The area where I was trying to get some field work done today before the hurricane makes its mark on the weather pattern is a fence contractor's dream and a surveyor's nightmare. Nearly all of the new fences are 8 ft. high. That means they are a bugger to use GPS around unless the antenna height is 8+something feet (which isn't exactly conducive to best quality positioning) and they are a bear to climb.
I realize the idea is to keep the deer and other stocked animals with jumping skills inside the fence until someone arrives with a gun and a checkbook to thin the herd, but the overhead on that one is a healthy item on the surveying bill that everyone else with regular stock fences doesn't have to pay.
I agree, their fences should only be 6.5' tall at the most.
Kent-
We carry a set of legs & stepladder that would accommodate that height most times.
Otherwise a bag of short tie-back ropes and selective pruning occurs before any PITA traverse/offset.
We also bring to our clients' attention how quickly we can measure when we can see true line and how long it takes otherwise as reflected in our account.
Cheers,
Derek
Derek, From reading your post, is it correct to assume you are one of the registereds that regularly make visits to the field ?
Here in Texas after a few years all you have is a lot of inbred deer, that is if the city dudes deer hunters who brought money, haven,t shot them all.
R.J.-
You betcha.
I prefer to make my own mistakes rather than ask others to do so.
It beats golf and other such strenuous intellectual activities.
Cheers,
Derek
> We carry a set of legs & stepladder that would accommodate that height most times.
Okay, I'm having a hard time envisioning this. When you write "legs" do you mean "stilts" rather than a tripod? So, do you climb up on the stepladder to put the 7 ft. tall stilts on and then you can just step across the 8 ft. high fence? Are there YouTubes available?
> Here in Texas after a few years all you have is a lot of inbred deer, that is if the city dudes deer hunters who brought money, haven,t shot them all.
Actually, on this ranch the deer have *ear tags* and are purposely bred to have the characteristics that hunters are willing to pay the most for in the animals they kill. I hadn't seen ear tags on deer before ever. I guess I've led a sheltered life.
Neither am I, a fan that is. Though necessity is the mother of invention: To read angles at a control point on Hwy. 401 in Toronto over 10' sound barriers circa 1974, we used three tripods, then set a fourth in the holes on the top of the three tripods, then I climbed up a stepladder and very carefully measured the 8 sets. It must've worked as we didn't have any repeats. Wish I had a picture.
> To read angles at a control point on Hwy. 401 in Toronto over 10' sound barriers circa 1974, we used three tripods, then set a fourth in the holes on the top of the three tripods, then I climbed up a stepladder and very carefully measured the 8 sets.
Great image, but to be precise (and I know we all want that because, we are surveyors, dammit!) the practical problem I see with 8 ft. high fences (some with electrified top strands) is the one of having to climb over them and back, the climbover entailing hauling a significant amount of stuff along in many cases. Several trips over an 8 ft. high fence isn't really comparable to several step-overs of an ordinary barbed wire stock fence.
Deer farms are big business. There are a few around here that work deer in pens like they used to cattle, but no Brangus 3 year old ever brought $15k, or more, at least around here.
Game fences do suck to be sure.
geez, Around here, we just walk out in the woods and shoot the deer. Don't know of any pay-for-hunting area.
Geez, Louise
You should not be going over them. You should be going through them at the gates, with the property owners permission. Preferably with him being with you.
Some of those fences have things on the other side that appear to be somewhat harmless, but, can be deadly or, at least, very damaging to you in a matter of seconds.
Within the past few years we had a lady killed by a white-tail deer within 30 miles of here. Just because they look cute doesn't mean they can't believe they need to protect themselves. First, they out weigh you. Second, when they stand up they are much taller than you. Those hooves can slice you just like a knife. You do not want to find out what getting bit can do.
Kind of the "Big Hat no Cattle" version of deer hunting.
A white-tail that outweighs me?
I'm definitely runnin' the other direction! I think they call those elk.
As far as scaling a tall fence, you guys must be a bunch of ex-basketball players.
I believe there is only ONE way to get through an 8' tall fence:
We should all take a hint from our four-legged fur bearin' friends.
A white-tail that outweighs me?
Info fresh from the internet. The pay-to-hunt crowd has no interest in the little ones.
Size and weight: The white-tailed deer is highly variable in size, generally following Bergmann's rule that the average size is larger further away from the Equator. North American male deer (also known as a buck or stag) usually weighs 60 to 130 kg (130 to 290 lb) but, in rare cases, bucks in excess of 159 kg (350 lb) have been recorded. Mature bucks over 400 pounds are recorded in the northernmost reaches of their native range, specifically, Minnesota and Ontario. In 1926, Carl J. Lenander, Jr. took a white-tailed buck near Tofte, MN, that weighed 183 kg (400 lb) after it was field-dressed (internal organs removed) and was estimated at 232 kg (510 lb) when alive.[5]
Geez, Louise
> You should not be going over them. You should be going through them at the gates, with the property owners permission. Preferably with him being with you.
It's certainly a nice thought, but not often a practical one when the ranches are thousands of acres and it's an hour's drive to go around the other side, into a gate, and through pasture roads to get to the other side of a fence that you can climb over in a minute or two.
> geez, Around here, we just walk out in the woods and shoot the deer. Don't know of any pay-for-hunting area.
And the common folk, like myself, do the same. Sure we have management programs to help deer population, but there is BIG money in this, and people pay it for the opportunity to shoot 160 to 220 class bucks.
In South Texas, with the Exception of the O&G industry, that region would be a ghost town if not for the deer industry, and those wardens down there have NO sense of humor and the judges back them to the hilt.
I've hunted behind high fences and taken management bucks that were spectacular specimens of deer that were greater than what I probably would have gotten at home. A management buck is one that at 3 years old, has hit the top of the bell curve and is going down, and you eradicate it from the gene pool allowing the bigger mature bucks to sire more big bucks.
15K seems a lot to me for a helluva hat rack hanging on the wall, but I'm kinda grounded in that. That's not to say that I wouldn't mount a deer head, but it wouldn't come from behind a high fence.
My son killed an excellent 5 year old buck on the farm last year that scored 113 and it was 17 1/4" inside and 8 points. Some of these non-typical bucks behind the high fences look like they have a cedar tree on their heads.
> I've hunted behind high fences and taken management bucks that were spectacular specimens of deer that were greater than what I probably would have gotten at home. A management buck is one that at 3 years old, has hit the top of the bell curve and is going down, and you eradicate it from the gene pool allowing the bigger mature bucks to sire more big bucks.
>
> 15K seems a lot to me for a helluva hat rack hanging on the wall, but I'm kinda grounded in that. That's not to say that I wouldn't mount a deer head, but it wouldn't come from behind a high fence.
I know that high fence ranches exist, but am still having a problem with how they can charge for something that the state legally owns. I guess it is for the privilege of shooting said buck??? I doubt I'll be ever shooting a 15k buck or even a 300 doe, doesn't make sense.
In Texas, the state owns all deer native to Texas.
I assumed that the cost was to hunt on their private property.....unless they are charging based on what kind and size of deer you shot.?
I was involved years ago on a survey where some guy owned a ranch and he abutted some BLM land (and had a right to graze his cattle on the BLM land.) There was an access road across his property to the BLM land. He was locking the gate to the access road, and he would charge people to take them through his property to hunt on the BLM land. The trouble was, that the road was a public easement to access the blm land.
We surveyed the land in question/the boundary between his land the the BLM land; hired by the county (if I recall right). At the same time we were out there, a BLM crew was also surveying the same boundary, and another private surveyor was also surveying it on behalf of the land owner.
I doubt that any of us came up with different boundary lines than the other surveyors.
Kind of crazy and a big waste of time (except for us that were getting paid to survey the same boundaries.