FreeHuntingLand.com
Wisconsin's public hunting land resource!
A place to hunt...
The seeds of FreeHuntingLand.com were planted in the spring of '07 when I saw a few nice turkeys on some private land that wasn't posted. I had heard about the Managed Forest Law (MFL) and Forest Crop Law (FCL) programs and thought that land might be in one of those programs. At the time, the only way to get this information was to buy a list from the DNR, so I contacted the DNR and purchased a printout ($5.80 just for Dunn County) of the legal description of private land in the MFL and FCL programs. I asked my friend if he could help plot the land parcels on my plat book ($28.00 just for Dunn county) the old fashioned way (with a magic marker). Four hours later we had a dozen or so parcels highlighted on the map. I was happy to find that the exact spot I had seen some nice Tom Turkeys, was in the MFL program and open for hunting, but we couldn't believe how long it took to get the land info, decifer the legal description, and then plot it on a map. In this day and age of computers and digital content there should be an easier way.
The picture above means a lot to me. It is a picture of my friend and I with our first Toms taken on Managed Forest Law (MFL) land and my very first wild turkey!. Send us your public hunting land picture of success.
The parcels in these programs are tracked at the 1/4 of 1/4 section (40 acres.) There are over 150,000 parcels statewide and they should only ever have to be plotted once. Getting the data online was a lot of hard work, but now you can find almost every parcel of public and private land, open for hunting in Wisconsin, plotted over satellite imagery right here on this website.
I have hunted in Wisconsin for 30 years and much of that time was spent on public land. Back in 1983, I went to the local DNR station and picked up the statewide map with a little green triangle marking all the DNR managed land. I thought that map was the greatest thing. I drove my '72 Pontiac all over the state to hunt deer on the "Public Hunting Grounds". I saw some deer, but these areas were very well marked and VERY popular. It seems everybody else knew about them too. Little did I know at the time, but my map was only showing me 10% of the land open to public hunting. Things have changed (I moved farther up-north, built a cabin, got married, started a family), but I continue to hunt public land. If you take the time to use maps and find little known open hunting lands, you really can have great success.
We hope you find this site helpful. We are new at this so please drop us an email with some feedback, good or bad. Let us know what kind of land maps you are looking for. We would really appreciate it. Thank You!
