battue,
Okanagan already commented on this quite appropriately, but perhaps I should have defined my terms: I have yet to meet an Easterner who hasn't hunted in the West who can really grasp the difference, or a Westerner who hasn't hunted in the East who can grasp the difference.
That said, I have guided off-and-on the West since the late 1980's, and yes, I have run into many Easterners who think they know everything there is about Western hunting, because they live and hunt in one of those "high pressure" Eastern states. In fact the first outfitter I worked for warned me that many Easterners would start telling me how to hunt after a day or two, and I found he was right, not just when guiding but on various hunts across the country. A good example was a whitetail hunt on the prairies of eastern Colorado, where a guy from New England was absolutely certain the local guide didn't have a clue how to hunt whitetails.
The problem with hunting prairie whitetails is the limited "whitetail cover" is so scarce and obvious everybody hunts it, and mature bucks soon learn to avoid it. Yet this "expert" insisted on hunting from a treestand along a minor stream with a cottonwood stand along the banks, because obviously that's where whitetails would be.
The outfitter said fine, go ahead--while he and his guides took the rest of the hunters out onto even more open prairie, where they could glass for bucks, just like they do for mule deer. The biggest whitetail buck taken during the hunt was glassed, bedded down, on an almost open hillside, and after a long stalk shot in its bed by the then-editor of a major Midwestern whitetail magazine, who'd never seen anything like that before. Meanwhile the New England expert sat in his treestand (the location personally selected by him) for three days without seeing a buck, though he did see a few does.
That night a blizzard blew through, and by the next morning many deer from the open prairie had migrated to bigger riverbottoms, due to their heavy cover. I killed a very good buck while still-hunting through such cover, and my hunting partner (a much more widely experienced whitetail hunter than the New England expert) killed another good buck half an hour later.
That evening the New England expert that the big rivertbottoms OBVIOUSLY where whitetails lived. But the bucks hadn't been there before the blizzard.
The weather cleared the next day, and on the last day of the hunt the outfitter took the New England expert out hims,and glassed up what may have been a B&C buck bedded in an overgrown hayfield, far from any typical whitetail cover. The expert didn't believe him--until the buck jumped and ran, whereupon the expert missed it.
That is just ONE example of how Eastern hunters who've never been West know more than the locals. I could cite a bunch of others, including a group of hunters from Minnesota trying to perform pronghorn drives on the sagebrush prairie--which failed miserably.
In fact the first outfitter I worked for pinpointed certain states where hunters tended to be know-it-alls, despite never hunting outside their own state before. The leading state, by the way, was not Texas, though both we guided more than one Texan who couldn't comprehend "hunting" without sitting near a corn feeder.
If you want to discuss this some more, I'd be happy to provide more examples.
