bloodcrick

I agree with you on ALOT of this but speaking from the other side of the fence this is what i had to deal with. I live in an area that is litteraly thousands upon thousands of acres, of prime hunting fishing /ground and water ,its huge. It was all free range for years and you could hunt anywhere on it. about 6 or 7 years ago i started seeing no tresspassing signs on the farthest properties from my house, well it kept creaping toward my area and i found out it was now going to be leased [:@]i was hot under the gills for awhile knowing that the area around my house was going to get it because it was ownedby the (same land owners) some big corporation, thatownes an ungodly amount of acreage and is leasing it all.it was them that had looked around and seen everyone else making money by leasing and wanted some of the gravy. Well you guesed it my area soon came up for lease. My neighbor does some excavating for the owners of this property and was offered a shot at this property first because they wanted locals to police it. He asked me and some friends if we wanted in, we boarder three sides of it. i was atoment at first, but if i did not, i was not going to be able to hunt it at all, and have to watch others enjoy what i once had at my back door. I got in as expected because everything in the area was already leased and the public land was swamped. There was a list of people a page and a half long wanting this lease, so if i did not get in it was going to happen anyway. so thats where im at now. it will probably slip away from us when some rich city slickers offer them big dollars to lease it [:@]With that said here are some good points that came from it. When it was free range you never seen any bucksover 2.5 years, the area was totally swamped with mainly gun hunters that shot everything, i was one of them and shot my share of dinks. Im not kidding you, there would be 50 trucks on one road opening day of gun season. The one buck rule and the leasing came along about the same time. excluding the young generation on the lease we got real picky about what we were shooting and starting to see some brutes about three years later. Since all of this i now have a 160" and two 120's bucks on the wall, and hardly see a hunter all season on the 800 acres we lease. if i get off of it someone will take my place, so what do i do?? not take it and fight the crowds on the public land. it happened, i cant do anything about it, what is,is.
Dink