 But another is suburban sprawl. That makes it easier for rodents to thrive by breaking up forest habitat, and rodents give ticks the disease that spread to us. Patty Casey is with the Agency of Agriculture. There's kind of a diagonal line that you can, it's kind of a moving line, but the south and the west side of the state have higher populations generally, and like up into the islands, we see a lot of ticks up there.