Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
A young man parked his truck on a paved road outside Lebanon early on a recent morning and took a shot with his rifle at a deer he’d spotted nearby.
The deer took off and the would-be shooter left. A nearby resident, though, watched through his window as the deer, shot in the hindquarters, dragged itself through his yard. He went outside and put it down.
Another neighbor called state police.
Oregon State Police Trooper James Halsey did some investigation and found the suspected poacher later. The young man said he thought he’d missed the deer. He’d wanted some meat, he said.
Just another day in the life of the local game warden.
Not too long before that, two Sweet Home-area residents had gone out to sight in their rifles between Ames and Wiley creeks. They found a large framed 4×4 buck that had been shot and left to lie.
Then there was the case of the 6×6 bull and cow elk that were shot just outside Lebanon. Shot and simply left to lie.
These are some of the many cases Halsey and other wardens see as they patrol Linn County.
“They all make me sick,” said Halsey, who has been a game warden in the area for 3½ years.
Halsey, 38, is one of three state troopers who work under Sgt. Mary Chambers in Linn and Benton counties. Their job is to enforce laws governing Oregon’s fish and wildlife – particularly hunting and fishing. They are part of 119 sworn officers spread out across the state in the OSP Fish and Wildlife Division.
During 2007 those game wardens spent 108,594 hours in fish and wildlife law enforcement, citing 14,061 people, according to OSP statistics.
The division has two sections, Wildlife and Fisheries, and two units, Aircraft and Special Investigations Unit.
Both Wildlife and Fisheries cooperate with state and federal enforcement agencies, in resource and regulatory management as well as hunting laws enforcement. Fisheries includes seven officers responsible for protecting state commercial fisheries and marine resources, assigned to coastal stations and to Portland.
The division has four aircraft that assist in fish and wildlife enforcement, located in Salem, Bend, Baker City and Medford. Halsey said the aircraft are particularly useful in detecting poachers at night.
The SIU assists field troopers with covert and in-depth, time-consuming investigations involving illegal commercial exploitation of Oregon’s fish and wildlife.
Halsey said he grew up in the Lebanon area and had an interest in the outdoors.
He got interested in serving in the OSP because of its fish and wildlife enforcement arm. “I’ve been engaging in outdoor sports since I was a teenager,” he said. “The job sounded interesting to me.”
After 24 weeks of training, including 16 weeks at the police academy, Halsey spent 4½ years as a patrol officer before entering the Fish and Wildlife Division, in which he has served for 3½ years.
“My goal was always to get into the Fish and Wildlife Division,” he said. “I wanted to get into the OSP because it is the only agency in the state that has a Fish and Wildlife Division.”
He spends much of his time in east Linn County, patrolling as far as the border east of Hoodoo, sometimes with assistance from the Aircraft Unit. He enforces both fishing and hunting laws, which means his emphasis tends to vary with the season.
He said most of the violations he sees are by anglers – fishing without a license, keeping fish on catch-and-release streams, failure to validate steelhead and salmon tags.
But most of the criminal charges resulting from his work deal with big game poaching.
Halsey said there’s no way to know for sure how many violations of fish and game laws occur in the area.
“I think it’s a problem,” he said of the illegal activity. “I don’t know how to measure that. Obviously, we’re not going to run across every case of it happening.”
Still, the game wardens have their ways of finding violators, one of the most effective being tips.
“We rely heavily on sportsmen who are abiding by the rules, who are witnessing hunting and angling violations,” Halsey said.
Often, he said, wardens will focus on a certain geographical area after getting complaints about activity there.
“We hear tips, complaints,” he said. “If the same name keeps popping up, we’ll start focusing on that person.
“If you have certain individuals abusing big game or cheating, poaching big game, stealing natural resources from the state and the public, then it’s worth focusing on those certain individuals,” Halsey said. “Focusing on those certain individuals sends a message to people who are committing the same wildlife crimes.”
The figures vary from unit to unit, but roughly one-tenth of people contacted by game wardens end up getting cited. In the Santiam Unit, for instance, officers put in 5,199 hours last year, and cited or warned 847 violators of the 4,360 they made contact with. In the Willamette Unit, 202 violators were cited or warned out of the 1,503 contacted during 2,527 hours of enforcement. In the McKenzie Unit, 1,302 people were contacted in 2007 during 1,827 hours, resulting in 157 violators.
Along the South Santiam River watershed, 55 citations or warnings were issued out of 606 people contacted during 226 hours of enforcement during 2007.
The game warden’s work can be time-consuming, Halsey acknowledged.
“Sometimes we stumble into it; sometimes it takes a concentrated effort,” he said.
The OSP also used wildlife enforcement decoys – relatively realistic looking deer and elk – that officers will set up along a road at night and wait to see whether passers-by will stop to shoot at the decoy. The success rate varies with the WEDs, he said.
“A lot of (depends on) being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “Some people fall for it, some people don’t. If you catch one or two people, word spreads pretty fast.”
He said shooting a decoy is looked upon the same as taking a live animal. The Class A misdemeanor charge can result in a $6,250 fine, a minimum two-year hunting suspension and the loss of the weapon used to shoot the “animal.” Some wildlife violations can also result in up to a year in the county jail.
Halsey said that, while there are repeat offenders, most people who get cited for wildlife violations don’t do it again.
“I think when the average person gets caught they learn their lesson,” he said. “I recommend that people just take 15 or 20 minutes to look at the regulations, look at where they’re going to hunt, and figure it out. They can call me if they have questions.”
Halsey said that he’s run into some sympathetic views of poaching as a game warden.
“There’s the view that as long as none of the meat’s being wasted, that’s not as serious poaching as somebody just going after animals and whacking off the antlers,” he said. “They think it’s not really poaching.”
“What people need to realize is that it’s still poaching. It’s still stealing. Poaching is taking an animal by means that are not legal or during a time of the year that is out of regulated seasons.”
Chambers, Halsey’s superior, has been a warden for 10 years. She said she doesn’t recall actually having a case where a suspect or violator has claimed they were poaching because they were hungry.
But she said she does run into a lot of people who say they didn’t turn in someone they know has violated the law because they thought the person needed the meat.
“I don’t subcribe to the idea that people are out there to feed themselves,” she said. “We interview people and if they are really hungry, there are other programs they can take advantage of.
“During the Depression that was probably true, but during the Depression they didn’t have the Oregon Trail card or a lot of the social support that we have available for people who are experiencing tough times,” Chambers said.
She said she believes that many violations of fish and wildlife laws are mistakes, just like many speeders don’t intend to break the speed limit.
“I don’t think you can paint everybody with the same brush when it comes to violating fish and wildlife laws,” she said.
Halsey said he can’t say which animals sustain the worst poaching inroads.
“If you’re a black tail hunter, you think the worst is black tail. If you’re an elk hunter, you think it’s elk. I think it’s all of them equally.”
Legitimate hunters often express their frustrations to him about people “not playing by the rules.
“Most people are playing by the rules,” he said. “There are just a few that are not. Besides nighttime hunting, they hunt out of season. They’re going behind closed, locked gates. A lot of private landowners in the county are having problems with trespassers.”
OSP offers two programs to give the public a chance to help stop wildlife violators. One is the Oregon State Police Citizen Volunteer Program, which doesn’t have a local project, but includes salmon monitoring programs on the Rogue and Umpqua rivers, the Clatsop County Beach Razor Clam patrol, assistance with the wildlife enforcement decoy and deer/elk season patrols to include salvage of illegally taken animals.
The other is the Turn in Poachers “TIP” Program, through which members of the public can report violations of fish and wildlife regulations, vandalism, pollution and littering.
Sponsored by the Oregon Hunter’s Association and Leupold-Stevens, along with OSP and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the program allows the tipster to be a documented witness or remain anonymous, and provides rewards varying from $100 to $500 or more for certain violations.
“The message out there is people just need to give us a call if they witness a violation or even if they feel that something’s not right,” said Halsey, who noted that the TIP line goes straight to dispatchers.
He said most tipsters don’t care about rewards.
“I’ve given away a lot of TIP money the last few years,” he said. “What’s funny is most people don’t want the money. They do it because they’re more concerned about getting those people caught rather than getting a reward.”