Ep. 38: Shooting Giraffes with Paintballs and How to Avoid Ticks and the Diseases they Carry

There's so many awesome seasons to take advantage of this time of year. We've got turkey season, bear season, depending on where you live. It's also the start of many great fishing seasons. But overall, it's just a great time to be outside. However, there is one season this time of year that I do not like, and that's tick season. If I really think about it, Ticks are probably one of the more dangerous things that a majority of hunters

encounter just being out, especially in the spring. It's because they're disease vectors for things like lyme disease, rocky Mountain spotted tick fever, which can actually kill you, as well as a lot of other diseases that cause sickness and other complications. I mean, ticks can be a huge problem, but there are great methods and best practices for prevention. Over the years, I've developed a system that seems to work really well and just allows me to go into

the woods with a lot more confidence. But before we get into that, I want to share a story that involves three things ticks, giraffes, and paintball guns. When I'm thinking about ticks stories, a lot of them came to mind.

I was thinking originally about this bear hunt with my buddy Brett where we were pretty much fighting ticks off with machetes, and then another hunt where I decided to go spring bear hunting in Montana and shorts, And by the time I reached a couple of miles into where I wanted, I had counted over a hundred ticks in a region that I'd prefer never to see ticks again. But of all the tick encounters and experiences, one completely stands out from the others, and it takes place in

South Africa. Quite a few years back, I would pretty much try to find guiding work wherever I could, and I would travel around and kind of made it a year round job. Going to New Zealand, traveling to different states hunting spring seasons, and one year I actually found some work in South Africa. Just starting out. I was on this reserve that had a lot of animals, but in this particular reserve they happened to have giraffes as well as I mean, there's a lot of different species

in this particular area. There was zebras in Yala, kudu, water buck, drafts, some other just like smaller animals, dykers, and just a lot of different species. Now on this particular place, they did have a problem with tick born diseases, killing a lot of the animals, and the drafts were especially susceptible to this. I don't know if it's just their body size, but some of these animals you would find so many ticks, like in their crotch region, in

their armpits. It just looked like these massive growths growing and they're all from ticks, a combination of disease from the ticks, and then I think just so many ticks getting on these animals. I mean, I just I couldn't see how they could live and it was becoming a really big problem. So this particular place, while trying to help out a lot of the animal populations on this

piece of property. Hired hunters or professional hunters to inoculate the animals and they use these they call it douse, So it's like, um, it's a chemical that you know, people use on cattle as well. It kills a lot of parasites and does kill the ticks as well. So they would use this douse to inoculate and kill off the ticks to help these animals survive some of the tick born diseases and maybe just give them a better

fighting chance. Now, if you're running cattle or whatever, you can bring your cattle into the yards through a squeeze shoot, spray little douse on the backs of them and send them on their merry way and do that once a year and you'll be fine. However, it's pretty hard to round up wild animals like zebras, giraffes and y'allo water bucks, all these things that are extremely spooky living in the

wild in the bush. That's just not possible. So the delivery method for this douse was a paintball gun, and these paintballs were filled with the chemical that kills the ticks, and then hunters would you know, myself. I would take the paintball gun around owned try to sneak up on animals and shoot them with the paintballs to inoculate them from the tick disease. And if you've ever shot a

paintball gun, they don't go very far. It's like shooting, I would say it was even it is probably like hunting. I would compare it to hunting with a traditional bow, because you had to get pretty close to these animals to be effective or to to make a good shot.

You could hit them anywhere because the oil from it would I mean, it's strong enough that it could pretty much cure a larger cattle sized animal with one or two paintballs, and some of the other animals like giraffes or real social animals that rub up against each other would actually spread it to each other as well, so you didn't have to make like a vital shot or anything. But you had to be pretty close and without obstructions of brush or anything else to actually hit these animals.

So that's one of the reasons that they hired hunters. They're really good at stocking to get in and inoculate a variety of animals that were extremely spooped, had been hunted and pressured fairly hard and did not allow people to get very close. I was also given a four wheeler where I could drive around, so I was mostly

on the four wheeler. I would have the paintball guns, so if I was driving around and saw some I could shoot them with the paintballs, or even try to chase some of them down with the four wheeler and

shoot him. The trouble was not a lot of roads there, and it wasn't like the type of terrain where you could drive off road and chase them and get them, so for the most part it was spot in stock and then a lot of night work with a spotlight, especially for some of the more nocturnal animals like the bush bucks, the in Yala's just a lot of different animals at night. They're mostly concerned about getting the drafts, and I thought, Okay, this is gonna be super easy

shooting a draft with a paintball gun. Like I just didn't had no real experience with the giraffes at that point. They were the hardest thing to sneak up on, and I think until this point, I'm not sure anybody had really shot the giraffes with paintballs their giant but they can see forever and they were extremely wary. They did not like people getting close. They were not like friendly zoo grafts. They would see you from a long ways off, and then they would just constantly keep jogging out of

range of the paintballs. So one of the first nights I would would drive around, and I don't know why, but I was never able to locate a giraffe at night. I I just thought, oh, they'll be easy, I'll go find some drafts at night. Maybe it was just like, you know, being unfamiliar with where they hung out. I didn't really know where I was and mostly just kind of sticking to the roads on the flour wheeler with the spotlight because it was the one that plugged into

the battery. I didn't have a cordless spotlight, so I drove around all the roads that I could find. Kind of after I knew the area, spotlighting, shooting some of the more nocturnal animals with the paintballs, but not seeing any giraffes. So I ended up starting to figure out

where the drafts were hanging out. I had spotted some giraffes one one morning, after having quite a few failed stocks on them, like okay, because at first I just thought I'll just walk up and shoot these things with the paintball it would be great, and that was not the case. So I let him calm down. I go stalking some other animals, inoculate of a water buck, which was like a pretty cool stock, and hunt in some real thick stuff, and then I go back to where

the drafts were in their feeding. I'm like, okay, cool. So I start sneaking in and there's about five or six girafts in this one's spot. I'm like, all right, I'm trying to plan out my stock where I can get through this one little creek where I can get close enough, and they're kind of feeding away like backs and really focused on eating this tree. So I'm like, all right, this might be my best chance. So I gotta shoot as many of these things with the paintballs

as I can. I get close, I get lined up, and I'm like, all right, sweet. I think there was five giraffes, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna take these three close ones, and then as the other you come out, I might try to hit him on the run, so I get lined up. I shoot the first shot, hit the close giraffe and the butt with a paintball, and I tried, I'm trying to get maybe two paintballs on each giraffe before I moved to the next one. Was the first one that pop pop got him twice.

The next one pop pop got it. But at this point they hear the gun going off. I'm fairly close and they don't like it, so they start running. I shoot the third one one time, and now they're standing out at a distance like looking they're they're not liking it, you know, like, guys, I'm just trying to help you out here. And then they start taking off again. I'm like, all right, I can get that one one more time. As I shoot that one, they run into a herd

of zebras. I'm just like guessing my yardage, but these I don't have a lot of these paintballs either, and I want to conserve them because I think they're kind of expensive. So I shoot and I'm thinking, okay, I will definitely hit this giant giraffe out in this flat. The paintball goes over the giraffe and hits a zebra behind. Find it, and I thought that was pretty awesome. How many how many people have tried to shoot a giraffe with a paintball, missed and hit a zebra? I think

that that's very low. But that was just one of the more fun experiences I've had dealing with ticks, and just a crazy fun and interesting look at how bad the ticks affect the animals there. And I'm thinking, man, I do not want one of these ticks on me, because I saw the damage that they did too large animals and how devastating they were, and the fact that they needed people to come in here and help protect

the animals by just trying to kill the ticks. Why are ticks so bad, Well, the answer is because they carry a lot of fairly bad diseases. Let's just actually talk about ticks a little bit first, and then we'll go into some of the preventions and things you should do to just make sure that you don't these things don't happen to you. The way a tick feeds is

it essentially finds a host, buries in, and then draws blood. Now, ticks mostly transmit disease through their saliva glands, so when they bury into your skin in exchange for taking blood, they're also releasing most of the time bad bacterias into your body that then cause complications or disease later on, or within a couple of days too, sometimes a month later. A lot of tickboard illnesses are very hard for doctors to diagnose because they have similar symptoms, but some of

them don't even manifest until a longer incubation time. So if you get bit by a tick, you might pull it out, not think anything, and then a month later get sick and not really correlate that with the tick. But let's talk about a few of the most common disease eases that hunters or people get. The first one would be lime disease. Now, some of the signs and symptoms of lime disease are fever, headache, fatigue. Lime disease

can manifest itself in lots of strange ways. I actually have a friend that got lime disease and it manifested as a form of meningitis where he had to have his brain essentially drained in spinal taps for antibiotics to be administered. I know quite a few people that actually have contracted lime disease, and a lot of people that have had a lot of complications, long term complications with nerve damage and other things from the bacterial infection years later.

But one of the ways to identify lime disease, and this doesn't happen. It happens in about seventy of the cases. But it's a bulls eye type skin rash. I know people that have got lime disease that did not get the rash, and then other people that have gotten the rash, but it was sort of hard to identify it first. So it's not so cut and dry. But the bulls eye shape rash, especially after if you know you've been bit by a tick, seems to be one of the

more dead giveaways for diagnosing lime disease. Now, not all ticks carry lime disease. Lime diseases carried by black legged deer ticks, so the type of tick can actually help in identifying the type of disease. One disease that occurs very often where I hunt, and actually in many of the regions where I hunt. They have done studies on

this disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It's called spotted fever because a lot of people within two to four days after they get the fever developed this really spotty looking rash. It's kind of like chicken pox looking, but more kind of everywhere, fairly fast, and it just it looks it turns your skin spotted. But once you've had that, once you're that late in the disease, it can actually be a very debilitating, even deadly disease. Um It's been known

to kill people. You can get a very high fever. Some of the symptoms include fever's headaches, the rash, obviously muscle pain. It can even lead to things like amputation, paralysis, permanent brain damage, just some seriously bad stuff. I just second hand known a guy that was in the backcountry in Montana. They one of the guys got pretty sick. They're riding out and he just blacked out, fell off of his horse. His fever got so hot he kind of passed out. They got him back in and it

turned out to be Rocky Mountain spotted fever. He had, you know, some paralysis issues he was he he ended up recovering from it, but it was an extremely bad deal. Just within the seven days that he was in there, he almost didn't make it out alive. And then there's the one that I thought I think is pretty scary. Is this alpha golf from the loan startick, which is actually fairly moore is being looked into it, but it

caused you to be allergic to red meat. I've had people that I know that have contracted this and hunters, and now they can no longer eat meat red meat, which I'm like, Man, give me lime disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Don't give me the one that you can't eat meat from. The spotted tick fever mostly comes from the Rocky Mountain would tick. And then I was reading recently a study out of monts Hannah talking about Colorado tick fever, which spotted fever and lime disease or

bacterial diseases. So it's a bacteria that gets in your bloodstream. But the Colorado tick fever, although it's not as dangerous as spotted tick fever, it's not not deadly. It just makes you fairly sick, is a viral disease from the ticks. One study, and actually an area that I hunt a lot, was saying that one in five ticks were infected with this disease, and then of those ticks, about one percent contained spotted tick fever, and it is also very possible that you could be bit by one tick and be

given multiple diseases. So with all that information, what we really want to do is not get bit by ticks. There is a high likelihood that if you do get bit by a tick, you can contract some pretty bad stuff. So I think that the thing that we want to

focus on is prevention. And so over the years, especially bearer guiding, I mean, I've had a lot of run ins, a lot of different experiences with ticks, and especially where I guided in Montana, being a study area for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, I knew that having talked to researchers and things, they are like, yeah, there's a lot of

it here, you should be really careful. And I didn't take it very seriously at first, but over the years, seeing people that I know get lyme disease, seeing people that I know get some other just really strange diseases from ticks, it really got me thinking about trying not to get bit and coming up with some best practices and some prevention techniques and just sticking to them in order to prevent from even having to deal with the initial bite of the tick and Over the last I

would say four to five years, I've been really successful deferring ticks and not having as many. You know, some years I would go and get have as many as twenty plus ticks buried in me. Now, if I get a single tick buried in a season, that's abnormal. Let's go into a few ways of prevention. I want to break this down into two. What I would call I

would call prevention, and then best practices. So what prevention is just ways to prevent the ticks from getting on you, things you can do to hinder ticks from affecting you. And then the best practices, what I would consider is just like doing the way you do things to prevent

them from getting to you. So kind of following a certain order of things, following a good code of this is what I do, This is how I this is my measures for preventing ticks, and then I follow those measures every time, and by just being consistent with it, it prevents it. When we're talking prevention, I think step

one is to coat your gear. A few years back, I started coating my gear in permethrin, and I think that that is probably the single biggest factor in preventing ticks that I've found it is extremely effective and I've noticed a huge difference when I use it. So what permethrin is. It's actually, I guess like a we'll just call it a bug spray head to turn. But it's

not like you would sprayed on your skin. It is pretty potent, and so I just coat my gear with it, allow it to dry, and then use that gear when I'm out hunting. The stuff that I've been using late least from a company called Sawyer, and they've just got like spray permethern. You can buy it at our e I, you can buy it online, you can buy it wherever,

and there's other companies that make it as well. For what it is advertised, it lasts for six weeks or six washings, which is plenty of time, and I actually recode it probably every other week or something like that. But what you do is you you lay your clothes out, you spray it with this permethern and then you just hang it and allowed to dry. I do the outside and the inside of whatever my hunting gear is. Now.

I know, if you're a bear hunter or a hunter, you're mostly you're thinking like scent, and I'm concerned about scent. Here's my thought on that. First off, this doesn't really have a smell. If you think about the scent that deters animals, human scent is the scent that's triggering a predatorial response. Think about it like this. I know a lot of people are like, oh, well, if you're filling up your truck at a gas station, that deer' going to smell the gas because it's strong, and which is true.

But they're gonna smell you as well because the wind direction and other things. For a long time, I resisted using repellent or any kind of anything while I was out hunting because I thought, oh, that added scent is going to make a big difference, and I'm not going to be successful. And then I started using it and

have seen no difference or change in success. It's better to have something to prevent ticks because that's a real and present danger than to think that whatever I'm using, as far as repellent is going to mess up my chances. And I think that if you try it, you'll find that it probably doesn't really affect your success anyways, but does affect the success of deterring ticks or even other bugs like the nice thing about this is it also

repels mosquitoes. Whether you're bait hunting or turkey hunting or bear it doesn't really matter what you're doing outdoors fishing, you're probably gonna encounter a lot of mosquitoes as well, and so to have something on your clothing that repels mosquitoes as well as ticks sweet awesome. I'm all for it. The nice thing about this too is it depends on how fresh it is or whatever. It does repeltics, but also if they start to get in the clothing, it

can actually kill the ticks as well. You're probably thinking, well, that sounds very dangerous for me. I've read as many papers as I can to just research the dangerous to people. If you spray it on like that, let it dry, it doesn't soak into our skins too thick for it to soak into and have negative effects. So I just suggested it's worth doing, and you can. You can do a lot of different gear with it as well. So

it depends on the type of hunt I'm doing. If I'm just going out from my house or cabin whatever, coming back each day, just hanging out in the springtime, I'll uh mostly just spray my clothes. But if I'm doing like a backcountry hunt, spring bear hunt or something like that, I'll spray my tent and then you can even spray your sleeping bag as well. You just spray it hanging out to dry and you're good to go.

It's awesome to be able to spray your gear and even think about, depending on what kind of seat covers you have or whatever, spraying your truck because a lot of the ticket bites that I do get every year aren't from actually being in the field. It's from having my backpack in the truck and then ticks getting off that in the truck, and then a few days later, when I've got no type of repellent on tick crawling on me and bearing in when I'm not looking for him.

When you're looking for him and being vigilant, that's when it's easy to detect them. It's easy to find them you're constantly thinking about them. But it's the ones that are hiding out later on at you're in your house and your vehicle that you aren't really paying attention to they get you. So the next step is after I've applied the prometherin then when I'm out in the field, My goal is to just stop access. So the way ticks work is they they don't jump, they don't fly.

They're just standing on blades of grass, mostly hip high or waste like knee high, with their fingers out or whatever out um and just waiting until you brush past them and they latch on. Once they latch on, then their goal is to find a place, a nice cozy place to burrow in. So they're gonna probably either crawl up your pants um. If they're low on the grass,

the crawl up your boots, up your pant leg. If they're up above, they'll crawl up your shirt or up your sleeve, and they try to find somewhere where they kind of are are tucked in an unnoticed, unnoticeable I find that they mostly burrow in or they just they

keep crawling up until they stop. So it might be at your waistband, it might be your crotch and your armpits, or at the top of your head, in your hair, somewhere where it's harder to find them, but also where they kind of crawl and stop and find a good place to latch or if you've got like a backpack on. I noticed on my chest sometimes I'll get unbarrowed in right where my pack straps are. So the way to stop the access is just allow fewer places for them to be able to crawl to your skin. What I

do is I always tuck my pants. If I'm wearing tall boots, I'll tuck my pants into my boot and then lace my boots up. If I'm wearing shorter boots, I'll actually tuck my pants into my socks. Now, I don't like hiking around like that because well, there's a lot of things wrong with it. First, you get a lot of stickers in your socks because they're outside your your low boot. And second, a lot of time when

I'm hunting in the spring, it might be damp. Who knows, like the grass from dew in the morning, some wet, and then that just drains all the water down my boots. So I'll tuck my pant in my boot or my sock, and then I'll just throw a gator over the top

of that, like a shorter gator. Even though it can be a little bit warmer, it just prevents water from getting into my boot and also kind of keeps another added layer of protection from anything crawling up my pant leg, my shirt I tuck into my pants, and where a belt just helps keep everything sealed off. I like to wear long sleeve shirt kind of keeps the sun off me, plus just adds a little bit extra layer of protection

from the ticks. Then the third thing that I do is I will then spray the openings around my neck and wrists with some kind of repellent. I prefer deep. There's a lot of different repellents out there. I know it kind of sucks when you're on like a long trip or a long hunt, you're using deed all the time. So I try to just limit it too. I'll spray my hair or my neck area, just whatever, and then just around where maybe they might crawl up my sleeves.

By adding the prometheron, by tucking in my pants and then just doing the spray on those few areas, it pretty much eliminates most of the ticks that will get on me. Now there are the occasional ticks it'll land on you briefly or whatever, or be on your gear and other things. So I try to spray most of my gear down. But that has been probably the best

system that I found for just keeping ticks off in general. Now, as far as the best practices go, I like to break it into what I think of as the quarantine and the check phase. Everybody now is aware of quarantine. Now I'm not thinking about quarantining yourself, but if you think about it, if if you're going out for a turkey hunt, you're going out for the day, and then you come home, even with the repellent on and everything, sometimes there's ticks that have landed in something, or just

they're on your gear, there, on you whatever. It still happens. Um it's not that they won't touch you, it's just helps take our way, say maybe of the ticks. So there is still a chance that you know there will be ticks on in your boots, on your clothing, whatever. Then you walk into your house, you take your clothes off, you shower, whatever. But maybe some of those ticks are now inside your house. And that's when you don't have any repellent. You might have your kids, your dogs, your whatever,

you aren't paying attention. You might go to bed after showering and pick that tick up at some other point when you're thinking about it. And that tends to be the ticks that ended up getting buried bury into you. So when I get home, or if I'm camping in my tent, I don't bring my clothes into my tent. And if I'm when I get home, I just have a black contractor trash bag that I keep handy. I take my clothes off before I go inside. If I'm in the garage or whatever, I take my clothes off

at put him in the bag. I mean, just like you don't have to be walking around outside in your neighborhood butt naked. But I'm just saying, like, have a way of taking the dirty clothes that you were out in the field with putting him in a plastic bag to prevent the spread of ticks getting into your hamper,

getting into whatever. If I'm home, what I'll do is I'll then take those clothes and I'll just throw him in the dryer' you know, from the bag straight into the dryer and then turn the dryer on high for about ten minutes. Dry heat kills ticks really well, and so that method kills him. If your clothes need to be washed beforehand, so ticks can actually live submerged underwater, So if you just put it in the washing machine, that's not going to kill him, and it has a

potential to get on your other clothes or whatever. I figured this out because I did a load of laundry and then pulled my clothes out and there's live ticks in there, and I thought that sucks. I always thought that water killed the ticks, and then I'm like, I gotta look this up. Turns out it doesn't, but the

dry heat does. So if you maybe aren't going to wash your clothes, but you just you're coming in for the daytime, maybe you did a morning hunt or you're gonna go do an evening hunt, just do yourself a favor. Take those clothes from the bag, throw them in the dryer, kill whatever ticks might be in there, and then you've got, you know, tick free clothes from that point on. Now, if you're out in the back country you're camping, it's

not possible to do that. What I do is if I'm coming in, if I'm hunting in morning or something, I'll take my clothes i've got. Maybe if I'm just like car camping, I'll have a black trash bag that I put the clothes that i'm hunting in in that bag, and I'll just try to squeeze the ear out, tight up, and then lay it out in the sun. I have had it, especially if your clothes are sprayed down with the permithin. I've found like I'll open the bag up and there will be dead ticks in there. Now I've

also opened the bag up and seen live ticks. But I think that that combination of the hot the sun and the repellent does tend to get the ticks off the clothes. And then if I'm gonna hang out in camp for today, I'll do that for a little bit, let it sit in the sun, and then I'll take the clothes out and just hang them up because the ticks will leave a little bit away from where I'm

camping or sleeping. But I try not to bring my clothes from whatever ticks into my tent because I find that most of the ticks that I find on myself personally with this whole method buried in is in the morning, so after I've done a tick check and all that. So it's coming in from clothes or other things that you just have laying around. So if you follow this quarantining the clothes that you're using out in the field, then you're gonna have a lot fewer instances of ticks

latching on in random places like in your house. Now, the other best practice is checking, So you just gotta constantly check for ticks. You know, if if you're hunting from home or just recreating and then coming home, you know, take your clothes off, put them in the dryer, take a shower, rints off, check yourself for ticks. If you're out in the back country, it's good to always just keep checking. I always call it is your mind playing ticks on you. You're out there, you're sitting, you're glass

and you're constantly feeling ticks crawling around. Once you find one, you kind of ever, you start feeling them all the time, but getting used to knowing what it feels like, paying attention to that checking, and then when you get back to your tent every day, you know, separating your clothes out, make sure there's no ticks on you, then go to bed.

If a tick does happen to burrow in. There's so many, I mean, I remember people saying, oh, you hold a match to its butt and let it back out, or you put alcohol on it, and they're just like all kinds of ways to remove ticks. The only way you should ever remove ticks. I don't care what people have told you. Do not do any other method than pulling

the tick out. Tweezers work fine for this. So what you want to do is you want to get as close to the skin as possible, pinch it with a pair of tweezers, not so hard that it squeezes it, but just hard enough where you can grasp it, and then just pull straight out like you're pulling a splinter out of your leg or pulling a hair out of something like. Just firmly abbit and pull it straight out. And by doing that, you know you want it to

pull everything that has out. Hopefully you've caught it before it's got too deep, because the most of the diseases through their saliva can still be transferred fairly quickly. But for the most part, you'll pull it out. You'll see, okay, does it have all of its attachments? And then take that tick. Let's just say for this, put it in a plastic baggy because we're gonna do something with it

in a minute. But once you pull that tick out, you know, make sure that there's no other pieces left in like if it's buried real deep, people have can pull and leave some of the mouth in the hole, but it's it's pretty easy to tell whether you got the whole thing or not. And then once that happens, take some antiseptic, whatever you've got, like alcohol or iodine, some kind of first aid antiseptic, and make sure you clean out that one. Because most of the diseases are bacterial.

So then you clean that out and it will help whether if there was something there before it spreads. Just cleaning it out that way is a great, great thing to do. Now, the last thing that I'll do, if I did pull a tick that was buried out, I'll often take a picture of it because certain ticks are

more likely for certain diseases. So if you got a tick and you're like I was buried in and you're worried about lyme disease, but it's a lone star tick, well you probably won't have lime disease, But there are other diseases that those ticks can carry that might have

similar symptoms. So being able to identify the type of tick if you do end up getting sick later on can be a huge help for the doctors diagnosing which antibiotics to give you or potentially what you might have, because being able to get those antibiotics soon and be treated right away is just gonna be way better in the long run. It's going to make your life a lot easier, and it'll be more accurate in diagnosing potentially

what you got. One last thing to think about if you're gonna be going into the back country, just remember to have some tweezers and antiseptic on hand if you do happen to get bit. Another thing that I would suggest is everybody in your hunting group or your family whatever, follow these same best practices, because the best way to prevent getting lime disease is just prevent getting bit in the first place, and it's super easy to do by

just following a few steps. By being diligent about controlling ticks, and you shouldn't have any problems. You'll be able to enjoy the spring and be tick free. I hope that helps some people. You know, ticks are something you should worry about, but if you just follow a few simple things, you can worry a little bit less and enjoy the experience a lot more. Before we go, I figured I

just mentioned some upcoming application deadlines. We've got Kansas deadline April, I think um and then Kentucky as well if you apply for ELK or anything there and Idaho the moose sheep goat applications do end of April. May beginning of May Montana moose sheep goat is due, and then May four Nevada deadline. So if those were something on your list of hunts, time is now. Also, I got a lot of questions asking about they remembered I did something

about applying in other states. That was episode twenty three, So I know it's kind of hard to find because the way it's labeled UM doesn't really describe it. So a lot of people have listened to it. We're gonna go back and relisten. I got a lot of those this week, so that is I'm pretty sure it's episode. Also, a question came in from Steve. He says, Heyremy heard you're gonna talk about tick protection next week. Will that

also cover mosquitoes? Yeah. The same chemicals that deter mosquitoes also work with ticks, deet, the promether and other things, so all this stuff is applicable for mosquitoes as well, which is huge problem in the spring. I know, UM, the thermo cell. I've used one in South America a while back, and it was an older I mean, this is like a long time ago, and it worked pretty well.

I know a lot of guys use those. That's not really good for tick prevention, but does work for mosquitoes, especially if you're if you're stationary sitting like in a in a blind or maybe a tree stand something like that. But yeah, so hope that helps everyone out. Also, we're gonna be doing a Q and A coming up, so make sure to shoot your questions over. I've got a lot compiled. Some of them might not get to you

might have to push them to the next one. But if you've got any questions right now, shoot him over because that's it'llly'll be. It will probably be the first of May, um, but maybe I'll just decided to do it for next week. So shoot those questions over and we'll get those answered until next week. Don't let your mind play ticks on you. Catch you later.