Squirrels do not eat ticks in any meaningful way. Unlike opossums, which are well-known tick predators, squirrels have no documented habit of seeking out or consuming ticks as food. In fact, the relationship between squirrels and ticks runs in the opposite direction: squirrels are one of the animals that ticks feed on most frequently, and they play a significant role in helping tick populations thrive.
Why Squirrels Don’t Control Ticks
Squirrels are herbivores and opportunistic foragers. Their diet centers on nuts, seeds, fruits, bark, and occasionally bird eggs or insects they encounter by chance. They have no biological drive to hunt ticks and lack the grooming behavior that makes some animals effective tick killers. While a squirrel might accidentally ingest a tick while grooming its own fur, this is not a reliable or ecologically significant form of tick control.
Contrast this with opossums, which spend most of their waking hours grooming. Opossums can detect a tick on their body almost immediately after it lands and will eat the tick before it has a chance to draw blood. This makes opossums genuinely useful for reducing tick numbers in an area. Squirrels simply don’t share this behavior.
Squirrels Actually Feed Ticks
Far from being tick predators, squirrels are important tick hosts. A large study of nearly 600 gray squirrels found that about 42% were carrying one or more ticks. Researchers removed over 1,500 ticks from the squirrels in total, the vast majority being larvae (77%) and nymphs (23%). Some individual squirrels carried as many as 117 tick larvae or 37 nymphs at once.
Young ticks in their larval and nymphal stages need blood meals from small and medium-sized mammals to develop into adults. Squirrels, along with mice, chipmunks, and shrews, are among the preferred hosts for these immature ticks. By providing reliable blood meals, squirrels help sustain tick populations in wooded and suburban areas rather than reducing them.
Squirrels Spread Tick-Borne Disease
The picture gets worse when you consider disease transmission. Gray squirrels are not just passive tick hosts. They are confirmed reservoir hosts for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, meaning they carry the infection in their bodies and pass it to ticks that feed on them. Those infected ticks then go on to bite other animals or humans.
Research from the UK Health Security Agency demonstrated that gray squirrels can harbor Lyme disease bacteria for at least 11 weeks and transmit the infection to ticks feeding on them. In one study, about 12% of gray squirrels tested positive for Lyme disease bacteria. Some squirrels had disseminated infections, with bacteria found in their bladders and hearts, making them especially effective at passing the pathogen along to feeding ticks.
This is a meaningful contribution to the Lyme disease cycle. When a tick larva feeds on an infected squirrel, it picks up the bacteria and carries it through its next life stages. As a nymph, that tick may bite a person, a dog, or another animal and transmit the infection.
What Animals Actually Eat Ticks
If you’re looking for natural tick control, opossums are the standout. A single opossum can kill thousands of ticks per week through grooming alone. They are so efficient at detecting and eating ticks that researchers consider them a net positive for reducing tick-borne disease risk in areas where they live.
Other animals that consume ticks include:
- Guinea fowl and chickens: Both will pick ticks off the ground and from low vegetation, making them popular choices for rural tick management.
- Wild turkeys: They forage through leaf litter where ticks wait for hosts and eat them along with other insects.
- Certain lizard species: In the western United States, the western fence lizard is notable not for eating ticks but for neutralizing the Lyme disease bacteria inside ticks that feed on it.
What This Means for Your Yard
If you’ve been feeding squirrels in your backyard hoping they’d help with ticks, the evidence suggests the opposite effect. Attracting squirrels to your property brings more tick hosts closer to your home, which can increase the local tick population. Each squirrel visiting your feeder may be carrying dozens of tick larvae that drop off and wait in the surrounding grass and leaf litter for their next host.
This doesn’t mean you need to wage war on backyard squirrels, but it’s worth understanding that they are part of the tick problem rather than the solution. Practical tick reduction in your yard comes from habitat management: keeping grass short, removing leaf litter, creating gravel or wood chip barriers between lawn and wooded areas, and treating the perimeter with appropriate tick control products. Encouraging opossums, guinea fowl, or chickens in your yard will do far more for tick control than any number of squirrels ever could.