Why I hate the fall.

The BBQ Pit
1

I live in rural Michigan. Really really rural. although I live on a main road, my house is pretty isolated. Across the street, to the West, is a field that’s farmed by some one down the road. Behind that is forest. To the south of me, about 1/4 mile away is our closest neighbor. Behind me (to the East) and North of me is a swampy/woods kind of area. Don’t have any idea how far back you have to go to reach civilization again, but it ain’t close.

There’s any number of wildlife around my home. Sandhill cranes. Raccoons. Wild Turkeys. bunnies. possums. skunks. itty bitty critters like moles, voles, field mice. A fox or two, or so I"ve heard.

and deer.

And hence deer season.

There’s quite a bit of public land up 1/2 mile. During firearm season, I’m acutely aware of the timing, 'cause I have to drive right by a significant chunk of public hunting ground.

however, at my home, it’s private property, posted “no hunting” (though we get an occasional ya-hoo who can’t read and asks)

This morning, as I left the back door, I saw the tail end of a deer running off to the East, about 50 feet away. I smiled to myself, “nature at work”, turned to head to my car.

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM

FUcking poachers.

it’s not firearm season yet. not that they care.

but fuck - you’re shooting your fucking gun right at my goddam house

fucker.

2

Idiots make all hunters look bad. My dad hunted for 40 years, was always careful with his firearms, only took the limit, and actually taught hunter safety courses. And yet every year, a different yahoo that his friends invited to hunt with them ended up doing such stupid shit it almost made him (as he put it) swallow his tongue.

A real hunter knows that you never shoot toward a house. And you never shoot within 100 yards of a house. Period. There are no exceptions, not even if it’s the legendary 40-point buck and he’s thisclose to disappearing back into the Great Thicket.

3

A pity there’s so many fake hunters out there every year.

I feel the OP’s pain. I’ve got 3 houses on about 70 acres of fields and woods, and the area is loaded with deer. I’ve got no problem with responsible hunting; those deer really mess up the crops, and the front end of a car. And I’ve seen as many as 20 deer just hanging out my my back yard, looking for something to eat, or screw.

But I hate bullets zipping around my land, where I and my family live and walk and play. Every year we get requests from perfect strangers who want to rifle hunt on my land and most take my refusal gracefully. But someone always gets pissed off, and hunts anyway, in or out of season. No hunting signs got torn down, or riddled with bullet holes, or both.

Fortunately my bow-hunting relatives, whom I do allow to thin the herd, patrol the place, and usually drive out the idiot rifle hunters, thanks to the miracle of cell phones.

And it’s gotten better since the law went into effect that one must have permission to hunt on anyone else’s property. It used to be the property must be posted as “No hunting” or anyone was free to wander on it and shoot at whatever they pleased. Even so, I’ve had yahoos insist they had permission to hunt my land, even with me telling them otherwise.

<<sigh>>

I’m not against hunting. But I hate rifle season on deer.

4

Wow. Umm, I thought that you were going to rant about the night coming so early…but guns. Yes, you win. That would driv-a-me-nuts…not unlike the wild rooster we had running around our 'hood. Cock-a-doodle-pain-in-the-ass.

5

Sorry. That should read Our hunting signs got torn down.

6

:smack:
Our no hunting signs!
:smack:

7

My mom lives on the outskirts of a trailer park, with a pretty big yard with a swingset in it. Her lot is edged on two sides by woods and a third by a cornfield. Prime deer territory, if it weren’t for the HOUSE and the SWINGSET and the LITTLE KIDS. Of course, every year some stupid fuck from the other end of the park climbs up the tree right on the other side of Mom’s fence, and starts shooting things. The backyard gets covered with spent shells and empty beer cans. And this is in New York, not here in Texas. Just goes to show there’re stupid, unthinking, drunken redneck hunters everywhere, I guess.

Seriously, I’m all for that guy taking out the deer before they take out my car - but there has GOT to be a better place for it than in a tree literally eighteen inches from the fence, shed and swingset and about twenty feet from my mother’s house.

8

I completely sympathize. The area I grew up in was very rural - woods, cornfields, that kind of thing. With that came asshole poachers who would drive around at night “shining” deer (illegal method of hunting that involves shining a spotlight in the deer’s eyes at night so as to confuse and immobilize them, to line up a good shot). One year, a friend of mine was out walking on her family’s land at night to clear her head, and nearly got shot by some of these jerks. She said that one of them said something like, “Whoa, you could’ve gotten shot!” like it would have been her fault! Somehow I suspect that if they’d discovered that night they’d killed not a deer but a teenage girl, that they might’ve just driven the hell away from there. I’d like to hope not, though.

My husband goes deer hunting with his father, and they’re responsible, careful, and law-abiding hunters. I’ve seen enough who aren’t, though, and that pisses me off.

9

My former (and let me just emphasize “former”) BIL did just that. Spent a year in the county jail for killing a woman who was chopping down a Christmas tree. He thought it was her fault, too. damn woman shuldda known better.

10

Gah! I moved to a house in rural central Virginia in 1994, and we’d no idea we were in the middle of prime hunting forest. Probably because the locals realised there were too many houses in the woods anymore to make it safe to hunt responsibly there. But this has never stopped this one group of weekenders who come up from NC and Virginia Beach – a couple of groups of guys who have bits of property in these woods, and have had this land for about 20 years, but haven’t noticed how many houses (some lived in by families with kiddies) are back in here now.

Our own house had sat pretty much empty during the season as it was a summer home, so for eight years, this one group of guys used to hunt on our property – when we moved in, we ended up nearly every weekend chasing them off our 5 acres. Once the idiots actually set up their campsite on the property about 50 feet from my back door! (That was the night I waited to make sure they were bedded down all snugly, then turned my MESA/Boogie to the open window and fired up my Flying V. Naughty, but oh well.)

When my partner confronted a group of camoflaged hunters lying along the front of our property where it borders the road and told them to leave, they informed him that they had been hunting on that property longer than we’d been living there, so they had rights to it. :confused:

Fortunately, a few of our neighbours are responsible hunters, and we gave them permission to be on our property, and they helped in those first couple of years to get these guys to go away.

Thing is, the main group of them had a hunting cabin, no power, water, or heat. They’d come down for long weekends (with very miserable looking girlfriends whom I don’t think were expecting a weekend of primitive camping), and hunker down in this tatty cabin – about 15 feet away from a neighbour with a modern house, satellite dish, garden, etc. We’d see them when we walked the dogs or drove by…they looked a bit daft, all seriously primitive camping right in the middle of regular houses and mod cons.

They haven’t come round in a few years, but we still have people who will turn loose hunting dogs to drive deer through our land (and who invariably leave a dog or two behind every year at the end of the season :mad: )

I don’t miss it being back up here in Delaware…especially after the first year in Virginia – it was like a warzone during the day, and my house had floor to ceiling windows in all the rooms. I was terrified, because I could actually see these guys tramping through the woods, and when I rang the local sheriff to ask for help, I was told by his assistant that he was out hunting, and just to find a place in the house to hunker down until the guys went away. Argh!

11

FWIW, a family of deer shiners saved my husband’s life when he was a teenager. He ran his car off the road and was stumbling around disoriented when they spotted him. Took him to the ER in their truck. If not for that…

Still, that doesn’t let the people you mentioned off the hook.

12

Come on, The Fall weren’t that bad. Tears For Fears were worse. :smiley:

13

Probably a bad idea, I know, but I’d be tempted to find out how some of these yokels would react to a sign that said something like this:

14

Curse you, Middlecase. I came into this thread to voice my agreement with the OP; I used to live in a wooded area in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, and I’ve heard many a bullet fly a little too close for comfort. One of the bastards even hit my cat (only grazed him; he turned out fine, but still). We didn’t own the land, so there wasn’t a lot we could do about in terms of patrolling and asking people to leave; we just had to make sure to avoid the woods in the fall, and keep our eyes peeled and ears alert. There are hunters, and there are drunk rednecks with guns. The woods in which we lived tended to be filled to the brim with the latter. That was all I intended to say.

I wasn’t going to say a danged word about…you-know-what. As you may have noticed in a certain IMHO thread, I’m trying to stop doing that so often. But you go and post something like that, and you expect me to ignore it? Come on, now. Sometimes I could swear you people are just baiting me…

Tears For Fears worse than The Fall. Hrrrmph. Whaddoes he know anyway. Bunch o’ no-count tasteless philistines… :wink:

15

Some of the farmers where I lived plastered the edges of their fields with ‘No Hunting’ signs, and still had problems with hunting dogs chasing sheep and livestock (sheep can be run to death very quickly) – one group, when confronted by an irate neighbour, cheerfully told him, yeah, they’d seen the signs, but the dogs couldn’t read, har har…

The worst weekend is Thanksgiving, because that is a long weekend, and includes ‘doe days’ (ie one can shoot at anything that moves); I used to like to take walks over weekends and Christmas when I lived elsewhere, and was shocked to be told I was risking my life even if I walked on my own property, with or without blaze orange – because the local law down there had very little sympathy for anyone ‘dumb enough’ not to know better than to wear orange or stay indoors from mid November to early January.

Again, this is no criticism of responsible hunters, many of whom really helped out and obey all the rules…at least in my area it isn’t the locals who cause trouble, it’s these people who come in to the area sometimes from several hundred miles away. Strange stuff.

16

The in-laws have a couple of ranches strung together in Colorado. While the acreage can be maintained by the foreman and his crew as far as the cattle operation goes, there’s no way it can be protected against undisciplined hunters and poachers, especially along the rivers and some of the back sections. It’s just too widespread and inaccessable. He’s (foreman) come across the gut piles of deer, antelope and elk and will often hear shotguns during turkey, duck and dove season. For us the aggravation isn’t so much that bullets are whizzing by since there’s only the one headquarters on the place, it’s that a hell of a lot of wildlife is being taken off it illegally, forcing us to ratchet down what we and the state feels is a sustainable harvest for the place.

I do loathe the poacher and can’t really fathom participating in such behavior.

17

Idiot hunters ruin it for the rest of us. We archery hunt and it’s getting harder and harder to find public access to land thanks to the abuse done by others. Rifle hunting terrifies me for the most part, especially when I first heard about “sound shots”. shudders

Anyways, I am secretly proud that at work we’ve made buck decoys for the rangers to trap poachers. This year they’re going to give us a video of the busts. :smiley:

18

Yeah, “sound shots”.

One of our neighbors came on some guys on his land. Or, come to think of it, it might have been on park land. They were bigger, uglier, and more of them than him. So he greeted them and said, “Hunting, eh?” <chitchat> “Yeah, this is great for that, I’ve had a couple of good hear shots this year already!”

…About those hunters who got trespassing hunters to go away, I wonder how they worded the discussions.

I wanna qualify that ‘rednecks’ concept that I’ve seen here. You have a middle-class city guy with his buds and guns, and they start imitating their idea of hotshot rednecks. Worse than anyone who grew up in the tradition, even the poaching tradition.

19

Sorry, Roland. After reading the thread title, I couldn’t resist. If it’s any consolation, things could be much, much worse. Try running a Search in the Pit for “Englebert Humperdinck”, and see what you come up with…

20

Apparently, in the case of one of my more taciturn neighbours, ‘ka CHACK’ (sound of pumping shotgun) worked pretty well :slight_smile:

For the most part, I have no idea how ‘my’ hunters got the trespassers to go away; I have actually managed on my own simply by asking nicely, but was rather frightened inside as I am a wee girl, and these guys were all carrying rifles, knives, etc.