AlongCameJones

CalHunter, indeed, you have a private land advantage knowing a private landowner. I've had two family members in Georgia tell me years ago that one needs to know people in order to hunt there. Georgia is mostly private land. A young fellow I worked with Idaho told me years back also that you have know people there too to hunt. ID is mostly public land but his personal hunting experience may have been mostly if not solely on private land.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of the total American deer hunters hunt on the private land of known landowners. Perhaps as many as 50% or more?

My first and only deer hunt ever was done on the land of a Trinity Co, NorCal beef rancher in 1996. Zone B-2. He was advertising guided hunts in the classifieds of a hunting magazine in 1996 and I thought this would be my ticket to get in the door. I bagged a little buck but last the hankering to hunt until just recently. I just had to know what it felt like to shoot a deer with my own gun. My heart was pounding as I was aiming at the buck. I now know buck fever. I shirked deer hunting for most of my life believing it was too expensive or I had to know private landowners which I never did growing up in the suburbs of the SF Bay Area and having no hunting mentors among my family and friends. My mother was anti-hunting (though she gladly ate store-bought meat and fish) and my father thought hunting unsafe because of all "the fools" out in the woods. I could only dream of hunting as a boy and was inspired by reading some early 1970's Outdoor Life magazines my grandfather gave me. He gave up deer hunting just before I was born but was an avid coastal fisherman in my boyhood days. My grandfather told me he gave up hunting because of all the walking involved when I asked him why he hunted no more. My grandfather avidly fished for and often caught salmon, rock cod and other sea fish both on party boats and private boats owned by men he knew at work. Fishing on a boat is suitable for tired older men. My mother only wanted me to read the fishing features but I read up mostly on guns and hunting and was also curious about the taxidermy displayed in those pages too.