Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Property line hunting etiquette?

Found a treestand right on the border(+/- 10 ft) of my property while doing some scouting this morning. Don't know the neighbors because it's a church camp and I'm not particularly worked up over it since I have plenty of land to hunt but was curious to hear what folks think about line hunters and if there is some understood distance one should keep from bordering properties.

Common courtesy and common sense should apply. But I guess as long as the hunter does not encroach upon you or take game on your side it would be legal. Now if you had a stand already in the vicinity I would say that was extremely poor taste. Is the boundary marked?

Never heard of any "property line" etiquette. If it jumps the fence,.."blammo"..! If you were standing on the property line and a B&C buck jumped the fence and is standing there looking at you,..what would you do?

I'd nail his azz!


As far as line hunting, I just think it's bad hunting manners to stick a stand right up against a boundary. I don't post my property and have never turned anyone away who came by to ask to hunt but stick a stand right against the border of my property and it's sorta like sticking your finger in my face. I keep all my stands at least 100 yrds from boundaries just as a courtesy to my neighbors. I know sometimes folks are constrained by the size of their property but it just doesn't seem quite right to hug property lines.


Maybe I care more than what I thought.

All lines are surveyed and boundary painted but not posted.

Is your pond holding water now days..... cement shoes and a swim should do them some good.

seriously while it seems like bad taste to me there is not much you can do about it, and maybe that is what bothers you.

My experience comes more from bird hunting than deer. When I was a kid, Quail were a huge draw here in Kansas. Now there are few around. Deer were very scarce and there were no turkeys. Now both abound.

Commonly, most landowners allowed owners of contiguous properties to hunt both sides of the fence row. Getting into the neighbor's interior property, without permission, was frowned upon. You don't walk the fence line for deer, so it's different. You don't ethically hunt somebody's place without permission. If you shoot one, you can legally pursue a wounded animal or recover a dead one, across property lines, here in Kansas.

We hunt many small woodlots and often need to have stands very close to the lines. With that said we do not put stands in an area close to where the neighbors have stands if we can help it.

maybe this is a chance to get to know your neighbors - leave a freindly note stating you were interested in hunting this area and find out what his plans are - a little cooperation can go a long ways!

you may find yourself tracking an animal onto his property !

Az

You hunt every inch of your property, I'll hunt ever inch of mine. Game knows no property lines, and it's fair to take if it's on your side. The property owner has no ownership in the game on his land until he reduces it to legal possession by taking it.

Safety concerns are another matter, and this should hopefully be handled by polite communications between landowners/land users.

The one that piss's me off is my neighbor - I have lived here for 13+ years. My stand has been in the same place (within 50ft of the line) for 13+ years. Last two years he has a friend hunting his land, and this fellow has placed a stand right on the line not 60ft from my stand - AND A WINDOW POINTING IN MY GENERAL DIRECTION. I informed the neighbors friend that the 10x10 building with the smoke stack is a deer blind that I hunt from and that shots comming in my general direction will result in return fire! When I went out two weeks ago to get the ol'blind ready for this years hunt - BULLET HOLES ALL OVER THE EAST WALL! So I spent the following weekend putting up a 10ft high privicy fence almost 80ft long. That should at least give me some privicy. The call to the local PD might not have hurt either.

Without addressing the safety issues, or the obviously low level behavior of shooting your blind...

How much of your neighbor's land is he supposed to not hunt because you had a stand near his property before he owned it?

Up a couple more feet. Just so dang dry and not much rain.

Well, that's true. I just find it in poor taste to set up stands right against your neighbor.


Heck, if they stop on down, they can come on my land and even use my stands for all I care.


Either way, I already got my buck in archery so I'll worry about doing some fall habitat work rather than where my neighbors are hunting.



It's sort of a trivial thing anyways.

Without addressing the safety issues, or the obviously low level behavior of shooting your blind...

How much of your neighbor's land is he supposed to not hunt because you had a stand near his property before he owned it? [/quote]
An
Well, if you bothered to read the post, my problem was not that he was hunting the line, but rather that he was hunting/shooting in MY DIRECTION! But I guess to some that's no big deal. And if fact just [bleep] is just another city dweller that only comes around durning hunting season. The rest of the year they are nowhere to be found - like when there is work to be done on the trails, or feed lots, or helping out the neighbors that are older, but I am sure that you wouldn't understgand that.

While I can't know exactly what tone of voice and/or body language you were using when you said



I can only assume that the way you wrote it means that you were rather forceful when you delivered that message. That said, I can understand how the guy receiving the message may have been pissed, but that doesn't excuse him (or whomever it was) in any way from firing shots into your stand.

Now that I have that out of the way, I'm just wondering if you considered that the window in the neighboring stand you were/are so upset with was/is merely there to observe game that might be headed toward the neighboring property from your direction? And even further, that they might be able to tell when someone was/is hunting your stand - and of course if/when you're not there at the same time, a shot in that direction wouldn't be 'dangerous'?

As to the original question about etiquette, I guess I would prefer a neighbor not set up a stand on their property line so close to a stand that I already had set up there, but it's not like I have any say about it, and definitely wouldn't want anyone trying to tell me where/how I might erect a stand on my property. I guess that means that if it happens, so be it ... just let it go ... move your own stand if you don't like it. It's not like you have any 'right' to the stand location just because yours was there first.

Again, I realize we're talking "etiquette" and not "rights" ... but I think it would be just as poor a display of etiquette to try to tell a neighbor that they shouldn't put a stand in a certain location on their own property - and that's regardless of whether it's the property owner who's hunting it, or some "city slicker" that only shows up during hunting season.

I can only speak to the type of terrain in the country I hunt whitetails, which is hilly country in southwest Wisconsin. Over the years adjacent properties have changed hands and there have been property line hunting issues and with the exception of a couple of times the issues have been resolved. What it comes down to is safety and the hills and hollows make it fairly easy to accomplish that.

I make it a practice to meet the property owners and invite them for a tour of my property and show them my stand sites, which are not on the property lines. For the most part the new neighbors have respected my wish that we remain out of sight of each others stands. In fact, after some discussion, I have moved a couple of my stand sites to accomodate the other land owner.

The two times the other property owners placed stands right on the property line without regard to safety and refused to change I placed a portable radio tuned to Wisconsin Public Radio near their stand and on another instance I placed my log splitter with a full tank of gas near a stand. In both cases they got the message.

I know in South Texas what happens in a lot of cases. Someone owns a 10,000 acre ranch and a neighor sells off 20 lots of 2 acres each and markets them to people to come down and shoot big deer. So they wind up each putting up a stand right on the boundry of their big neighbor.

They put the stand up and come back in hunting season and there's a high fence along that part just along their property boundry.

I've seen lots of those instances. A ranch might be 10,000 acres but have 600 yards of high fence along one neighbor who has 4 acres and 4 stands.

In one instance a guy was leasing out one stand on just a few acres next to a big ranch and advertising it as killing deer of the XX ranch. It didnt' last long before he was fenced out on that little property boundry he had. Guy was trying to kill a buck every 2 days out of that one stand.

I agree with that.

I don't want to tell anyone what they can or cannot do on their own land and I'm not about to get in a pissing match over it. There just seems to be a lot that's changing in hunting over the years and I'm not particularly fond of what I'm seeing. From driving down the roads and seeing new posted signs at every turn to cutting off neighbors with stands, it seems what was once a time of year where everyone had fun and helped each other has turned into a selfish pursuit of getting the next Pope and Young and screw everyone else. I imagine to an extent, it's always been that way. I just wish there was a little more of the comraderie I saw when growing up.

+1