While we are discussing morals and ethics of game bird shooting, how do y'all feel about working hard as one can to take a daily limit every time you're out? Any problem with that, or do some feel it is greedy in some way?
Lots of gray areas there too Stan, but there is nothing wrong with killing your legal limit in most cases. A good State Game Management agency sets reasonable legal limits based upon the resource. However, it can be taken to greedy extremes in some circumstances. I used to work with a guy who had some great dogs, and was a devout pheasant hunter. My co-workers who had hunted with him warned me that he would needle me or anyone to find out about farms that had a good pheasant population. They said if I ever made the mistake of giving away my hot-spots, he and his brothers would go there and relentlessly keep returning until the population was decimated.
A lot of land in the vicinity of my house is posted (including my own) simply because the local Amish Dutch are much the same, and keep coming back with dozens of shooters and drivers until an area is cleaned out. They also take it a step further by being well known for poaching, exceeding bag limits, and hunting on land without permission. I've thrown a number of them off my property after I watched them cross a barbed wire fence only a few feet from easily visible posted signs. All of my non-Amish neighbors know they have permission to hunt my land, on the condition that they tell any Amish they see to get the hell out. I admire them for hunting hard, but you won't find many non-Amish land owners or hunters who are happy to see them.
I didn't know how they were until after I bought my land. I gave permission to one Dutchman down the road to hunt, and it was OK at first. Then he stopped by one day and said he was hunting on my land with his cousin, and they noticed I had a lot of what they called hickory canes (saplings an inch or so in diameter). He asked me if it would be OK for his cousin to cut some, because he had a business making hickory rocking chairs. He said that if I allowed him to take some, he would make me a hickory rocker. We took a walk through the woods, and he showed me what he was interested in. I noted that there were many that had two or more saplings bunched together, and told him I would be OK with him taking the smaller ones out of a group, but to please leave the nice straight single saplings and also leave the largest out of any group of two or more, to grow into mature hickory trees. He agreed to that, and I was happy that he would be thinning out excess trees, and I would also get an Amish made hickory rocker out of the bargain.
A few months later, when I was back in there doing some hunting, I noticed that virtually every hickory sapling had been cut down. Where there had been plenty of shagbark hickory saplings, now it was difficult to find any at all, except for the small stub of the cut off trunks. Oh, I never got my damn hickory rocker he promised either. The next time I saw John a few months later, I told him that he and his cousin and the rest of his clan were no longer allowed on my land, and I wasn't nice about it.
An unethical hunter probably isn't very ethical in most other matters either. Sadly, they often ruin things for other hunters. There's a story behind every parcel of land that gets posted. Someday, I'll tell the whole story of how the Amish prompted me to post mine.
