Help With New Neighbor

[yoderjac]

Historically, on the lease I’m on we haven’t had lots of does, so most of the five members don’t shoot does. I have nothing against it if there are plenty of them. Since I’ve been a member our doe population has grown. I think it’s the food plots, they had no way to plant or the experience to do so.

On my home place, only eighty acres, we might take a doe every other year. I took one this year in muzzleloader season. We have does that actually “live” on our place now since I cut quite a bit of timber a few years ago. That opened up the understory and allowed the short growth to get much thicker and I actually have bedding areas now as well as more browse. The deer used to keep my WW mowed down almost into summer but now they don’t eat near as much after spring green up. That tells me they have more preferred browse.

We have lots of bucks in the fall of course and I manage to take one almost every year either at home or on the lease. I didn’t this year, but that was mostly my fault. One of those shoulda, woulda, coulda things !

We are in a very different situation here. Our deer numbers were so high when we bought the pine farm, that we had to shoot every bald deer we could, even if it meant shooting button bucks, just to get our numbers down. As coyotes have become a new predator in our area over time, recruitment has dropped. We don't have CWD in our county or EHD at our farm yet, but CWD has been found a couple counties away. It won't be long before that becomes an issue for us.

We have very liberal bag limits here which makes for a lot of venison in the freezer.

 

[HuronMtn]

Good original question and thread. Yes, this is one of the harder parts of owning property, the neighbor relationships.

I found it helpful, especially when I was the "unknown new neighbor", to NOT lead-off with a problem. I decided my first goal was to get off to a good start with each neighbor and get headed towards a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.

I didn't wait for my neighbors to show an interest in me, I reached out to them. In doing that I was rewarded with things I hadn't anticipated:
+ Getting offered free use of the neighbor's excavator
+ Help troubleshooting a control failure on my tractor
+ An invite for my son to hunt a neighbor's property
+ Tour of a neighbor's property
+ Neighbors that check on my cabin for me when I am not there (I live 150 miles away)
+ Clued in on trespassing hunters in the area that I need to keep an eye out for

Only after that first goal was underway did I concern myself with addressing a specific concern.

There have been a number of them, and they each went better than expected having first reached out to get to know each neighbor:

+ Resolving road easement issues
+ Neighbor's father snooping around my property
+ Neighbor placing game cameras on and hunting my property
+ Agreeing where the property line is
+ Neighbor driving his truck full of beer drink buddies on a tour through my food plots
+ Neighbor taking his ATV/snowmobile through my property without permission
+ Placing of No Trespass signs (in my State at least one has to be posted to get full protection under the law)

 

[buckdeer1]

Worst I have had in a long time was neighbors set my place on fire this year while they were burning trash when they shouldn't have.2-25ft cedars in my windbreak,6-10ft sawtooth,2- 10ft bur oak,2- sandhill plum patches I planted apx 100ft x 100ft if combined

 

[Matlax]

Worst I have had in a long time was neighbors set my place on fire this year while they were burning trash when they shouldn't have.2-25ft cedars in my windbreak,6-10ft sawtooth,2- 10ft bur oak,2- sandhill plum patches I planted apx 100ft x 100ft if combined

Wow. That’s pretty bad. Sorry to hear it!