I have been interviewing people of immigrant backgrounds in Central and Southern Finland about their migration experiences, identity, nature and ticks. As wrote, in Finland, forests play important roles as places of recreation or timber production. Recently, forests and nature have started to be used as integration tools. As argue, in policies and research, the term nature-based integration has started to be used. The integration training (kotoutumiskoulutus) and broader policies encourage newcomers to get to know and use nature in Finland as a pathway to settling in.
But what does it mean to build a relationship with a forest when we start to consider other beings who inhabit or use it? As, for example, Eben Kirskey wrote in , we live in a multispecies world filled with non-human beings like plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, who shape our lives as we, humans, shape theirs. And as aptly point out, not all those beings’ company is desired by humans. When forests become stages for both integration and disease transmission, questions about belonging, risk, and care grow increasingly urgent, especially as climate change reshapes the movement patterns of both people and other animals like ticks.
Usually, I am the one who does the asking. But this time, I decided to gather some of the questions I have heard from the research participants during forest walks and interviews. These are not always scientific questions. However, thinking through them has helped me better understand the topics I work around and how they ultimately shape the research I do.
What should I do if I or anyone near gets bit by a tick?
I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. There’s a practical answer, of course: I always refer to the official Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare’s guidelines ( available in Finnish), which suggest removing the tick with fine-tipped tweezers as soon as possible and monitoring for symptoms. But there is a multiplicity of people’s reactions and ways of acting. Some people panic. Others are deeply grossed out, while some have stories of growing up in countries where ways of dealing with ticks were a part of and a necessity of everyday life. A tick bite is rarely just a tick bite. It breaches our past experiences, fears, and ways we understand risk and nature.
Do I always have to kill a tick?
Not necessarily! Our instinct to kill ticks is understandable. We often encounter them in moments of vulnerability and see them as parasites who may transmit disease. However, their ecological role is more complex than it might seem. As write, ticks are a part of food webs. Birds and rodents feed on them, and they thus support animal populations. In interviews, people described killing ticks in different, sometimes slightly vengeful ways: burning them with matches, drowning them in oil, sealing them in plastic bags. The underlying tension here is between self-protection and co-existence. How much harm are we willing to cause to avoid being harmed?
Why do some Finns hug trees? Can I try too?
Tree hugging is often connected in popular culture as a symbol of the nature-loving hippie subculture, but it can also be understood as a therapeutic practice, like in an example of Japanese born sylvotherapy. Some Finns hug trees because they make them feel calm. Others do it during forest bathing (metsäkylpy), a practice of mindful walking and grounding in nature. Of course, you can try! It might feel silly at first, but it might also change how you relate to trees. You might notice their bark texture, their scent, their quiet presence and other creatures that live with them, like lichens and bark beetles. That awareness can be a first step into multispecies thinking.
Insects on aluminium foil on a forest floor. Microphoto: Alicja Staniszewska.
Can a forest recognise you?
Not in the way your dog might recognise your voice, or your friend might wave at you from across the street. But forests have memories. write that trees can record development pressures and store chemical traces from past disturbances. As points out, in some Indigenous and also non-indigenous epistemologies, knowing doesn’t require eyes or names, but it is about ongoing relationships. If you walk the same path often and breathe with the rhythm of that place, you become part of the forest’s pattern. Maybe it doesn’t know you in a cognitive sense, but it registers your presence. It changes with you.
Can ticks love back?
Probably not in the Hallmark sense. But their attachment can be intense. Ticks are fascinating from a multispecies perspective because they challenge how we define meaningful relationships. They force us to confront bodily boundaries, vulnerability, and even environmental change. In Finland, many immigrants develop new outdoor habits and sometimes fears due to ticks (and other factors, like for example coldness or darkness), which become a kind of symbolic gatekeeper of belonging in the forest.
Asking questions, sometimes serious, sometimes silly, is one way to open space for multispecies thinking. It’s how we begin to see forests as relational spaces and how we begin to understand migration beyond human terms: as entangled with ticks and trees, pathogens and policies. The encounters with non-human creatures along the way of the integration process remind us that no one integrates into a place alone.
You can ask Alicja more questions via email: staniaz(at)jyu.fi
