Louts Ruin Goose Hunting For Responsible Sportsmen

Goose hunters can hunt every day this week, the final week of a long 1996-97 season during which snowstorms, ice storms, thawing and freezing dominated movement of the big birds.

You’d think goose hunters would be happy. Instead, many, mostly those who have to depend on the goodwill of property owners, are frustrated, partly because they encountered disillusioned and somewhat hostile landowners and because they saw geese in fields where it would have been impossible to hide.

Several landowners are fed up with irresponsible hunters and won’t permit any hunters on their property. A few landowners post their lands with the Fish and Wildlife Department’s “Hunting Only by Written Permission” signs and then permit only family members and friends to hunt.

But loutish hunters are more responsible for the frustrating “No Trespassing” signs that discourage conscientious hunters. For example, last week one of my friends and a visitor from the coast drove the back roads of Lincoln and Adams counties looking for geese that may have returned following the big thaw. They saw thousands of geese, but they never set out decoys.

The men, responsible hunters, spotted geese on land where they could have set out decoys and created makeshift blinds. The property owners, though not happy to see hundreds of geese chewing on their winter wheat, wouldn’t give the men permission to hunt.

One property owner said he had a bad experience with hunters last fall. He told my friends that he gave the hunters permission to dig pits in his field last fall with the understanding that the hunters would fill in the pits after they had hunted.

The hunters dug their pits, shot geese and left without filling in the pits.

After that incident and a couple of other bad experiences the landowner decided he wouldn’t allow any more hunting.

My friends found another place where there were thousands of big honkers. It would have been possible, they said, to have built a makeshift blind close enough to where the birds were feeding to have had chances at incoming birds.

The landowner, they discovered, was soured on hunters. Some hunters, he claimed, had shot holes in his sprinkling system. My friends’ experience with landowners wasn’t an unusual one. Landowners have all kinds of excuses. They contend hunters have shot birds near their houses and barns, driven over winter wheat fields, left gates open, cut barbed-wire fences, shot their pet cats and otherwise behaved badly.

Many of the stories are true. Some who buy hunting licenses believe they have a right to hunt on private land and that they can do as they please. They trespass without asking for permission. They become hostile when landowners tell them to leave.

They’re the louts who infuriate landowners and cost conscientious hunters hundreds of acres of prime hunting land each year.

The louts can’t seem to understand that having a hunting license doesn’t give them a right to hunt on private property without getting permission to trespass. They’ll never learn. , DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review