People hear “Hudson County” and assume they’re safe from ticks. Concrete. Brick. No woods to speak of. What ticks?
Liberty State Park has ticks. Lincoln Park has ticks. The tall grass along the embankment near Bergen Hill has ticks. So does the wooded section behind Riverview Park up in the Heights, and any unmowed lot near the bottom of Tonnelle Avenue. Black-legged ticks (the ones that carry Lyme disease) don’t need a forest. They need leaf litter and shade. That’s it.
New Jersey has been in the top four or five states in the country for Lyme disease for years now. Hudson County’s numbers are lower than rural Sussex or Warren, but they’re not zero, and a lot of the cases that do get reported here trace back to local parks, weekend hikes in the Watchung Reservation, or quick drives up to trails in Bergen County.
If you’ve got a dog in Hudson County, ticks are basically an everyday concern between April and November. The dog runs at Liberty State Park and the trails along the Hudson River Walkway both pass through patches of overgrown grass, which is exactly where ticks wait, parked at the tip of a grass blade, ready to grab onto something warm. Your dog brushes by, picks one up, comes home to your apartment in West New York or Weehawken. Two days later the tick drops off on the couch.
Once a tick is inside your home, it can wait weeks for an opportunity to attach to a person. The nymph stage is the scary one. About the size of a poppy seed. Basically impossible to spot unless you know to look.
If you find one on yourself, here’s the playbook:
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip the tick as close to your skin as possible. Pull straight up with steady, even pressure. Don’t twist. Don’t crush. Don’t burn it. Don’t smother it with Vaseline. Those old-school methods make the tick regurgitate stomach contents into the bite, which is the exact moment pathogens transmit.
Save the tick in a sealed bag or piece of tape if you can. Sounds weird, but if you develop symptoms later (bullseye rash, joint pain, flu-like fatigue), having the actual tick to show a doctor speeds things up. Rutgers Cooperative Extension in Toms River will identify ticks for free, by the way. Useful to know that.
Watch the bite site for thirty days. The classic Lyme rash usually shows up between three and thirty days after the bite. It doesn’t always look like a clean bullseye. Sometimes it’s just a slowly spreading red patch. Anything weird in that window, call your doctor.
For homeowners with actual yards in the lower-density parts of Hudson County (parts of Bayonne, Greenville, the Heights, North Bergen), yard treatment is genuinely worth it. A tick exterminator in Jersey City treats the perimeter, the spots where the lawn meets shrubs or fence lines, which is exactly where ticks live and hunt. Done right, this knocks the local tick population down by 70 to 90 percent for the whole season.
The CDC’s tick prevention overview is genuinely the best one-page summary anywhere. Permethrin on clothing. DEET or picaridin on skin. Tick check within two hours of being outdoors. Shower when you come in. None of it is complicated. It just has to actually be a habit.
Tick season here runs roughly April through November. May and June are the worst (nymphs), and October sees another peak (adults). If you’ve got kids playing in any park with grass or leaf litter during those months, do a quick tick check before bed. Behind the ears, the scalp, the waistband, the back of the knees. Five seconds per spot.
You don’t have to live in the woods to deal with ticks. You just have to live near a park.