Hunting Tips

The fastest way to find property lines for hunting in Wisconsin is to combine HuntWise with the DNR's Public Access Lands tool and your county's GIS or treasurer records.

If you've heard that purple paint marks private land in Ohio, that's actually a myth. Ohio lawmakers have proposed a purple paint law twice, in 2017 and again in 2020, and neither bill passed.

Illinois' purple paint law comes with an odd carve-out: it doesn't apply to real property inside a municipality of more than 2,000,000 people, which in practice means Chicago. Everywhere else in the state, that same purple stripe on a tree or post carries full legal weight as a "no trespassing" notice.

By 1857, Iowa had already sold off nearly all of its public land, save for a sliver of federal ground in the state's far northwest corner. That history still shapes hunting today: Iowa now has one of the highest levels of private land ownership in the country, with roughly 97% of its land in farms, timber, and pasture.

Ask a Kansas game warden what trips up out-of-state hunters most, and permission comes up before anything else. The state requires it on every private acre, posted with a sign or not, which makes Kansas one of the stricter states in the country on this point.

Texas hunters face a boundary problem most other states don't. With more than 95% of the state in private hands, nearly every promising piece of ground belongs to someone.

The best way to get private land hunting access is to identify the landowner using the HuntWise hunting land app or county parcel records. Then, reach out to the landowner between four and eight weeks ahead of your hunt.

Free hunting land near you is accessible with the right tools. When I want to find free hunting land near me, I typically check my HuntWise app and then confirm with my state mapping app, which overlays all hunting zones.

The WindCast feature of the HuntWise app is a wind layer that shows real-time and forecasted direction and speed data. It overlays wind conditions on your hunting map to improve scent control and help you make more informed hunting decisions about positioning and planning.

Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) are public lands managed by state agencies for wildlife conservation and hunting, offering access to millions of acres across the country.

There are five critical features hunters look for when choosing an app with property lines. These are:

Public land hunting in the US is classified into five categories. They are federal lands (USFS, BLM, USACE — roughly 600 million acres), state Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), state forests and parks open to hunting, walk-in hunting programs (WIHA, PLOTS, IHAP), private landowners who receive payment for opening their land, and county/municipal open space.