Public vs Private

What are your thoughts? Pro's an Con's. I know a few people including family that continue to harvest large bucks off public. 

I live on 7 wooded acres along the Amnicon river , surrounded by almost 36sq miles of Douglas county forest , give or take . Always a new cut making for a change in deer activity . Been hunting up here for almost 25 years , and I know there are places nobody has hunted in years . While scouting and looking at sat photo's , we have adopted what we refer to as the 700 yard rule . If a good looking area is beyond 700 yards from an ATV trail or, a place for somewhere to park , it's a likely area to scout for mature deer . I still have to pay taxes to Douglas County tho' . I live here !

Right on Ole.

I've got 600,000 acres of Nicolet National Forest right outside my cabin door. It would take me ten lifetimes to hunt all of it. I took all the money I saved not buying private land and bought me a nice postage stamp (well, a one acre postage stamp) with a nice cabin and two garages and piled all the rest of the money in the bank, for retirement at 62. Hopefully, I won't croak before then (three more years!) and I'll get to hunt and fish for however many years I have left on this earth.

Not much of a plan, I'll grant you, but it's all I've got.

Fortunately, I'm built like an old Wisconsin plowhorse and hiking in a mile and a half and dragging a deer out a mile and a half still isn't TOO much of an ordeal. Sure beats sitting in front of the teevee watching deer hunting shows.

Burn some boot leather; get away from the crowd. It's not that difficult.

All public land, for me.

RR

I disagree on private being better unless you inherited it or get to hunt for cheap.  I've debated buying land for a while and its not a money issue, not in terms of affordability anyways.  I just can't justify the return.

Spend $200k to hunt a deer.  I then would have to pay taxes, deal with trespassers, etc.  Maybe the neighbors blast everything anyways.  Do I use the land the rest of the year?  Turns into an expensive deer.

Instead of doing that I could continue to hunt public like I do today and get deer.  Sure its a little more work and maybe they aren't up to everyone's standards.  Then I can take all that money I was going to invest in land and use it to go on out of state hunts for the rest of my life.  Take a week every fall and go out west or maybe a trip to Canada.  If I want to skip a year, I just don't go.  No payments or money tied up.  Still can hunt public in WI but then have other options and new adventures.  I personally get bored looking at the same woods every year.  I like to try new things, but with private property you are kind of doing the same thing every year for the most part.  Yes you might freshen up the food plot or cut some trees, but it doesn't really change much.  I get why some like that consistency though, I'm just more for new things.

That was my justification to not wanting to buy land anyways. 

You can make so many improvements on private land that this shouldn't even be a competition.  Only advantage public land has is the shear quantity of it.  I could go down the street from my cabin and hunt the 300 acre parcel of public anytime I want but I still go to our private farm.  Only downside of private is the money it costs to buy more.  In order to afford more than 40-80 acres in good location you have to have a pretty good paying job, or be very good at saving, or split the costs with other people.  I'd rather hunt the 50 acres private farm than the 300 acres public parcel any day of the week.

Not even a comparison. Private is soooo much better.

I'll be happy to give you my climber and share GPS coordinates to every single one of my public land buck trees in return for hunting privileges on your private land.

I better go clear out my inbox so there is room for all the messages from people wanting to give up their private :)

Ok, back on subject. There is little doubt private is easier.  You can make tav trails to your permanent stands in August and not have an affect of the deer movement. Both are good and bad in some ways.  If I had a million dollars , I would most likely have a huge chunk of private land  . 

I do not think to many guys have 125k cash to invest in the stock market when they are young.I bought an 80 in 1989 for 10,000  just sold it for 170,000.If I had put that in the stock market I might have that, I don't know maybe but I sure would not have had the fun.Getting back to what is harder private is easier as far as work,not having to walk as far in.That said the 80 I just sold had a 40 in swamp had a lot of deer in there but it was sure a lot of work getting in there.I still hunt some public always have I like hunting big woods with a bow.Also after I bought that 80 in 89 I had it logged made over 4 grand that I put in the market and added 1800 hundred a year that last I checked it was over 200k.

Fishsqueezer, if you are on a section with 4 other guys, that is actually crowded. As for me in the Flambeau River State Forest I rarely even see a buck so Fish has me beat by a mile. So weather I am down in Washington co. or Price / Sawyer co. I am all public.  It is much harder than private . I have to walk in an awful long ways to hunt and get away from others, but that is public. I have a choice though. I could buy a very big chunk of private land if I sold my Price co. / South Fork Flambeau River parcel. I decided a long time ago , a deer is not worth dumping so much money into . A 100 ac. parcel  in Price/ Sawyer will set you back at least $100K. Add a cabin and you can add $20 K.  Add taxes and add another $1,500 per year.  In the long run it is not worth the hassle of upkeep , trespassers , ATV's ETC.  $125,000 up front with $1,500 added per year in an S&P 500 fund returning 7% per yr avr. adds up . You will end up with $1,103,000 after 30 yrs. This does not even count for upkeep and work weekends that cost money too. I know I am stepping on some toes here but it is not worth it   unless you really make a lot of money, and with the hunter numbers lower every year I doubt after 30 yrs you will sell that parcel for $ 1,103,000. Aint gunna happen. I could actually do this but decided it is too much . I was lucky , I bought 7 ac. on the Flammbeau River for $3,000 and put up a $3,000 cabin in 1989. I pay $200 in taxes. I'm lucky and if taxes go up too much  it would be gone in a hurry. Back to public land. Price co.  is the worst hunting  I have ever seen. Many private owners can not fathom how poor it really is. Like JC Wis. says , it is a miracle to find a rub or scrape. In 2016 I walked a mile circle and found one rub.  The neat thing is , I have not seen a hunter since 2009 where I hunt.  In southern WIs. , on Public , I can tell where the hunters are. Just listen to grunt callers and antler rattlers . They get louder and more desperate as the sun goes down.  My last two deer have been down here though. 

If you haven't watched Whitetail Adrenaline I highly recommend it. All public land.

Private you deal with idiot neighbors that sit on the boarder and hunt non stop,  morning and night all season.  Then they have friends they let hunt and tell them to hunt the boarder because all the deer live on the neighbors.  They live by us because they are on theirs non stop.  just dummies.

Public you deal with idiots that have the same rights as you to be there.  

Only positive of public is that most hunters are lazy,  you have 100s of 1000's of acres to find the spots others may be over looking.  

Private, you most likely don't have to worry about someone stealing a stand or being in it when you get there but you have that 150 acres only.  Some times a good thing,  sometimes a bad thing.

Public,  is free,  Private is EXPENSIVE.

I'd prefer private over public yet because I have a place to go that I can call mine.  I have place for my kids to learn how to hunt and not worry about someone setting up 50 yards from them or worry about someone walking under their stand 30 minutes before closing.

I hunted public for the first 12 years.  I shot deer, but I've had enough of a education.  I believe some of the best hunters out there are hunting public.  I know guys that can read sign better than most,  know how deer think and kill deer on public pretty consistently.  The public land life is not easy for anyone,  some just do it better.

I started out on private as a young lad during a time when people would litteraly hang signs on their land that read “if you post your land stay off mine.” The deer would run from farm to farm all day. I didn’t see many deer that weren’t running from something. Hear some shots on an adjacent farm and get ready. The guy who owned the farm died unexpectedly and the absentee family members proceeded to duke it out for a few years before selling it and we were out. 

We then made the move to the flambeau state forest/sawyer county land and learned very quickly that we actually had to hunt the deer. This was the late ‘90’s and it was pretty crowded. It didn’t take long for us the figure out we had to try to get at least a mile from the nearest ATV trail (and thus bait piles) and all of the sudden it wasn’t so hard. Fast forward to the early 2010’s when the sawyer county recreational cabin leases expired and the hunter numbers (and ATV marauders) seemed like half of what they were. The last three years it’s been my brothers and I and two other guys (that we could tell) to pretty much a section of land). I actually enjoy hunting the public now more than I did the private as a youth. There’s only been one year that I haven’t harvested a deer and that had more to do with the daycare strain of Ebola I contracted that year than anything. It’s more work but is certainly doable if your expectations match reality. 

My experience is north of HWY10 only.  Public land - gotten incredibly worse over the past 15 years.  More and more people, as only I can assume it is because loss of open hunting land which focuses more people on the limited public land.  Northwoods is a bit better as more land is available, but the combination of predators and the decade long doe slaughter severely limits how many deer are actually there to hunt.  The banning of baiting in many large tract areas of the northwoods makes it much harder to hunt (especially for archery), especially in years with little acorn production or few oaks....there is little natural food that will congregate deer most years.  The deer population is so low it is hard to even detect trails, and finding a rub in many areas is a minor miracle.  If you can find public land that abuts some private land with ag fields or food plots where baiting is banned you have a bit higher chance.

Public land in the northern farm units I hunt are almost devoid of deer not so much of because of predators, but because of the free antlerless tags that had been given out in years past with purchase of a license.  Many areas of private land are in the same boat, but again if you have access to private land with cooperating neighbors, good hunting is the outcome.

Private is mixed it seems.  The nice thing is you usually don't have to worry about other hunters, and generally have a few more deer especially in areas where groups of landowners have gotten together and decided not to kill every deer they see.  Those people have it luckier than they even know.

Without a doubt, private is the preferred way to go in my book. For the most part, you know who is around you and where they are, and you likely don't have to worry about morons walking up on you or setting up 40 yards away like what happened the last time I hunted public. 

Don't get me wrong...I like public. I shot my biggest buck on public, and while I do enjoy the tower stands on my brother inlaw's property, I do miss being in the woods and seeing all the forest life as it's a little different than watching a picked field. But at the same time, dragging that buck out sucked and it sure is nice to be able to drive a vehicle close to where it's laying.