Skip to main content

An increase in trespassing


Trail cameras are addicting. You buy one, get some pictures then decide that you should have another one at a certain intersection and the next thing you know, you are like us and have almost 10 out in the woods, trying to pattern your deer.  That excitement of pulling those memory cards quickly vanishes when you see things that don’t belong on your property. 


In the past couple of months, we have had lots of activity on the trail cameras; a car driving around in the newly planted clover and a man walking through a highly traveled deer intersection.  Both men had to make an effort to get where they were; this was not just an 'oops, I took a wrong turn.'  We had posted signs up already and clearly that was not enough of a deterrent to keep them away. This is when it pays to be friends with police officers.  I sent pictures of the car to a friend, who came back within minutes with the name of the car's owner.  I did the same thing with the pictures of the blonde man, baseball hat on backwards and watch on his left wrist.  Thanks to trail cameras, there are eyes in the woods even when you are not there.  As a result in this increase, we have started putting cameras out for our cameras just in case someone tries to steal the camera (or the memory card) that has their picture on it.  It is easy to hide a camera when its sole purpose is to keep another camera safe.

It is also disappointing.  It used to be that you could trust people to respect your land and their lack of access to it.  People would communicate with the landowner if they wanted to be on the land to hunt, fish, trap and/or forage.  There was a mutual understand and respect for the owner, user and land itself.  I remember hunters coming to the door and talking to Dad about hunting on our property a month before the deer season was scheduled to start.  Dad would sign their landowner permission slip and ask them to hunt in a certain region of the land and not to use four wheelers.  Everyone was happy and followed the agreed upon rules.  That is clearly not the case anymore.  I understand why more land is being posted.  Within hours of seeing the car on our trail cam photos, I added more posted signs to our property

So what happened? Why the lack of respect for landowners? and when did trespassing become a new norm?  Across the country, there is discussion around protecting public land for hunters to use.  Here in Maine, more than 95% of our land is privately owned (Maine.gov.) That is a lot of land to lose access to if trespassing continues to increase and landowners begin or continue to post their land.  A few bad apples could ruin it for everyone, so it is up to us to discourage it, report it and work to keep hunting lands available.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taking Turkeys to Texas

There are a few less turkeys in Maine to hunt this year. A few months ago, Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife in partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation , captured and released more than 50 birds into East Texas with the hope of rebuilding their population.   “Eastern turkeys are where the restocking efforts originally began,” explained Shawn Roberts, Director of Field Operations for the National Wild Turkey Federation, “We tried in the 1920’s but it didn’t work.  We tried pen-raised birds and that didn’t work either. The only thing that was successful was to trap birds and relocate them to good habitat.” “We started this current effort in the early ‘80s and we had to begin looking outside the state to see if we could get them moved in. We didn’t want to violate The Lacey Act so we had to come up with a way to compensate the states that were giving up a resource either by trading other wildlife or paying them monetarily,” said Roberts. Texas is on the very edge o
Post a Comment
Read more

Utilizing technology to make you more aware

Staci and I were roaming around the woods on a piece of property that she knew. It was snowing and we were chasing deer tracks to see if we could find some early sheds. It was a perfect day to be out in the woods and we were relaxed and not really paying attention to where we were going. We knew the border of the property and we knew that if we walked long enough we would hit roads or the bog and find our way back. We got to a point where we thought we knew where we were but we were not sure. Staci got out her compass to take a waypoint to make sure we were going in the right direction to get back to the truck. I took out my phone and turned on OnX. Within seconds we knew where we were, where the property borders were in relation to us and we could watch the dot (that represented us) on the map move as we walked out of the woods and got closer to the truck. In another adventure, my son and I headed out on a shed hunting mission.  When we got into the woods, I turned on the tracker
Post a Comment
Read more

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it.
15 comments
Read more