Ticks are a major vector of disease, so understanding their distribution, geographically and across hosts, is important for the study of evolutionary ecology. Numerous passerine species worldwide are infested with ticks, and both prevalence and intensity of ticks vary across host species. In bird studies, foraging height is commonly thought to explain the difference in prevalence and intensity of ticks, with ground-foraging birds having a greater chance of encountering a tick. In this study, we used phylogenetically independent contrasts to examine the prevalence and intensity of ticks on passerines in South Australia and the role of abundance, body size and host foraging height for differences in prevalence and intensity of ticks. We examined 1262 birds for ticks between April 2004 and December 2006 at five sites across South Australia. All the ticks we collected were immature life-stages of Ixodes hirsti. Of the mist-netted birds, 347 (27.5%) individuals were infested with an average of 2.8 ticks. Both prevalence and intensity of ticks varied significantly between host species. We found that body size was significantly correlated with tick prevalence, with larger hosts having higher tick prevalence. Abundance and mean foraging height did not explain the variance in prevalence or intensity of ticks.