Ep. 682: Foundations - Creepy Crawly Cuddle Puddles

you gotta bear with me. The truth about what we do, whether that's I don't know, thinking solely about white tails twenty four to seven, or turkey hunting or antelope hunting or whatever, is that there are a lot of elements to any hunt, and really any preseason scouting or prep work that we kind of just gloss over. One of those is the presence of bugs, a category into which I'm gonna lump spiders and scorpions and just about anything that sucks in as gross and could potentially bite your

sting you. This episode is all about those creepy crawley bastards and how to deal with them in the preseason and throughout the season. Picture this if you will. Your life is as a lab mouse, pretty rough right. The odds are you're gonna be injected with some disease or put through some tests that probably I would venture to say, are not much fun, not as fun as hanging out with a bunch of lady mice and eating cheese or

whatever mice daydream of. Nope, you're a lab mouse, and one day some white coated human takes you and puts you in a panic and do like maybe showing you a video of a snake staring into your little mouse cage all of a sudden. Also introduced into this situation is a cherry blossom, a sweet, smelling, entirely totally innocent cherry blossom. Now, imagine that they do this to you

several times over the course of a study. And while you don't know what the hell is going on, because you're a mouse, you know that every time you see a snake, you smell a cherry blossom. Now, before you think, I've totally lost my marbles, and some of them have rolled under the couch, and some of them are rolled into the driveway and eventually into the storm drain, to never be seen again. What I'm actually describing was an experiment real scientists did to see if genetics play a

role in our fear responses. Specifically, can one generation pass down a fear of something to another generation or several generations. What one experiment nature neuroscience study showed was that a terrifying experience that changed the genetics of mice in such a way it actually manifested itself as a phobia. And what's wild is that it passed down through a couple

of generations of mice. So even the offspring of those mice, when they smelled cherry blossoms, without being exposed to panic inducing situations at the same time, still exhibited a real and measurable fear response. Even mice that were created with in vitro fertilization from those original mice inherited the same fear response. In other words, through a traumatic experience, an

echo of fear was created that several generations could hear. Now, this is just mice, you might be thinking, and those scientists probably don't know what the hell they are talking about, and blah blah blah. But the truth is that's pretty wild, and it's prevalent in us humans too. If you don't think so, ask yourself, why are you so scared as snakes or maybe heights, small spaces? What's your phobia, my friends? Because I bet you have one, and if you don't, I bet you know a lot of people who do.

And also you're probably lying. Now ask yourself, why would someone I don't know living in New York City where chances of exposure to wild, venomous snakes are probably almost zero, Yet you could find plenty of people living there who have lived there their entire lives, who are terrified as snakes. It's not rational, which is the cornerstone of a lot of our current phobias. Or I don't know how about public speaking. I ever stood in front of a large

crowd and had to address them sober. That sucks for most people, even the repercussions for a bad speech or saying something dumb, you know, even they're pretty small, But the fear is large, so large, in fact, that it creates a real metabolic response, a fear response. Or I don't know how about spiders. That's my big one, and I freaking hate it. I hate them. I can't describe it. I don't know why it is but I hate spiders. Snakes, no problem, heights, mild problem, big cats, bears, whatever, fine,

But spiders, uh no, thank you. I know, and I mean I know this, even if I can't prove it. Somewhere way back in my bloodlines, some of my ancestors had some rough run ins with spiders and that made a scar on our genetics that is visible today. They are gross and dumb, and I know they eat a bunch of bugs and are mostly gentle and whatever, but

I just don't care. I don't like them. Of the places I want to visit in the world, Australia is super low on my list, mostly because of their spider situation. But if you hunt, you'll deal with spiders. If you set stands in the summer or just live down south in general, you're going to run into some eight legged buddies. They're going to show up at your party at some point. It just happens. In fact, if you do this stuff enough, you'll probably deal with all kinds of creepy crawlees that

can bite or sting or just generally ruin a good time. Hell, there are even caterpillars out there that should be cartoon like, fun loving, slow movers that should pose no harm to humans, but some, specifically one with a name that I can't say on here because people think I'm making it up, are covered in soft hairs that actually cover spines that will break off in your skin and cause severe pain.

This is one of the reasons why when I travel to hunt Southern States, or maybe to catch some fish down there, I'm always leery of all the bugs, even the cute ones that look like they should be in a Disney cartoon. You never know which little caterpillar or fly or whatever is going to send you to the er, or at least make you very, very uncomfortable. But they are out there and we have to deal with them.

In fact, if you go out this month to scout or hang some stands, or hell crawl across the prairie to try to arrow an antelope, you will find yourself dealing with bugs and spiders and bees. I have bad luck with bees, and I can only attribute it to the reality that I spend a lot of time outside disturbing the world around me. As I read this, I'm fighting the urge to scratch and scratch and scratch. Some spots on my legs and some spots way up on my legs that might make it look like I caught

some kind of venereal disease recently. The truth is I mowed right over a yellowjacket hive, and those satanic bastards took it upon themselves to not only me a few times on my lower legs, but also to work their way up into my shorts. And this is only speculation on my part, so take it for what it is. But I think they might have been trying to sting me on the old knackers because they got a little too close for comfort. Late summer and early fall that's

bee time. And if you're out hanging stands and maybe running a chainsaw to clear out some trails on your deer ground, pay attention. I average a couple of stings out there a year. And while most situations are just painful and leavey, shaking your fist at a dumb insect with a weapon on its ass and a poor attitude, you can get into trouble you. Obviously, if you're allergic to bees, you should know how to keep yourself safe and how to get your EpiPen in your hands if

you need it. But getting whacked a bunch of times can cause non allergic folks to have bad reactions too. My personal record for one encounter was eight bee stings while I was hanging stands and my black lab found a ground nest that didn't take kindly to a black bear looking dog poking her nose into the entrance hole. I've had a couple other close calls, like when I went to hang a stand one time and I realized that there was a ground nest below me at the

base of the tree. So when I figured that out, I was like eight feet up, and I realized that if I descended in normal fashion like we would all get down from our tree stand, I'd have to go right through a swarm of perturbed bees. So I executed, in at least my assessment, a near perfect dismount out of the tree, complete with a barrel roll at the end. Think about it this way. They are all over out there, and they won't take kindly to you messing with them.

And what's even more annoying is how often you're in a stand minding your own dang business when a couple of bees just take a keen interest in you for some reason. At least caterpillars never do that shit. You'll also deal with mosquitoes, which, according to a lot of people, are the deadliest bug out there, since they are vectors for bad diseases like malaria. Here in the States, we have plenty of mosquitoes, and they can mostly be dealt

with by wearing clothes that they can't poke through. Sure, they're annoying, you know when you hear them buzzing in your ear or watch them flying in front of your face over and over and over again. But mostly mosquitos are pretty easy to handle, at least until they get to the point where they are overwhelming. Now, I've had this happen down in the Everglades of Florida, and here at home in Minnesota, and across the river in Wisconsin on those big wood situations where the mosquitoes can be

a pretty special experience. But I'll tell you what. One of the worst mosquito situations I ever found myself in was in western South Dakota, of all places, while I was hunting antelope. As you may well guess, there isn't a ton of standing water in western South Dakota. You're as likely to see a bunch of small cactus growing than you are to see a wall. But boy, oh boy, when you do find standing water at the right time,

you find every mosquito in the county. And those prairie mosquitoes are built with a little extra armor and a tenacity that no big woods mosquito can match. I've found some of those same style of mosquitos on early season velvet hunts in Nebraska too. They are kama Cozi mosquitoes that come in hot, and they don't do a whole lot of courtesy laps around you to figure out where a good spot is to land. They see skin, I guess,

and they go for it. Mosquitoes can be managed pretty good with clothing, as I've said, and a thermicell unit. Now they don't pay me. I don't even really know anyone who works for the company. I just know that if you deal with mosquitos and you need some help, that Thermoicella is legit and there isn't a better product on the market. Seriously, they're incredible, although you probably wouldn't want to use one in an enclosed space, I don't think. And yes, the deer can smell them, but they can

also smell you. If they can smell a thermosol, so it doesn't matter. There's also I don't know the gnats and no sums that make early season hunts no fun. Oftentimes I end up with itchy gnat bites on my forehead and my ears and my hands for my early season hunts, which is annoying but not super bad. They do have a knack for flying right into your eyeballs, which is also real annoying, and no sums can be almost worse because well, you can't see them. Do you

wish we named other critters that way? I do. No sums are a pain, and while I've never experienced them horribly on any hunt, I have had the displeasure of fishing close to mangroves in Florida at first Light, where the largest free ranging population of those minuscule blood sucking bastards live. And while they made me itch like crazy, they made my little girls swell up like little blonde balloons. I bet no matter where you live and hunt, you probably have some kind of bug in your region that

causes you fits at certain points of the season. Maybe it's scorpions, which I know aren't really a bug, and I also have had very limited experience with him. And I'm not too sad about that. I've been stung exactly one time by a scorpion, and that was enough to get me to cross Texas off my list of places to live now. My cowboy hat wearing buddies from the Lone Star State are pretty nonchalant about scorpions and other gross critters because they deal with them all the time.

Oh they shake out their boots before putting them on and look real closely at the ground when they sit on it to call turkeys or try to shoot a pig or a deer. I do too now when I'm down there, but one time I didn't, and I leaned right up against a scorpion that probably holds the world record for largest stinger. At least it felt that way when he shoved it right into my back, which was

pretty rude. That feeling a throbbing pain and the uncertainty of knowing whether I was going to die for a really terrible axis deer hunt was not my idea of a good time, But it happened where it usually does in the outdoors when you're in Texas or quite a few states. Now you also have to consider fire ants. Now, I've been lucky. I've never had a run in with them, at least to the point where I got to learn

firsthand why they are named as they are. But I've seen plenty of them, and honestly, if spiders are on my list of creepy crawleys that I really hate, ants are probably close second, or maybe third, after bees and wass. I don't know what it is about ants, but if you've ever had the displeasure of getting bit by them, you know what I mean. Now. I know we aren't dealing with bullet ants here in the States, at least

not yet. Probably if we give it enough time, they'll make their way to Florida or somewhere, but we do have plenty of ants that can ruin your day. I've been stung or bitten by a lot of ants a few different times, and I'll bet you if I was a mouse, my offspring would have a real fear of ants. In fact, my one daughter does, so maybe it already changed my genes. My worst experience was while I was

hunting blacktails in California. And this is an estimate on my part, but at least a million big black carpenter looking type of ants crawled up my legs in the dark, and they all waited for the go ahead signal to bite me at the same time. It was horrible mooey or eblay and made me really appreciate Minnesota winters in the five months of brutal cold that comes with them. Bugs and spiders and creepy crawleys, they're all over. They are a part of our lives as outdoorsmen, and can

actually even be a positive part. Just think about how much Mark Kenyon loves pollinators. Without them, we wouldn't have all kinds of food and stuff, and also Kenyan wouldn't have anything to weirdly obsess over. Now, a lot of those creepy crawleys out there, they're actually not They're not really threatening at all, and they're mostly welcome around us. Butterflies are a good example. I've never felt threatened by

a butterfly ever, draggonflies or another. I spent quite a few hours watching dragonflies hunt over high country water holes last September while waiting on a bull elk, and if there is a more impressive hunter out there, I'm not sure I've seen it. Sometimes bugs can be entertainment, and sometimes they can just be a part of the whole experience well without causing us extreme pain or multi generational phobias.

They aren't a reason to stay home, obviously, but in certain environments, at certain times, they can be a reason to be super cautious. Think about that as you head out with the best intentions to watch a bachelor group of bucks as the clock winds down to the most wonderful day of the year, the deer opener. Or maybe you aren't quite there yet, but know that a bunch of trees have fallen down across your favorite access trail. It's time to fire up the old chainsaw and get

to cutting. Maybe it's as simple as taking a pole saw on your favorite ladder stand to trim up a few trees around those stand and open up some shooting lanes. Make sure there isn't a paper wasp nest in one of those shot blocking limbs. Trust me on that one. Or maybe you have a hunt book to a new state, a new environment, and you're laser focused on killing whatever

animal happens to be on the menu. That's great, develop a good plan, work with what your outfit or advises, or whatever the DIY forums tell you to do, but also remember that if you're from Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or somewhere and you decide to go hunt I don't know Arizona coups deer, you better check your sleeping bag for unwanted snuggle buddies. You don't want to start a cuddle puddle with a scorpion, and if you do, go seek help,

professional help. Please and please keep listening to this podcast because I'm going to talk about more stuff next week. Stuff that might help you kill a deer, for example, or to put it in another way, stuff that might help you kill a big buck early in the BO season or later in the BO season sometime maybe gun season two, whatever. Just listen. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by

First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. As I always, thank you so much for checking in and for listening. We hear a meat eator. We really appreciate all your support. I can't thank you enough for it. If you want some more content, whether it's podcasts, whether it's videos, whether it's articles, themeeedeater dot com has you covered, go there and you'll see everything we produce, which is a lot of content. Trust me,