Has anyone ever heard of reciprocal hunting rights on private property?  I ran across a post on the Michigan Sportsman Fourm about this today.  Apparently, at least here in Michigan there is a entire section of land in Otsego County that has these rights granted to private property owners.  What it states is that everyone in that section who owns land and their family memebers has the right to hunt all other private property in that section!  Wow!  I would be highly ticked off if I bought a piece of property and found out that everyone and their brother literaly could hunt my property. 

     From what this gentleman posted, he said that his brother in law bought a parcel of land for hunting and found that everyone else was hunting it.  He called the DNR, but the CO’s said that these people have reciprocal hunting rights granted to them and there was nothing they could do.  With further discussion on the forum it was stated that this was on the property deed.  It was stated as “reciprocal hunting and fishing rights in Section 21“, further discussion revealed that this was put on the deeds about 50 years ago by all the land owners of that section, the only way to recend it would be to get all land owners to sign off.  Yeah like that is going to happen. 

     So the moral of the story is to have a real estate lawyer check your deed and title work before you sign.  Don’t just assume that the title work is enough.  This guy did and didn’t read all the deed word for word, and now he is hosed!  Years ago I guess you had an abstract drawn up on land purchases that showed everything that ever was done or transfered to and from property owners, I guess this is no longer the case, that is why we now have title insurance.  Good lesson here to learn from, unfortunatly it was the other guy who got the screws put to him.