A Reddit user said he had gotten permission to hunt a piece of property near him that had not really been used for anything in more than 20 years. According to his post, the owner did not want anyone else hunting there unless they were with him. Season ended on December 31, and when he went back in afterward to pull his tree stand, he noticed a trail camera sitting where he parked his bike. He checked with the landowner, and the owner told him the camera was not his.
That was when the hunter pulled the card. He wrote that the photos on it showed trespassers. From the way he told it, this was not a case of him guessing that someone had been slipping around on the property. He had a camera on the land that did not belong there, and once he looked through it, he had pictures showing the people who had been using it. He also said he turned the camera off after pulling the card.
The situation got worse from there. In the same thread, he explained that the trespassers had cut locks, destroyed the gate, and acted like it was still fine for them to come and go because they used to have permission from a previous owner. He said that excuse kept coming up, but the current owner had made it clear that the property was not open to them. The poster wrote that what really got under his skin was how casually some people seemed to treat old permission like it carried over forever, even after ownership changed.
He said he was trying to figure out the smartest way to handle it without making the whole thing worse. The camera, the photos, the damage to the gate, and the repeated attitude that they could still use the place all pointed in the same direction. From the way he told it, the issue was no longer whether someone had wandered over the line once by mistake. He had a property owner telling him only he could hunt there, a strange camera at his access point, pictures of trespassers, and damage that made it obvious people were forcing their way in.
The comments pushed him toward reporting it and documenting everything. A lot of people told him to save the photos, keep records of the property damage, and stop treating it like a disagreement that could be talked away. The poster did not sound eager for a confrontation anyway. He sounded more like someone who had gone out expecting to take down a stand and ended up realizing that strangers had been watching the same access point he used to get in and out.
The whole story came down to that ugly little discovery after season. He went back to private land he had permission to hunt, found a camera that was not supposed to be there, pulled the card, and realized the property had a trespass problem that was a lot more active than he thought. And on top of that, the people behind it were apparently acting like old permission from a previous owner still gave them the right to cut locks and keep coming back.
What do you think — if you found a stranger’s trail camera sitting at your access point and the card showed the same people damaging the gate, would you confront them at all, or go straight to the game warden and the owner?
Original Reddit post: Private Property convo
