
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