Lost in the headlines about flood relief and Un-Fair and politics and hot weather may have been this gem of a news story from the weekend: It seems some Minnesota hunters have started building "mansions" and "palaces" for deer stands, essentially houses on stilts with stairways, decks, shingled roofs, commercial windows, insulation, propane heaters, carpeting, lounge chairs, tables and even generators for electricity.
They're taking outdoor sport and turning it into indoor leisure.
All of which would be fine, even HGTV-worthy, except that they're doing it by taking and using public land that actually belongs to all of us.
"What they are doing by building these palaces is claiming a piece of public land as their own. That's not right," St. Louis County Land Commissioner Bob Krepps told the News Tribune's John Myers for a story in Sunday's paper. "A lot of these cross the line of what's appropriate. ... If I'm out walking and come across one of these buildings on posts, am I going to feel welcome to hunt there? Probably not. And if I do (try to hunt there), there's likely to be a fight. That shouldn't happen on land that belongs to everyone."
Some hunters also are cutting down trees, lots of trees, so they can spot deer deeper in the woods. Some cleared-out shooting lanes are more than 30 feet wide and up to 700 feet long. In one area, a group of hunters cleared more than six acres of forest for 47 shooting lanes, Myers reported. Every tree chopped down, of course, is one less tree the county will someday be able to harvest, that revenue benefitting all county property taxpayers. By taking public land and treating it as their own these hunters clearing shooting lanes essentially are stealing from the rest of us.
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Considering all this it's no surprise many counties, national forests and state wildlife management areas are banning permanent deer stands. St. Louis County, on the other hand, has nothing on its books to address the growing problem.
Krepps can make good on his reported "hopes" of coming up with new county land regulations to ban or at least limit deer stands and to forbid timber cutting for shooting lanes.
And St. Louis County commissioners can take a stronger leadership role on the issue. Commissioners Steve Raukar of Hibbing and Keith Nelson of Fayal Township were named in the story as supporters of simply talking to hunters to urge them to do the right thing rather than cracking down on their greed, their obvious lack of ethics and their apparent lack of respect for other hunters.
The Minnesota Deer Hunters Association can play a more active role, too. The association has no formal stance, indicated its Executive Director Mark Johnson.
"Our ability to continue to use these public lands depends on our actions out there," Johnson said. "We are seeing ... public land managers forced to take increasing action because of the bad apples out there who just go too far."
Bad apples are staking claims to land that belongs to all. As county Land Commissioner Bob Krepps said, "That's not right."
