"People are notoriously bad at discerning how dangerous a situation really is. 'I’m going to die of heat stroke' will always trump 'I’m going to get babesiosis'..."

"... because feeling hot is more immediate than the possibility of getting sick a few weeks from now. Now, if you felt ticks crawling up you, you might feel a more immediate need to keep those critters off your skin. But ticks are notoriously sneaky with their small bodies, stealth method of walking on their toes, and ability to inject pain killers and antihistamines."

From "Tick Bite Prevention – Dressing the Part" (Cornell). This video quickly explains how to dress for your forays into tick territory (and will also earn a "men in shorts" tag):

As for babesiosis, it's not like the new word I learned writing the previous post — "horsiculture" — which actually has to do with horses. There are no babes in "babesiosis." It's a tickborne disease: "Babesia microti is transmitted by the bite of infected Ixodes scapularis ticks—typically, by the nymph stage of the tick, which is about the size of a poppy seed." It can kill you.