While walking through the grounds of the Riverside Country Club earlier this month, the course superintendent and a co-worker came across a tree teeming with ticks.
"We were examining the tree for a type of beetle that's chewing at the leaves and the next thing I know we were picking ticks off each other," Scott said. "The leaves were just coated with them."
Scott estimated there were upwards of 1,000 recently hatched ticks on the six-metre-high white ash.
He and the co-worker were not bitten by the insect but removed several of them from their clothing and skin.
Scott examined a few under a microscope and said he believes they were blacklegged ticks, which can carry Lyme disease.
"It was disturbing," Scott said, noting he's found the odd tick on the course before but never to this extent.
As is the case across the Kennebecasis Valley, the golf course has "quite a deer population" - the preferred host for adult ticks.
"The fact that we have so many deer and the tick population is rising on the golf course so dramatically probably says the same thing for the whole area of Rothesay," he said.
"That population was kind of alarming."
