Do y'all have any crazy stories of catching a poacher in your blind on private property? Have often thought about what to do if this situation ever arose for me and what I would/could do legally. How have you confronted or handled the situation? Call the cops/GW? Do you escort them off the property?
Not in the blind but when we pulled up to our camp last summer to fill feeders, a guy walks out the kitchen in his underwear and walked towards our bunkhouse.
He made himself home for the previous 6 weeks. He broke a window to get in the kitchen and a window to get in the bunkhouse. He prepared himself a bed with some sheets he found, ate all of our food that we had in the freezer, and walked to town periodically with all of the power tools, game cameras, electronic calls, bionoculars, etc that he could fit in his back pack to sell.
I didn't leave anything valuable at the lease, but he hit the other guys up for close to $3,000 worth of stuff.
We didn't know if he was alone, so when my brother-in-law confronted him he told him to pack his stuff and backed off. Had a sheriff deputy meet us at the gate. At the time we didn't know anything was damaged or stolen.
The deputy picked him up at the gate.
We told him if all he did was use our shelter and eat our food, we wouldn't press charges this time. He assured us he stole nothing and damaged nothing (told us exactly where our spare key was hidden, but he must have found it after he broke the windows).
We arrived at camp and discovered otherwise. We should have asked the deputy to follow us to the camp. About time we noticed the deputy had already dropped him off somewhere. He assured us he would be easy to find though and had a warrant for his arrest the next day. Don't know what ever came of it though.