Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada Tick Fever near Hudson Hope?

A friend just spent 3 weeks hunting Moose around Hudson Hope and never saw a legal animal. According to the BC Wildlife officer over 400 Moose have died this year in the area of some type of disease carried by ticks.

Anyone hear of this?

Yes...We had that tick problem around here 3 years ago.It really chitt kicked the population.Seems to kill the calves and weaker animals.

The moose do not die of a disease or fever. The ticks get so thick that the animal itches like crazy and rubs off their protective winter coat. Then the moose uses up their energy faster staying warm and with less food around they just get weaker and weaker. Combine this with a loss of blood as well from the ticks, deep snow from this winter and you have a bit of a moose kill. It happens all the time and the herd usually rebounds in a few years. It is not usually wide spread and happens in pockets. We had it happen about 6-7 years ago. Kind of sucks for the moose, but that mother nature.

My godson lives in FSJ and he warned me not to come up for early moose.The ticks knocked the chitt out of the moose weakened by the bad winter,as Sitkaspruce says.The meat cutters at Wonowon and in FSJ were not full last week,usually they are stuffed first week of the season.He said there were close to 60 moose camps in the Farrell Creek area(mostly Lower Mainland guys),with very few animals on the meatpole. Monashee

I'll keep you posted. I'm headed into that general area on Tuesday for a week.

Good Luck Rick!

We just returned from an early season 10 day moose hunt in 7-21, between Dawson Creek and Tumbler Ridge, and came home with two bull moose for three hunters. We did find one moose carcass that obviously went down late last fall as it still had antlers attached. There is an obvious lack of game in comparison to the last few years we have hunted the area [moose and deer] but from what we observed it appears that the younger animals made it through last winters heavy snows far better than the larger bulls/bucks.

We were seeing moose on a daily basis...so they are still there if you know where to look. I think it would be fair to speculate that the larger bulls didn't fair too well because they wear themselves down during the rut and go into the winter with depleted fat reserves, and with the heavy snows [20' snowdrifts]we experienced last year I am sure many succumbed to mother nature.

There was very heavy snows in that area last winter, so heavy in fact that the B.C. gov. rans ads in the Vancouver news papers that I noticed ( I think it was in January-Feb ) that the Elk and deer seasons were thrown wide open to minimize the extent of winter kill. I do not know if this also was applied to Moose.
Two friends hunted hudsons hope and saw few moose but wet just north east to a friends ranch and got two bulls.