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| Take, Take, Take |
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| Hunting Season 2007 |
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 | | Scott Staats/CENTRAL OREGONIAN | | OSP Trooper Amos Madison (left) with Gary Lee and his four-point bull elk. |
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There is a lot of luck involved with hunting.
Take for example Gary Lee of Portland on opening day of the first bull elk season. Lee hunted hard all morning without seeing anything then started walking back toward his truck to meet his other two hunting partners for lunch.
When he was only about 200 yards from the rig, a 4-point bull ran out from some thick cover into an opening not more than 50 yards from him. Lee had the sixth elk of his life by 11 a.m. that morning. Trooper Amos Madison, Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife Officer, heard the shot ring out as well as did a few other hunters that Madison was checking at the time.
To make matters even luckier, the elk fell only a few yards from a 2-track road. Driving right to your animal? Most of the elk I've gotten in the past were about a mile from any road and it required about half a day to get out.
Since I didn't draw any tags this year, I figured I'd ride along with Madison to see how the rest of the hunters were doing. We headed into the Maury Unit, which doesn't usually have a high number of hunters. Madison checked a total of nine hunters and all had tags and were hunting legally. Besides Lee's bull, we saw one other hunter with a bull in the back of his truck.
"The first season was fairly quiet in terms of violations," said Madison. He said there some road closure violations but the big problem more recently, is deer being killed. There have been bucks turning up with their heads cut off and backstraps taken.
"The deer season was very disappointing based on the number of violations seen and the judgment people used out there," Madison said. Violations included shooting from the vehicle, not having tags, using tags out of season trespassing, wasting of game (shooting it and letting it lay) and riding on ATVs with loaded firearms. One father and son killed four deer and had no tags at all. Some hunters were driving vehicles in fields trying to herd deer up against the fences.
"I don't know what drives people to go ahead and choose to hunt unethically or in violation of the wildlife laws," Madison said. "When asked why they did it, they often respond, 'I don't know.'"
During the elk seasons there are typically more violations in places where there are more elk. Where you find the elk in large numbers, Madison explained, you find more hunters and often more violations. Hunters are having trouble finding elk on the public ground and that's why there have been more violations such as trespassing on private land since that's where the animals are showing up.
Throughout the big game seasons, and oftentimes after the season closes, troopers will set up deer or elk decoys to check compliance with hunters and to catch poachers.
During the hunting seasons, other wildlife officers from around the state come to assist because of the volume of complaints and violations. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife personnel are also out checking hunters, and OSP flies a plane during the hunting seasons to check for spotlighters and road closure violations.
When I was out with Madison, there were at least seven OSP officers and five ODFW biologists out checking hunters. The six units covered by these folks include more than 12,000 deer tags and about 4,100 elk tags - their job isn't easy.
Trooper Mark Prodzinski, who covers the Redmond area and points east, south, north and west, said it has been an especially bad year for violations.
"For whatever reason, since archery season started I've seen more wildlife violations than I have since I've covered Central Oregon the last 14 years," Prodzinski noted. "I don't know if more people have been calling our office to report violations or more violations are occurring." In his area, he has investigated the illegal killing of 25 deer and 5 elk.
One of the more troubling violations involved a father who purposely took his 12-year-old boy on his first deer hunt in a closed area. The boy did shoot his first deer but it had to be seized. The father was cited for the violation, but later said it was worth it for him to see his son shoot his first deer.
"That's the attitude we are seeing with a lot of these wildlife violations - take, take, take," said Prodzinski. He's also had many violations involving trespassing, hunting with no tags and wasting of wildlife.
Sergeant Dave Pond, who heads up the OSP Fish and Wildlife Division in Bend, said that he's been seeing lots of poaching starting with archery season to now. This year does rank up there with some of the worst for wildlife violations, he said.
His officers ran some decoy operations and caught poachers during every operation. During one operation, two officers cited a couple who were fishing with bait in a bait-prohibited area down near LaPine. Both also had Western Oregon deer tags on them but said they were not hunting. The officers went down the road about five miles and put up the decoy and a half-hour later, the same two people drove by and shot at it.
Pond concluded that many hunters this year used questionable or poor judgment.
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