There’s always that one jerk…good thing you called DNR.
I’m hoping that it results in one (or two - his buddy was driving the truck) young hunters learn a valuable lesson about being aware of their surroundings in the future. 1) He was on private property, 2) approximately 1/2 the legal distance from a building, 3) had no idea about either (but claimed it was okay because “I was within 5 yards of the road”. Huh? 3) They clearly were driving along the road, saw some turkeys, and one got out and shot one. Driving around scouting for stuff to shoot does not equate to “hunting” in my opinion. I’m hoping they got a fine and/or temporary suspension of hunting privileges, plus some hard-core hunter safety education for numbers 1&2. Will never know.
)
For the mover of leaves, using a rake is more healthy than blowing leaves with any of the usual noise makers. However, if lawn maintenance is your business, you cannot compete without a leaf blower.
When confronted with unwelcome noises on the water, I turn off my hearing aids - an option not available to many of you.
Raking hurts my wrist, the same wrist I need to paddle, so I do use a backpack blower. It’s a 4 cycle blower so I can claim it at least pollutes a little less than a 2 cycle. My wife really likes to rake by hand but she has even asked me to get some of the bulk with the blower because it’s so much quicker.
Semi off-topic, I also have the worlds best gutter blower. A 16 foot windsurfer mast attached to a handheld electric blower. There’s a right-angle nozzle on the end made from ABS plumbing pipe.
My excuses are that “Paddling is healthier than raking.” “My cordless blower is less noisy and less polluting than a gas powered blower.” And, “The leaves that I have left behind are part of the composting and regenerative process needed by my backyard soil.” 
sing
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We also do some composting with leaves, but the rest we rake to the curb and the city picks them up on a given week. Our city lot is not huge, but decent size and has 11 trees.
Have not heard one while paddling but we had a neighbor withe jet pack version that ran his every time he cut the grass. Were talking about postage stamp yards and the guy brings out his jet pack for 20 minutes or more.
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Really! Love to hear it! Wish that was the case in my local.
One way to take care of leaves is to mulch them into the soil with an electric lawn mower. You have to do this several times over the course of the fall, and at some point there are too many leaves, so the mulch can go on the garden. Of course, lithium batteries aren’t environmentally friendly. Also, some trees, like walnuts, have toxic leaves that can’t be mulched because they will kill the lawn.
Don’t do it with oak leaves. One year my bagging system broke and rather than hurrying up a repair I just mulched the leaves. My front lawn, which gets a lot of sunlight, was slow to recover in the spring, but survived. 80% of my back lawn died. Some areas were so bad that nothing at all grew on them the next year. Other areas were colonized by moss. It took four applications of lime to get the pH back to 6.0, and two more seasons of re-seeding and extra fertilizing to get most of the lawn back. I’m still fighting the moss.
Regarding leaf blowers, I bought an EGO battery powered backpack blower. It was pricey, but I love it.
I’m actually counting on that aspect of oak leaves as I prep my new large property for winter. I just used my largest snow shovel to clear the 30’ by 50’ driveway of oak litter and the mast year bounty of acorns and have lined a long pile of that debris along the split rail fence along the back lot line to create a “sterile zone” I won’t have to mow or weed.
And after shredding more of the leaves with my battery mower, I plan on mixing some of the oak detritus with dried grass clippings, straw and already decayed compost to spread around a large area of my extra lot next door before I bury it with cardboard layers to kill back the established lawn beneath. I figure that will enable more easily turning it over and seeding it with native wildflowers next Spring.
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A little iron sulphate can help control moss.
Sounds like a good plan.
If you were closer I could bring you about 8 cubic yards of oak leaves.
its quite legal in Maine to hunt on any private property not posted No Trespassing or Access by Permission only. You do have to be sure your projectile has a range of no more than 300 feet from a house. Maine has some property laws that are quite unlike othe states as there is relatively little public land ( 95 percent private) and a robust hunting tradition. Of course careless hunters can po a landowner and voila the land gets posted. Landowners appreciate being asked for permission.
Legally people can hunt on my unposted land.
Knowing the local laws is always important. Where people muck things up is in equating convention with law, in cases where those did not match. Also when people from other states think their home law applies wherever else they go.
With other things, these faux pas might not cause harm. A lost tourist once told me that they had been driving around scoping out land to buy, during which she helped herself to opening a door to a mound atop a family burial vault. Only then did it occur to her that she had walked into private property. Duh. I told her she had trespassed and she said, “It had no fence or sign.” Well, in CO the burden to know is on the would-be explorer. The owner is not required to post signs at all (and she should have taken the nearby presence of houses as a clue anyway).
No real harm was done in that case. But if she had been shooting on that parcel while the owner was outside unaware of her presence…
Not asking first is a good way to be sure the land gets promptly posted.
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I’ve been spreading iron sulphate granules twice every spring and once every fall since this happened a few years ago. It turns the moss black in the spring, and then I tear out as much as I can with a garden rake, but it bounces back every time there is a cloudy wet spell, which happened over and over again this year.
It’s a pH problem. Landscapers told me not to worry because once the mulched leaf bits start decomposing, the pH will return to balance. It did not. Sunlight also has something to do with it, because my front yard returned to stability in a year while my back yard never really recovered.
The only positive thing I can say is that the invasive Himalayan blackberry that I used to cut back and dig out monthly all around the perimeter of my yard is now subdued enough that I only have to tear it out once in the spring and fall.
I am in the same situation re pH, and with all those big oaks around, there’s plenty of shade for the moss to enjoy.
Thanks to the six inches of snow that fell here, I can attest that my snowblower is much, much louder than my leaf blower
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