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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

When in the US or elsewhere where landowners can decide who can do what on a piece of land, how do you know where you can go picking berries or mushrooms? Do you check a map for some indication that a certain piece of land is "public" rather than privately owned? (Some countries have a right of access to any land meaning anyone is allowed to walk/pick berries/mushrooms etc on any land regardless of who owns it).

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Wildlife Management Areas are a great place to start. State and federal parks too. I’m syre there are plenty of walking trails if you are near a major city.

Private landowners are pretty good about marking boundaries where public meets private.

Trespassing laws often require notification, so they are pretty good about posting notification. They aren't really doing anyone a favor.

(Michigan requires notification, with the exception of land clearly being used for agriculture, which does not require notification)

But yeah, there is lots of public land.

I recently saw a video on YouTube and I think it was Michigan. It was about lakes and hunting rules if your property or public property touches the lake. They were saying you have about 5-10 feet to hunt around any lake even if it’s not the side you own or public land touches.

I’m not sure it’s like this in Georgia. Interesting though.

There are substantial access provisions for "navigable waters", I would take some convincing to believe this includes hunting adjacent to lakes.

This document discusses it pretty well I guess:

https://dspace.nmc.edu/bitstream/handle/11045/10614/Public-A...

(It's focused on tribal fishing and hunting rights but covers public access nicely; just skip all the quoted text to get an overview)

In the video it was a guy trapping by the high tide line of a lake. A land owner was harassing him. Hunter called the game warden and when the landowner came back he got a ticket for harassing a hunter. Basically you can hunt/fish all around a lake if you have permission on a piece of property that touches the water. There’s a certain amount of feet from the water you can legally be in.

You meant trapping but said hunting which is technically true, but makes people think of shooting instead.

Very little map checking. People generally know where public land is, as it is typically some sort of park or rec area.

Otherwise, land is mostly considered private and you stay off unless you have approval of the owner.

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