Do you hunt from home?

I don’t.
I would love, love, love to be able to.
We’ve looked around since Covid as the housing market was favoring sellers, and we could have sold our house for almost wide what we owe.
But, land has risen, if it’s available, and the cost to build has risen dramatically in our area so we would have to take out more than what we would like to. Also, interest rates are almost triple what we have now….
I travel fifteen minutes east to hunt my Father In-laws and 30 minutes north to hunt on public. Not out the back door, but not too bad either.
 
Sort of.

My first passion is hunting ruff grouse. I have a cabin 2 hours from home in NW WI surrounded by great grouse covers (I had over 50 onx pins of spots I wanted to hunt this year). With starlink now I can work from there and I specifically avoid booking work travel for much of October and November so I more or less go live there and hunt daily. Generally work from around 6:00-2:00 go bird hunt a couple hours and then finish out my work day. We deer hunt rifle season there as well and while I have not bow hunted there in recent years next year I also plan to bow hunt. I will burn a bit more PTO but I will plan on bow hunting first light, go to work until mid afternoon, go bird hunting and then hit the stand until dark, finish out the work day. Burning 1 day of PTO a week will cover this schedule assuming I work a bit in the evening. Its not exactly my bed but it more or less is, actually sleep better there than at home and spend 60-90 nights a year there.

I have some public hunting areas near my house as well (not grouse but pheasant and deer) 250 acre chunk, 350 acre chunk and 1000ish acre chunk within 10 minutes. Another 25k acres 15-30 min away depending on where I access from. But they can be crowded, there is little to no chance that you can show up on a weekend and not have trucks parked there already, and given limited parking areas most guys still go in when there are trucks there already. I generally will not but most will. They can be ok for week day hunts though outside of being right near opener.

Sometime in 2025 or early 2026 I will be buying a new house on an acreage near where I live now and ability to easily harvest a white tail or two on my own land will be a requirement. I wont be ready to pull the trigger until fall but have been watching the market and there are nearly always 3-5 places that meet both my requirements an my wifes and are within our budget so it should not be too hard to find something when we are ready. I figure we have from fall 2025 to late summer 2026 to try and find something, I would hate trying to move during hunting season.

We would not mind moving farther out but I need reasonable airport access for work.
 
Currently looking at a place to move to thats adjacent to 7900 acres of federal forest on top of the 20 that it comes with. It's a large contributing factor in my purchase so my boys can have the experience of growing up like that.
 
To me, hunting close to him can add stress, as I try to squeeze in hours etc. when I’m away from home I’m all in and concentrated.
If that makes sense?
 
Wife’s uncle (oldage) always shot deer out of a window in the house but Native American so no rules.
Last time he had the window open and went to get his .22LR came back and shot a doe but his daughter had closed the window unbeknownst to him so he had a nice little hole in the window. He was in his mid 80’s then and no more deer stand climbing.
The daughter didn’t want the deer shot is why the window got closed he found out afterwards.
 
I used to hunt whitetail and waterfowl within a few minutes drive from the house.

I moved west so the closest now is over an hour, so occasionally I will leave early and hunt from home.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I can literally walk out my back door and deer hunt. As I was pulling out of my driveway this morning a young buck was chasing a doe around in the field beside my house. Same for turkeys and doves.
 
I have 26 acres to hunt on, but I enjoy going out and seeing new scenery. Anymore it's not about the kill, it's about the views and the experience. Here is a deer my buddy shot on my property, and a couple coyotes I shot.
 

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