It’s a Record Tick Year — and One Bite Can Take Venison Off Your Table for Life.
Ticks are at record numbers this season, and they’re carrying Lyme disease, Powassan, and alpha-gal syndrome — a lifelong allergy to red meat from one Lone Star bite. I used to keep them off with bug spray. But deer smell spray from hundreds of yards. So now I use this.
I’ve hunted the same Driftless ridge since 1992 and I’ve never seen ticks like the last two years. Pulled eleven off myself after one September sit. And it’s not the itch that worries me. A guy I share the ridge road with took one Lone Star bite — the little tick with the white dot — and came out of it with alpha-gal. He can’t eat red meat now. A freezer full of venison he can’t touch.
So I sprayed. DEET at the tailgate, right over twenty years of scent discipline — scent-killer laundry, clothes in a tote, wind-checked walk-ins. Say that out loud and it sounds as dumb as it was. Two seasons ago an eight-point I’d had on camera all summer cut the trail I’d walked in on. Nose went down, then straight up. One blow and that was the last I ever saw of him. He didn’t wind me — he winded where I’d walked.
A buddy who runs hounds put me onto ultrasonic tick tags — he’d had them on his dogs two seasons. Wild Ward is the same idea, built to clip on. Mine rides the left strap of my pack, turned on at the tailgate. No smell. Nothing I can hear, nothing a deer can hear. And the tick checks got short.
Here’s what’s actually riding in the timber this year — and why spray was never the answer.
This isn’t the tick year your dad hunted through.
Lyme disease.
The one everybody knows — fever, wrecked joints, months of feeling wrong. Case counts track tick counts, and tick counts have never been higher than this season.
Alpha-gal syndrome.
One Lone Star bite — the tick with the white dot on her back — can switch on a lifelong allergy to red meat. For a hunter who feeds his family out of the freezer, that’s backstraps, sausage, and venison chili gone. Permanently.
Powassan virus.
Rarer, and worse. No treatment, and it can pass in the first minutes of a bite — not the day-plus Lyme takes. And a stand sit is hours motionless in exactly the cover ticks quest in.
So you spray — and your bug spray reaches the deer before you ever see them.
Deer flag DEET instantly.
A whitetail’s nose carries up to 297 million scent receptors — yours has about 5 million. DEET and permethrin are loud, foreign chemicals in the woods; on the right wind a buck picks them up hundreds of yards out and pins you before shooting light burns off.
Your walk-in leaves a scent line.
Spray doesn’t stay on you. It marks your boots, your pants, the brush you push through — a chemical trail lying between the bedding and your stand for hours. Deer don’t have to wind you. They wind where you’ve been.
That was the trade: smell like a hardware store, or go in clean and roll the dice on everything above.
A tick winds you the same way a buck does. Wild Ward jams its nose.
A tick has no real eyes. It hunts with the Haller’s organ — a sensor array on its front legs that reads the CO₂ off your breath, your body heat, and vibration. That’s how it finds skin through boot leather and blaze orange without ever seeing you. In hunter’s terms: it winds you. Every tick that’s ever gotten on you found you through that one organ.
Wild Ward jams that sensor. It broadcasts ultrasonic frequencies across 19–135 kHz — static the Haller’s organ can’t read through. Two modes: hold one steady frequency, or run the sweep mode, which cycles through 8 different frequencies so ticks never get a window to adapt. Either way you stop reading as prey. The tick lets go, drops off, hunts something else.
And to everything else in the timber, it’s nothing. No chemical, so there’s no scent — not on your skin, your clothes, or your walk-in. Deer can’t smell it. They can’t hear it either. Neither can you, your dog, or the turkeys. Clip it to a pack strap or bino harness, one press at the tailgate, hunt.
Rated 4.8 / 5 by hunters who quit choosing between scent and ticks.
“Deer in range all October. Nothing in the checks.”
Quit spray three years ago over my scent routine and just ate the tick problem. This clipped to my bino harness ended that. Eleven sits this bow season, wife found nothing on me, and the deer never acted like it was there.
“Turkey season is tick season down here.”
Three hours against a tree in May grass used to mean crawling home. Ran it on my vest all spring. Can’t hear it, birds worked in same as always, and I stopped finding ticks in the truck.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Clip it on and hunt like you hunt for a month of sits. If it doesn’t earn its place on the strap, send it back for a full refund — no questions, no hoops. Free shipping on every order.
Quick questions
What does it actually do to the tick?
What’s alpha-gal again — can one bite really do that?
Can deer or turkeys hear it?
Does it put off any scent at all?
Do I still treat my clothes with permethrin?
How long does the battery last?
Can it go on my dog?
How fast does it ship, and what if I don’t like it?
Next sit, give the woods nothing — and the ticks nothing to find.
Silent, scent-free, clip-on tick protection in the worst tick year on record — Buy One, Get One 50% Off while this run lasts. Free shipping. 30-day guarantee.
Order NowI spent thirty years choosing between getting winded and getting bit. You don’t have to. — Dale
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