After looking at the photo, I am wondering if we know for sure that Camp Brown Road is not a private road. If it does belong to the county, then somebody with a county map should probably find-out how wide the right-of-way is.
I can tell you from personal experience that partygoers in the house across the street are allowed to park on the 40'-wide right-of-way of our road, even though that puts their tires several feet into the lawns of some of the neighbors. The police just were not interested in enforcing the idea that parking on a maintained lawn was inappropriate in soaking wet weather.
On the other hand, in rural areas, there are a lot of private roads that are NOT maintained by the counties, even though they may lead to multiple residences. In those cases, the owners of the right of way for those private roads DEFINITELY have the right to exclude whomever they wish, no justification required. Some of those private roads look better than some of the county roads in the same area.
So, it seems like a good idea to know for sure who ownes the road you are on if you want to challenge a landowner about your right to be there.
Steve Long
----- Original Message -----
From: James Tyler Bell
To: Maryland Birding Birding
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 10:14 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: [MDBirding] Re: Private property problems
Since 95% of the people on this list have no idea of where this location is and the distance from Camp Brown Road to the house where this landowner thinks we're peeping, I've attached a screen shot from GoogleEarth that shows the house is 0.37 miles away. Even the best scope under ideal conditions would have a hard time discerning people inside the house. If the landowner had asked Mikey to move down the road so that he was looking at an angle toward the trees, that would have been fine, but to forbid Mikey and anyone else from exercising their rights on a public road just irritates the hell out of me.
Anyway, it might be a moot point as the numbers of snipe found today were well below what we observed yesterday so the flock may have moved to another location which may or may not be visible publicly.
Tyler Bell
<jtylerbell...>
California, Maryland
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