Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Anti-ATV fencing

How about posting some no trespassing signs that have 00 buck holes shot through them, from your property facing out. It might get the message across, as well as the fence.

Nothing worse than spending your $ and sweat into your land, and having some low lifes ruin it for you.

See, I'm not so sure that a sign like that would work. I've put up my share of signs like that. The one that's up there now reads:

"Tresspassers will be tormeted to the fullest delight of the landowner and then prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

All that says is that I'm a fun loving sort of guy. It's true too. I've done my share of tormenting, and the neighbors know it.

The folks I'm up against know my schedule and know that I'm not there most of the time. My hope is that I can get back to the way it was the second and third season we were out there. Poachers had to park in an apron where they were easy for the DNR guy to spot, and no one was driving their ATV's all over the back hosing things up.

You might try a different approach with your fencing. Some friends had a very simular problem with there hunting property around Clare. He planted multaflora rose and Hawthorn. It has been in for a few years and God help the poor dumd bastard that thinks he can walk or drive his quad or snow sled through there with him on the seat. Plus you get the benefit of making cover and a food source for your wildlife. There are others like citrus trifoliate orange that is used around state correctional facilities. This will peal the hide right off of you. but it might require more up keep then you may want or be into.

I'll vote for the hog wire with a strand of barbed wire on top. Keeps out dogs pretty well and hard to climb for a person. Cutting through would require a bit of time that most don't dare take.

The funniest cure for trespassers shooting deer was a fellow that had a problem with jerks shooting at deer from the road. Well, he was at a garage sale and found one of those styrofoam deer archery targets. He added two tannerite explosive targets to the innards and set it in his orchard. Some dude bagged the exploding deer and drove off so fast he ended up in the ditch for a quick arrest. Ward

I like it. I like it MUCH.

Try planting that stuff along your pre-existing fence line. Hawthorns planted this fall at the fence-posts, multifloras in the spring in between the posts.

Fertilizer well this fall (cow [bleep] - horse [bleep] if you can get it; call your local elected officials for help); and stand back.

I gotta remember that one... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Yeah, <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Not if you really think about it, though.

Are you wanting me to think it is somehow illegal for me to run a single strand wire fence around/on my own property which is blatantly posted No Trespassing ? I hope there are no laws about accidently leaving a board with a few nails in it laying around.................I can be forgetfull.

As a self proclaimed trespasser,in my younger years, and a landowner now,i know what its like to be on both sides of the fence,literally. Unless you have a close relative with the last name of Gates or own an oil well somewhere you can't afford to build a fence,at least one of any length, that a determined atv'er can't get through, around, under, or over. Although a 6ft cyclone fence with a barbed wire topper is defineately going to let them know that your serious about keeping them out. Maybe a caretaker to stay on the place would be of some benefit. I know of a couple of good ol' boys who laid in wait for three days (heavily armed i might add)to catch a bowhunter that was sneaking in on foot to deer hunt. They said they met with the local D.A. before hand to discuss a harsher penalty for arrested trespassers and seemed to help a little. My family owns 40 acres bordering several hundred acres of sand dunes. People will drive around the gate past the no trespassing signs and move things in our driveway to get to or from the sand, if noone is home. And the problem seems to be ongoing. I think anything short of shooting the violators and hanging their carcass on the fence posts might be futile. i wish you luck.

Thanks all for helping to get this project underway.

Mooseboy and I started at sunup on Saturday-- went to the Southern States store in Brooksville. I bought a bunch of fence and a bunch of posts. Then, I drove into Falmouth and rented an auger.

The auger was a bit of a problem, but it would have been far worse without it. At sundown we'd bored countless holes-- all about 6 inches deep. There were slabs of limestone just below the soil as big as pool tables. In a few places, we were able to get through. In the rest of the spots, we made do with wanging in metal T-posts.

By Noon Sunday, I had the to big gate posts in, set in concrete, and all the T-Posts wanged in. We called it quits and broke out the M1 Garand. Mooseboy has decided he wants to use it for deer hunting this year.

Stan, my neighbor dropped down to help on Saturday. He brought his king-sized fence wanger, and pounded down the T-posts for me. He stayed for happy hour and a steak dinner. Along about 9, his entire family showed up on ATV's, looking for him. It turns out his son had made most of the tracks I'd seen on the property; he'd been down assessing the pastures to see if they were worth haying once more before Fall.

OH! So you're the one!


Oh well.

The fence is still a good idea. I've had way too many problems over the past few years to let it go. I've seen what happens when ATV'ers get habituated to a piece of ground. The landowner can completely lose control. This draws a line in the sand before it gets to be a problem.


One other thing: I took all your wise counsel and made a change in the design. The first 100 feet of the fence, including the gate will be in 2X4 welded mesh, 5 feet high with a strand of barb wire going over the top. After the fence disappears behind the hillside, it will change into multiple strands of barb wire, hung closer together than normal. I did this, because I decided that there was absolutely no sense in giving them an impenetrable boundary. The mesh is there as a policy statement. Anyone determined to get through is just going to cut wire and drive on. This way I've given the real miscreants something to cut. The vast majority of the poachers I've met would honor the message of the mesh and go elsewhere. The ones that don't will need help from the DNR LEO's to understand, and I won't be able to get them any further along that path.

Thanks again.

Some surplus "tangle foot" might come in handy! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Russian olive trees are pretty tough to get through, as well, and are pretty ornamental, as well. In just a few years, they are impenetrable. Lots of highway departments use them to screen interstates, and I've seen deer do desparate things to avoid them. Drive I-64 across southern Illinois to see what I mean!

On Saturday I scouted elk on a tree farm in western Washinton that was posted as off limits to motorized vehicles. There were lots of ATV tracks going around the gate, but in some places the timber company had gone in with a backhoe and dug ditches about 4' deep and 20' long.

I don't know that you can keep ATVs out of anything, but the ditches would work for pickups.


Okie John

Oh, you can keep ATVs out; it's a lot of work, but it can happen. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

TLEE: Grandpa actually did that once back in the Thirties. Neighbor kids were stealing from the jobsite, so Gramps went through the weeds flinging roofing tar. The next day he visited the parents to explain how the kids had gotten covered in tar. The pilfering stopped.

Ratsmaker: Russian Olive is possibly worse than the ATV's. It's darn near impossible to get rid of. I'm going to start planting hawthorn-- it's native, and growing wild already. Nobody wants to tangle with that stuff.

Okie_John: That's the bitch about ATV's-- they're built to go anywhere. I certain that even with the fence, butted close up against the hillside, somebody is going to try and give it a go. I finally realized that physical barriers alone are not going to cure the problem.

Being a huge ATV fan and owning four of them for my kids, wife and myself it kills me that people ride on other peoples property without permission. Isn't easier to just ask and be nice about it, kinda like hunting on someone elses property. If someone doesn't want me riding on their property, I'm not going to, I don't want or need those kind of problems!

I would build steel gates and hang them on 6" steel poles that are in about 4' of concrete. The problem is that they'll find another way around them. Wire fences can be cut real easy. Like I said, its to bad people have to be this way. Good luck!

Will Osage Orange (AKA Hedge) grow where you are? We had that on the fence rows when I had to live in Kansas--tough stuff.

--Mike

My first wife�s dad showed me a neat trick to stop dirt bikers at night. He lived on the end of a gravel road; beyond his house was private land some of which was farmed. A bunch of bikers started coming in at night and making a mess of the place. Signs did no good. I was visiting when he decided to put an end to the problem. After we heard them ride in we went out and he stretched one strand of Scotch Tape across the entryway at belt height. When they came out from their night of tearing things up, their headlights hit the tape and every one of those bikes went under the tape. Seams as how Scotch Tape looks like a cable in the dark when your headlight hits it. There was the biggest uproar of cussing but they must have gotten the message. Next time it could be a cable. They never came back as long as the old man was alive.

Ditto ironbender's suggestion of Osage Orange. A mature Osage Orange hedge is darn near impenetrable on foot, much less on an ATV. Way back, it was used in lieu of fences to mark boundaries and keep cattle in. There must be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of miles of straight lines of Osage Orange trees in this state. I was in my 20s before I knew that tree as anything but a "hedge" tree or a "hedge oak". It grows quickly and the thorns are really nasty when the trees are young.

We have about a third of a mile of Osage Orange (known here as "Hedgeapple") fence rows on our farm. It's not just the young trees that have the thorns - it's any branch low enough for browsers to reach (amazingly, the tree not only doesn't waste the effort to grow thorns where they don't do any good, it grows bigger, more succulent leaves way up there too).

Osage Orange is also very trashy, losing a lot of thorny branches. I have had to repair 3 bad tire leaks on the 4 tractors this year alone. One thorn went all the way throught the thick part of the tread on a one year old tire to puncture the tube.

So you wouldn't have to wait for the trees to get big enough to form a hedgerow, just collect a bunch of thorny branches and place them where the ATVs run (perhaps concentrated by fence with an open gate). These natural caltrops should provide a number of punctures in the ATV tires and perhaps convince them to trespass somewhere else. And unlike nails in a board, they're naturally occuring, right?