Bowsnbucks
5 year old buck +
From one who's a long way from you Mn. guys - trespassers must be prosecuted HARD, first time - every time. Here in Pa., where sneaking in somewhere is a sport in itself, unless you hammer them from the get-go, you're only sticking it to yourself. Maggots are maggots. An example from my neck of the woods: A neighboring land owner ( lots of acres ) has caught the same trespassers 4 times, each time giving the warning " If I catch you guys here again....... " but did nothing further. They recently caught same ones on their land AGAIN !!! Another neighbor ( with even MORE acres ) caught someone once on a 4-wheeler & prosecuted them the first time. Then they caught another different guy, prosecuted him the first time. Word got around that if you try sneaking into blah-blah's property, you're risking big fines and possible loss of hunting license. Leniency gets you nothing but more trouble.
If you're worried about retaliation, put up hidden cameras like you do for deer. If you spend thousands on a cabin, food plots, etc., spend some $$$ on cameras. Put some thought into their placement so they won't be detected or where cars might get parked if someone were to try retaliating.
On the deer numbers front - sounds just like what happened here in Pa. For YEARS - when we actually HAD lots of deer ( 60's, 70's, up to mid-80"s ), the deer kill report was around 110,000 to 130,000 deer - bucks and does combined. Then the doe tag numbers went skyward and each year the kill numbers got higher. ( 250,000 to 300,00 ) When hunters started to bitch about not seeing very many deer any more, tag numbers kept going up. And so did the kill numbers !!! We had deer behind every tree - so many deer damage complaints, they made locusts ( plague ) look like children !!! You wanna know the funny part? The deer complaints were, in the large part, from near cities where hunting wasn't allowed or VERY restricted. Deer were eating Mommy's flowers, or landscape shrubs. But the $tate $aw an opportunity to $pin the prob. into a $tate-wide one and even in the northern counties ( remote country ) where deer numbers were WAY down, tag$ were I$$ued like deer were a menace. The whole state got painted with the same broad brush.
One of you Mn. guys said on a past post that deer tags need to be issued on a local level. TRUE. Best done if on a year - to - year basis. Then tags could be tailored to account for bad winters, etc. It took much public complaint here in Pa. to get tag numbers dropped in the " thin " areas and tags allocated on a more local basis. Keep the pressure on.
If you're worried about retaliation, put up hidden cameras like you do for deer. If you spend thousands on a cabin, food plots, etc., spend some $$$ on cameras. Put some thought into their placement so they won't be detected or where cars might get parked if someone were to try retaliating.
On the deer numbers front - sounds just like what happened here in Pa. For YEARS - when we actually HAD lots of deer ( 60's, 70's, up to mid-80"s ), the deer kill report was around 110,000 to 130,000 deer - bucks and does combined. Then the doe tag numbers went skyward and each year the kill numbers got higher. ( 250,000 to 300,00 ) When hunters started to bitch about not seeing very many deer any more, tag numbers kept going up. And so did the kill numbers !!! We had deer behind every tree - so many deer damage complaints, they made locusts ( plague ) look like children !!! You wanna know the funny part? The deer complaints were, in the large part, from near cities where hunting wasn't allowed or VERY restricted. Deer were eating Mommy's flowers, or landscape shrubs. But the $tate $aw an opportunity to $pin the prob. into a $tate-wide one and even in the northern counties ( remote country ) where deer numbers were WAY down, tag$ were I$$ued like deer were a menace. The whole state got painted with the same broad brush.
One of you Mn. guys said on a past post that deer tags need to be issued on a local level. TRUE. Best done if on a year - to - year basis. Then tags could be tailored to account for bad winters, etc. It took much public complaint here in Pa. to get tag numbers dropped in the " thin " areas and tags allocated on a more local basis. Keep the pressure on.
