Posts Tagged → purple paint
Please do not pet the landowner
A few weeks ago, my wife looked up, startled. Her eyes were fixated on something over my right shoulder, and then she said “There are some men on the porch. Were you expecting visitors today?”
Uh, no, I was not only not expecting any visitors that day, I was not expecting any visitors the entire weekend. Because I was alone with my wife and relishing our rare private time together in a quiet out of the way dead-end location.
Just as I stood up from the table and turned towards the front door, an older guy with a greying stubble knocked. Another guy in his fifties was standing near him, and both were dressed in casual-to-ratty-on-the-crick clothes. I did not recognize either of them, and reflexively felt for the grip of “Biden’s Lung Buster” at my side.
Opening the door and stepping outside, I buried my rumbling fury under a big steaming pile of humor: “Hi boys! You can put the free beer here on the porch and help yourselves to load of firewood on the way out.”
With big smile, of course.
The two men were nice enough, and laughed at my joke. They explained that they had been fishing down in the creek that morning and had heard a gobbler up above them on the mountain. And that had set them in motion trying to figure out a way to get to the gobbler, to hunt it, without trespassing on what they acknowledged is very clearly posted private land all around the gobbler.
After what they said was a lot of driving around and walking and consulting maps, they determined the best way to attain their goal was to drive up the posted and very long gravel driveway to the remote home nestled way the hell back in the woods, and then to knock on the door and ask permission to both hunt the gobbler at present time and in the future cross over our property to access state forest land farther up the mountain.
“You two bastards are lucky as hell I didn’t come busting out here buck naked with an AR to run you off, because the angry naked old man thing is about a hundred times worse than the gun,” I half joked.
The two interlopers chuckled at the joke, and started getting the hint. After all, the land AND the driveway are all posted for a reason. Privacy is a valuable and rare thing, and because many Americans today seem to have been raised without any manners or a sense of self-preservation, big yellow posted signs, buckets of purple paint, and gates are now a necessity to preserve what shreds of privacy people have remaining to them.
But these guys had purposefully ignored all of the legal and physical barriers designed to keep them out of my private life.
“Yeah, I have had that same bird in gun range twice this week, including earlier this morning, and I have decided to let him live, because he is a rare survivor up here,” I explained, truthfully.
Wild turkeys used to be plentiful in Northcentral PA, and for the past fifteen years they are now as rare as hen’s teeth, due to a combination of factors like mature forests and craploads of nest-raiding predators.
“Well, could we at least cross over your land to get to the state land?” the second guy asked, having taken a step backwards off the porch and onto the steps.
To which I replied with bare naked contempt: “Why would we let strangers walk through our best hunting ground so they can go hunt where they want? We leave that area as a sanctuary so we can hunt it carefully, and having people walk through it would just ruin it for our hunting, to say nothing of our privacy up here. And it is remote and quiet up here…right? Guys, there are over two million acres of public land within an hour’s drive of here, and you guys need to be here, right here, on us?”
The second guy looked chagrined, and I felt only the slightest twinge of regret for having spoken so plainly.
“Well, we thought it wouldn’t harm anything if we asked,” said the first guy, who was studying his feet.
And that’s the thing. The signs around the property and at the gate on the private driveway do not say “Hunting By Written Permission Only” or anything similar about asking for permission to hunt on the land.
Rather, the myriad signs and purple paint say keep out, stay out, do not enter, do not trespass, no access, no anything, private land don’t even ask. And frankly, every square inch of private land in the valley (which is about 93% public land) is heavily posted and jealously guarded, so physically asking anyone for permission to hunt is both a fool’s errand and a deliberate theft of someone’s valuable privacy. It is an invasion of someone’s sanctuary.
Folks, don’t try to pet the landowner. He is likely to bite, because he was sleeping comfortably in his quiet little corner when you came up to him, woke him up, and acted like petting him was the best thing he could have ever expected or wanted. When in fact all he wants is to be left alone in his quiet little corner. He never asked you to pet him and doesn’t want you to pet him. He doesn’t want to see or hear you, either.
For some odd reason, a lot of people across America believe that public land sucks to hunt on, and that private land is where all the wild game is holed up. Nothing is farther from the truth than this incorrect notion; almost all of the trophy deer and bears I have killed were on public land. If getting to a piece of public land is difficult, then you should do everything legal you can to get there, because in my extensive experience, hardly anyone else will be hunting that area. But one thing you cannot do is badger the adjoining private landowner. Sending a letter explaining yourself, or placing a friendly phone call, is the only correct way to ask permission.
Halfway through PA deer season
We are halfway through deer season, and I, having hunted in several counties in Northcentral and southcentral Pennsylvania, have a few observations. These might be helpful to those seeking to fill tags this coming week, or to policy makers trying to mould a better season next year.
a) Despite the “purple paint law,” which is Pennsylvania’s new private land trespass law that carries severe penalties for trespassing, PA hunters continue to trespass and poach and shoot deer on private lands they have no business being on. So far this season I have been witness to the deliberate taking of deer on private land by people who have no right to hunt there, both a buck and a doe. One incident was just plain sloppy woodsmanship; the other was purposefully crafty. Some trespassers are habitual lawbreakers, who trespass more to get one over (in their warped thinking) on someone who has land, rather than to actually pursue a specific trophy animal or meat for their family. This blurs into the mental illness category. Others are defiant individuals, who have always had authority problems both at work and elsewhere. This also blurs into the mental disease category. The antidote to all this miserable behavior is the joy of hidden trail cameras, which have caught several malefactors in flagrante. Yeah, Jon, you….again. To be continued!
b) Pennsylvania is now a huge deer trophy destination. The trophy bucks that are being taken from archery season, when deer are at their most vulnerable, right through rifle season, would have been unimaginable twenty or forty years ago. The enormous heads (antlers/ racks scoring 140 inches and above) that are being taken by hunters everywhere across the state are easily on par with famous trophy destination states like Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Kansas.
This development is a looooong way from the spike bucks and “trophy” fork horns of my youth, and frankly to which too many older hunters would gladly return.
This exciting development is primarily a result of top-notch deer management by the Pennsylvania Game Commission over the past twenty years. Along that twenty-year-way, PGC has suffered a lot of abuse for its deer management, which always involved reducing the number of over-abundant does and retaining a high number of mature bucks to return again next year, with racks that have gone from OK to spectacular. People upset with PGC were long accustomed to “seeing” lots of deer. These people incorrectly equated overabundant deer with a healthy deer population, because, in fact, the truth is the opposite. Too many deer is unhealthy for not only deer, but for a boatload of other animals, and plants, that everybody other than deer needs. Deer diseases like TB and CWD are a result of deer populations too high for their own good. So is the deer-car-collision disease, which is crazy high in PA.
We have to kill a lot more deer. PGC knew that and started it in 2000, and it was a slow and painful process that necessitated an entire cultural shift among tradition-bound hunters.
However, PGC alone doesn’t get all the credit for these big bucks, even though the agency has carried the torch of scientific wildlife management through a hailstorm of undeserved crap. Another reason Pennsylvania has so many massive trophy bucks roaming around is that we have a lot fewer hunters and less hunting pressure over the past five years, and over the past fifty years. There is a big difference between someone who buys a hunting license, because he has been proudly buying a license every year since 1962, as it is part of his personal identity, and someone who buys a hunting license with the intention of squeezing out many of its benefits and opportunities, such as climbing high into remote places in pursuit of huge bucks.
Buying a hunting license is a tradition among many older Pennsylvanians, even if they don’t actually hunt much or at all with it.
If I can think off-hand of five hunters I know who will comment on the dearth of deer hunters seen in the more remote places, I can probably easily find five hundred others who will testify to far less hunting pressure in most places, not just the remote ones. This means that old bucks with big trophy racks have more secret places to go where they can go on growing old, without dying of sudden acute lead poisoning from a hunter standing downwind behind a tree. As the population of really older bucks continues to climb, they begin to spill out into more accessible and less topographically challenged places, where the average Hunter Joes can now occasionally pick one off for the local newspaper’s front page.
c) I miss John R. Johnson as my long time knife maker of choice. John took a break from making his beautiful custom knives about five years ago, and fortunate are those of us who bought his highest-quality products while we could. While it is possible to hunt with a hunk of basic soft steel half-assedly made into a rough knife shape in China, why should we? Ever since the dawn of our species, a hunter-gatherer species, our hunters have ALWAYS prided themselves on the high quality of their weapons and accoutrements. Having a nice rifle and a nice knife is a source of great pleasure for every hunter I know, and most aspire to having the best they can stretch to afford. That is to their individual credit and to our collective credit, as a sign of sophistication and high performance. So if you are fortunate enough to find a JRJ hunting knife somewhere, buy it right away. Cherish it, keep it sharp and well, and use it. It is a product of one of our central Pennsylvania native sons, and a true embodiment of the rugged character and values we here in central Pennsylvania cherish.
Purple woad. Or why hunting leases
Leasing land to hunt on is a big thing these days, and there is no sign of the phenomenon decreasing. Most of it is about deer and turkey hunting.
Hunting leases have been popular for a long time in states with little public land, like Texas, but the practice is now spreading to remote areas like suburban farms around Philadelphia and Maryland. So high is the demand for quality hunting land, and for just finding a place to hunt without being bothered, and so limited is the resource becoming, that leasing is a natural step for many landowners who want to get some extra income to pay their rent or fief to the government (property taxes aka build-a-union-teacher’s-public-pension-fund).
Having been approached about leasing land I own and manage, it is something I considered and then rejected. If a landowner at all personally enjoys their own land themselves, enjoys their privacy there, enjoys the health of their land, then leasing is not for you. Bear in mind that leasing also carries some legal liability risk, and so you have to carry sufficient insurance to cover any lawsuits that might begin on your land.
Nonetheless, some private land is being leased, having been posted before that. And the reason that so many land owners are overcoming the same hurdles that I myself went through when considering land leasing, is that in some cases the money is high enough. Enough people want badly enough to have their own place that they can hunt on exclusively, that they are willing to pay real money.
Makes you wonder what kind of population pressures and open land decreases America has seen over the past fifty years to lead to this kind of change in land use. Makes me think of one anecdotal experience.
On the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend of 2007, I drove up to Pine Creek to dig the footers for our barn. All the way up I shared the road, in both directions, with two motorcyclists headed in my same direction. That is it. In addition to my pickup, a grand total of two vehicles out for a Sunday drive in the country were on Route 44 and Rt 414.
Fast forward 13 years and my gosh, Pine Creek Valley has nonstop traffic in both directions at all hours. It does not matter what the time of day or night is, there are vehicles going in both directions. And not just oversize pickup trucks possibly associated with the gas drilling occurring around the area. Little tiny dinky tin can cars are going up and down the valley, too. There are literally people everywhere here now, in what had been the most remote, undeveloped, quietest corner of rural Pennsylvania. Even if you go bear hunting on some sidehill in the middle of nowhere up in Pine Creek Valley, you will encounter another hunting gang or two. Which for bear hunting is actually a good thing, but the point being that there are people everywhere everywhere everywhere in rural Pennsylvania.
OK, here is another brief anecdote. Ladies, skip ahead to the next paragraph. About ten years ago I was fishing on the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. When I was finished for the day, I drove back north toward home. At one point I had an urge to pee, so I began looking for a place I could pull off and pull out, without offending anyone. Yes, I have my modest moments. And you know what? The entire region between The Chesapeake Bay’s northern shores and the Pennsylvania Mason-Dixon Line, is completely developed. Like wall-to-wall one-two-three-acre residential lots on every inch of land surface. At the one place that finally looked like I was finally going to get some relief, I stepped out of the car and was immediately met with a parade of Mini Coopers and Priuses driving by on the gravel road to their wooded home lots. There was literally people everywhere, in every corner, in every place.
So what happened here?
There are more people and there is more land development, both of which leading to less nice land to hunt, fewer big private spaces for people to call their own, and so that which does exist is in much higher demand.
Enter Pennsylvania’s new No Trespassing law. AKA the “purple paint” law.
Why was this new law even needed? Because the disenfranchised, enslaved Scots-Irish refugees who originally settled the Pennsylvania frontier by dint of gumption, bravery, and hard work had a natural opposition to the notions and forms of European aristocracy that had driven them here. Such as large pieces of private land being closed off to hunting and fishing. And so these Scots-Irish settlers developed an Indian-like culture of openly flouting the marked boundaries of private properties. Especially when they hunted.
And this culture of ignoring No Trespassing signs carries forth to this very day.
Except that now it is 2020, not 1820, and there are more damned people on the landscape and a hell of a lot less land for those people to roam about on. Nice large pieces of truly private land are becoming something of a rarity in a lot of places. Heck, even the once-rural Poconos is now just an aluminum siding and brick suburb of Joizy.
So in response to our collision of frontier culture with ever more valuable privacy rights, Pennsylvania now has a new purple paint law. If you see purple paint on a tree, it is the equivalent of a No Trespassing sign. And if you do trespass and you get caught, the penalties are much tougher and more expensive than they were just a few months ago.
And you know what the real irony is of this purple paint stay-the-hell-out boundary thing? It is a lot like the blue woad that the Celtic ancestors of the Scots and Irish used to paint their bodies with before entering into battle. Except it is now the landowner who has painted himself in war paint.
Isn’t life funny.
