I’m a lurker. In the world of Web forums, that means I spend a lot more time reading than I do posting messages. It’s not that I’m completely quiet, but I’d bet that better than 85% of my time on different hunting forums is just reading what others are talking about.

It never fails that once a month you stumble upon posts from fellow outdoorsmen who want to bash celebrity hunters. The logic behind them typically either cracks me up or infuriates me enough to wonder what kind of people are sitting on the other end of computers. I read a post recently wondering if other hunters were getting sick of Michael Waddell. The preposterous argument was that Waddell was no different than other hunters so why should he be making “millions”?

Guess what, Einstein? Just the fact that he seized an opportunity to make a living at something we all do does indeed make him different than you. While there tends to be jealousy at the root of all the posts with the bashing, one has to wonder if people actually read any of their messages before they hit “POST”.

Of course, many of these posters are the ones who suddenly grab their Sherlock Holmes junior detective kits with every successful-harvest post. It drives me nuts! Hunter A posts picture of a deer he just spent all autumn chasing; Nimrod B points out in a post that the deer’s eyes look too cloudy to be shot during a morning hunt – ending the post with, “Something’s fishy.”

Give me a break.

Before my size 9 Muck Boots step down from this here soap box, let me quickly make a plea for my fellow hunter to quit whanking about cyberscouting. It sucks, yep. I too don’t really want people meeting me at 4 a.m. at my favorite duck-hunting spot. That also is why I don’t post about my favorite places. In this case, Nimrod A all but gives the GPS coordinates to his best spot with pictures in parking lots of public launches, near recognizable markers, etc. Then Nimrod A is complaining about the skybusters that are 75 yards from him the following weekend.

You can’t fault people for utilizing all available resources to improve their chances at success. You fault Nimrod, who opted to tell the world. Cyberscouting, afterall, is sort of like performance enhancing drugs for lurkers!