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Open Fields Doctrine

An interesting question from Norfolk political blogger Vivian Page:

A front page story in Sunday’s Virginian Pilot raised an interesting question.

Game wardens had put a hidden camera in a tree, pointed at VanKesteren’s soybean fields, after receiving a complaint about protected birds getting caught in predator traps.

The camera wasn’t just placed in any tree: it was placed in a tree on Steve VanHersteren’s property, without his knowledge or consent. The video was used to convict the Eastern Shore man for a violation of the federal Migratory Bird Act. His only alternative is an appeal to the US Supreme Court, an expensive proposition.

So, do you agree with the magistrate and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that, while troubling, such surveillance can done without a warrant?

Or is this an invasion of privacy and, as such, the conviction should be overturned?

Now I might be something of a rube when it comes to Constitutional Law, but it seems to me that if the officers can do this kind of thing without any kind of issuance from a judge, then there really is no such thing as private property outside of my house and car. And I'm not even talking about it from an anarchist point of view.

Among Vivian's commenters is one Timothy Watson who asserts that this is well covered by case law--some "open fields doctrine" that they never covered in my physics classes and about which I am therefore ignorant.

My question is, What constitutes an open field? How easy does this make it to violate the spirit of the law while following the letter? And why don't they teach this to us rubes in high school, before we go off and major in hard sciences?

Case law would make a great high school elective.