How Private is Private Land?

[bwhana]

I experienced similar harassment to this video many years ago on a small farm owned by my grandmother.  I was approached 2x in one week while in a tree and pulled over right after leaving 3x that same week with blue lights and sirens going, once with my 5 year old son with me.  I knew the other landowners in the area since I was 7, and none of them called them to come out.

I even found evidence where they had hunted from one of my stands - found a spent 270 case, which I or the neighbors have never owned and found out the local gw used one and was caught by another hunter in his stand 1/2 mile down the road from my land.

At the time, and before I found the spent case, I thought it was isolated to me and the only thing that stopped it was calling 911 and getting a deputy sent out and asked to have the gws charged with trespassing (I went to school with the sheriff's son, also a deputy, who advised me to do so). Terrible to see it is still happening to folks and on a larger scale.

I found out later on that the local gw had called my grandmother and asked permission to hunt a week prior to the incidents and she told him no, so in my case it was petty jealousy and using his position to harass me.

https://youtu.be/wvsnVDbxOhU?si=N3VqYqCXd4qXgIzP

[quavers59]

   I remember  reading one of Lovett William's Books. This statement  that he wrote really stuck out.-- Where Ever There Is Game- There Is Poaching..

[Dtrkyman]

A friend of mine was hunting whitetail basically in his back yard, had 30 acres or so, some dude comes down the creek and asked him if he had permission to hunt, of course my friend said yes, moron asked him from who, friend says the landowner, moron says well who is that, uh well that would be me!

[Tom007]

The private I hunt, we prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. It is extremely well posted and patrolled. Cameras by the entrance points. We don't have many problems at all.

[tad1]

Anyone could come cruising through private property at any time.
There are always gonna be bad apples in all walks of life, from law enforcement, to pedophile pastors.
Would Game Wardens be able to effectively do their job without open fields doctrine, or having to get a search warrant for any time they wanted to investigate something?  Do GW do more good than harm?
I think the bad apples are fewer than the good, but being on the receiving end of corruption/harassment definitely sucks!
This stuff becomes a real can of worms!
             JT

[paboxcall]

Couple years ago we set up on private ground, random blind calling - just hen sounds as it was a slow morning. Suddenly a guy emerged from the tree line across the pipeline in front of us, shotgun at 3/4 arms, pointing his gun in the direction of the hen deke, and us behind that. We hollered at him, and he turned and fast walked out of there. 

It happens all the time.

[g8rvet]

Don't know about this guy, but a lot of folks think they can break any game law they want on their own land and I would bet that happens a lot more than rogue game wardens poaching.  I agree there is likely a lot more to this story and this guy is a lot less a victim than he is insinuating.   

[Greg Massey]

We don't have a problem at my place, we all respect each other, and we understand if you need to retrieve an animal across the property line... Same owners for years..  Everyone follows the game laws from what i can tell, but i don't go poking my nose in other peoples business.  I can say in all my years, I've not seen anyone break game laws at our place... The only people who come on the farm is coon hunters sometimes at night during coon season and that's fine, we look at this as a way of getting rid of some predators.

[CAPTJJ]

We have an piece of public land near where I live that is stocked with pheasants, one of few. There was older local judge that put up posted signs trying to make it his private hunting spot. The local GWs got word of this and busted him.

[GobbleNut]

Again, I am located in a part of the country where hunting often is done on large tracts of public land with scatterings of private intermixed.  Not to discount the issue of trespassing (it can be a problem anywhere), but from my experience, our problem more often is private property owners trying to discourage legitimate public-land hunters from accessing PUBLIC land. (if you are not aware of the "corner hopping" debate out west, you should read up on it...it is ludicrous!)

Contrary to the idea that the issue is just about private landowners getting authorities involved with trespassers, I have had to contact those same authorities to get them involved in situations where a private property owner has tried to keep me from hunting public land.  Both situations are unacceptable...and there are villains on both sides of this coin. 

To take this a step further, there are landowners here that INTENTIONALLY do not post their property boundaries and leave them unmarked so they can claim that public land hunters are encroaching on their property.  I think most, if not all, states have posting requirements for private lands.  I know our state does and it a rare instance where a private property owner legally posts his property.  Summary,...the problem works both ways...

Again, ...not discounting the problems noted in the original post.  Just making an alternate point that is also very real. 

[Tommy Strutsalot]

BTW - that video is worth watching.  I am a retired LEO so I have mixed feelings about it but always remember if asked for a consent to search that your answer can be a polite "no".  "Exploratory Searches" are a bad move just on principal.  If an officer has probable cause to search he normally won't ask.  There is probably more to the story in this video. 

I work in the criminal justice field in a way that interacts very closely with the law, and I agree - I'm always very suspicious of these one-sided stories that seem paint LE as the bully targeting or harassing the totally law-abiding citizen. The difference to me is that I live in a state, PA, where the PA Game Commission (I'm actually our office liaison to the game commission and I've done some really cool things in partnership with them) have the right to trespass private property when they suspect that hunting is OCCURRING, not just when they suspect an infraction is being committed.  They assume an affirmative legal right to intervene in suspect hunting activities to proactively check the legal status of the activity.  This is more anecdotal, but I've also been told by local landowners that they have discovered PGC officers on their private property, without permission, and out of hunting season, reporting that they were collecting some sort of data or information about wild turkeys.   As you probably would agree being a retired LEO, there's such a huge chasm between how game officers can access private property in states like PA and apparently LA, and say, a basis for probable cause to search a property where you have a reasonable belief that a crime is occurring or has occurred.  The theoretical concern is, what would stop a law enforcement agency from deputizing a game commission officer to assist in violating your 4th amendment rights?   Agree?

[NCL]

My brother was a BLM ranger in Wyoming and he said one of his most common calls in the Fall was the posting or denying access to public land by private ranchers. He said often the rancher had leased grazing rights which then made him think he had total control over the land.

[1iagobblergetter]

The Game Wardens can come on my land i have nothing to hide...

[mcw3734]

My brother was a BLM ranger in Wyoming and he said one of his most common calls in the Fall was the posting or denying access to public land by private ranchers. He said often the rancher had leased grazing rights which then made him think he had total control over the land.

I worked for the BLM in Idaho and interacted with our LEOs a fair amount. I was informed that one of their 'standard' pieces of equipment in their truck was a can of black spray paint. Why? To spray over the orange paint somebody put on fenceposts bordering BLM public lands to falsely give the impression that it was private. Orange paint on fenceposts indicates, basically, No Trespassing, private land. Could have been the grazing permitee, or just another hunter who wanted to keep others out.

He also told me of going bird hunting with another LEO on a piece of BLM that folks reported being harassed by a local rancher trying to kick people off. Sure enough, the rancher showed up told them to get off 'his' land, and then received a citation. He didn't fight it either, I was told, he knew what he was doing was wrong.

[Cut N Run]

I had a guy cross the (well marked) property line on my lease by 350+ yards to cut off a gobbler that was already working to my calls.  The trespasser ended up busting the bird and spooking him back down into the creek bottom he'd been roosted in.  It completely wrecked my hunt, so when I approached the trespasser, he threatened to call the landowner (he claimed his grandfather owned the land) and have me arrested(!). I called the property owner, who was working in his shop on the property.  He immediately came out on his Polaris, recognized the guy as one he'd caught trespassing before & called the Sherriff. The trespasser knew he was over the line and had no business being there.  So far the threat of another fine has kept the trespasser away.

One of the horse farms I hunt has trails around it (which I maintain), so the riders can enjoy the land without having to dodge limbs and branches as they ride. We have a deal worked out, if they see my truck parked in a specific place during the season, I'm hunting.  They back off and go a different direction (& sometimes push birds towards me).  I can't tell you how many times I've had joggers, dog walkers, bicyclists, four wheelers, and other hunters follow those trails while I was in there hunting...on posted land.

Jim