Unread postby harold » Mon Feb 05, 2018 6:02 am
I think Dan was right when he talked about guys fearing getting lost. I see it all the time; trails of orange ribbon, bright eyes, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using those in moderation, but when you are marking every five feet there is something seriously wrong with your skills in the woods. I once saw a guy mark a well used hiking trail with ribbon every five or ten feet. The trail led to a fence enclosure (DCNR and PGC here put them up to keep the deer out of clear cuts; that is another topic in itself). The guy then tied ribbons on the fence! Seriously?! Turns out his "stand" was down the fence line a couple hundred yards then fifty feet from the fence. I was dumbfounded. Guys just do not spend enough time in the woods. I do think some of it is laziness, but I also think there is lack of time or effort. Most guys (and gals) on this site have a serious passion for hunting and therefore spend enormous amounts of time outdoors. But fact of the matter is, a large majority of hunters only spend several days (I'd guess less than a week) of the year in the field. This will only get worse as populations continue to shift toward urban areas.
PSU did a study a few years back where they took aerial surveys of hunter locations during rifle season. This was easy to do with guys wearing orange and no foliage on the trees. Here is part of the results from the abstract:
"On the Sproul study area, 73% of hunters on public land were located <600 m from a road, compared to 60% of the area being within that distance and 70% of hunters used slopes <8°, which represented 57% of the area. Hunters on private lands on the Sproul study area were uniformly distributed by distance from road, but 79% of hunters were on slopes <8°, which represented 73% of the area. On the Tuscarora study area, 79% of all public land hunters remained <600 m from a road, compared to 69% of the area being within that distance, and hunters tended to avoid steeper slopes, although the effect was not as great as on the Sproul study area. Hunters on private land in the Tuscarora study area avoided locations both near and far from roads and slope had little relation to the distribution of hunters."
The results are not surprising. 600 meters is about 1/3 mile.