Poaching remains steady over last three years in state
Pennsylvania Wildlife Conservation officer Steve Leiendecker shows how the mechanized decoy deer in the back of his service vehicle is assembled while parked near the state police barracks in Dunbar, Sept. 21, 2006.
Pennsylvania Wildlife Conservation officer Steve Leiendecker, right, and deputy Wildlife Conservation officer Dave Anderson look over the corpse of a deer on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006 after it was illegally shot and killed on a farm in Grindstone, Pa., two days earlier.
Despite recent cases in Westmoreland and Berks counties, the number of poaching, or unlawful taking of game, violations has remained steady over the last three years, according to the game commission.
Statewide, there were 1,161 unlawful taking charges filed in 2013, 1,173 in 2014 and 1,481 in 2015.
State game wardens say poaching game animals is attempted in a variety of ways and those who try are motivated by greed or give in to temptation.
White-tailed deer, Pennsylvania’s most abundant and sought after big game animal, are the most common target of poachers’ bullets and arrows.
“Over the limit and out of season” are most common game law violations that Shawn Barron, a Pennsylvania Game Commission wildlife conservation officer (WCO) said he encounters.
Over the limit violation occurs when hunters kill more deer than they have licenses or permits for and an out of season violation occurs when someone kills a deer when it is not in season.
“There are two types of folks when it comes to violations. Some don’t intend to, but can’t resist. Others intend to by hunting at night,” said Barron, the WCO for southern Fayette and Somerset counties.
In the recent case in Mount Pleasant Township, game commission officers broke up a poaching ring that included 11 deer taken illegally and hundreds of pounds of venison distributed. Conservation officers filed 96 charges against the four individuals and thousands of dollars in fines. The suspects were allegedly using high-powered lamps to spot the deer at night and then shoot them.
A spike during this past season was attributed to an incident along the Berks-Lebanon county line where six people killed 256 snow geese over the limit, which is 25 per hunter.
A hunter in the fall muzzleloader season, which is restricted to antlerless deer, or does, who shoots a buck would fall into the “can’t resist” category, he said.
“Some guys can’s pass up a nice buck even though it’s not in season or they have the wrong firearm,” Barron said.
Another frequent violation is tagging a doe with a tag for the wrong wildlife management unit.
Doe tags are easier to obtain for units with high tag allocations and hunters sometimes buy tags for those units, but hunt in different units, Barron said.
Some violations or suspicious activities are reported, but, Barron said, he encounters most through patrols and field checking hunters.
Mike Reedy, chief of the bureau of wildlife protection’s administrative division and a former WCO, agreed with Barron’s classification of poachers.
“The majority are opportunists. Other types are night hunters. Most are opportunists, but unfortunately there are other violators too,” Reedy said.
Whether WCOs learn about more violations through field checks or complaints depends on the districts they patrol. WCOs in rural districts spend more time field checking hunters than WCOs in urban or suburban districts, he said.
“I had a district in York County. I handled calls mostly. When I had a district in Lebanon County, I check more hunters in the woods and spent more time there,” Reedy said.
The commission recently replaced its old tip line, which people could call to report suspected violations, with Operation Game Thief. Calls to the Operation Game Thief line are routed to a dispatcher and are assigned to WCOs within 20 minutes of the call, said Travis Lau, commission spokesman.
Operation Game Thief received 326 calls from October through December last year. The tip line had 118 calls during that time period the year before, Lau said.
The number of WCOs has an impact on the number of poaching cases.
“When we have more boots on the ground, more violations are detected,” Reedy said. “Officer presence is a deterrent, but more officer will be able to detect more violations.”
There are 136 WCOs and nine vacant WCO jobs across the state and that number is projected to increase. The commission also has about 350 volunteer deputy WCOs.
The game commission did not begin a new WCO training class because of a financial bind. Staff has been laid off and the commission has asked to Legislature to increase the cost of hunting licenses. The last increase was in 1999.
If the commission recruited a cadet class now, it wouldn’t graduate until 2018 and the number of WCO vacancies is expected to reach 40 by then, Lau said.
The number of repeat violators that WCOs come across has decreased since the Legislature adopted two law enforcement measures several years ago, the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact and Act 54.
The compact is an agreement among many states in which the suspension of a person’s hunting, trapping or fishing license in one state can be recognized in another state. Act 54 significantly increased the penalties for game law violations.
Before the measures were adopted, a person who lost hunting privileges in Pennsylvania due to violations could buy a hunting license in another state and hunt there. The fines in place before the penalties were increased were not enough to deter violators from repeating offenses or committing others.
“We’re seeing fewer repeat violators. Guys who worked the system for years, we’re seeing less of them,” Reedy said.
Baiting deer is a growing violation across the state.
The number of citations issued for baiting increased from 311 in the 2012-13 season, to 422 in 2013-14 and to 467 in 2014-15, Lau said.
Andrew Harvey, the WCO for northeastern Fayette County and Westmoreland County, said baiting violations regularly occur in his district, but harvesting over the limit and shooting deer out of season are the most common violations he sees.
Many of them are “violations of opportunity” and are not premeditated, he said.
“An archer (hunting deer) sees a bear and can’t resist. They decide they might never get that chance again. A guy sees a bigger buck than the one he shot so he shoots it. They just let the situation get the best of them,” Harvey said.
He said he caught a hunter who killed a six-point buck, let it lay where it fell and continued hunting for another buck. “He’s facing some big fines,” Harvey said.
Those and other violations are often reported by other hunters or property owners.
“They’re tired of hunters cheating wildlife and cheating other hunters who do it legally,” Harvey said. “We really do rely on the public letting us know about these violations.”
Failure to tag a deer and unlawful possession of deer are the most frequent violations that WCO Chris Bergman encounters in his district in Washington County and the western half of Fayette County, which he is covering due to a vacancy.
A person can be cited for an untagged deer if they don’t have a license or move the deer to their vehicle without tagging it first, he said. Being in possession of an untagged deer is unlawful possession, he said.
“Most of the time they have a tag, but they try to get away without using it,” Bergman said.
Shooting a deer from inside a vehicle at night while using a spotlight is what he calls “worst case poaching.”
Road hunting, in which someone drives around to find a deer and then jumps out of the vehicle to shoot it, happens more frequently, Bergman said.
In Washington County, he said he cited a man for shooting a six point buck with a rifle on a Sunday during the archery season.
Most of Bergman’s cases stem from his patrol work, but some come from calls from the public including one case this past season that came from Operation Game Thief.
“We get some from people calling in, which is very helpful. The more information they have, the more we can do,” Bergman said.
Greene County’s only WCO Jeremy Febringer, said hunters and Operation Game Thief are the source of leads to many poaching cases.
“We have a lot of law abiding sportsmen out there. A majority of our cases came from sportsmen who don’t think (poaching) is fair. I have quite a few cases come in (from Operation Game Thief) that turned into big cases,” Febringer said.
Illegally harvesting deer is among the most common violations in the county, he said. Those charges often stem from people hunting without licenses, shooting from a road and hunting over bait, he said.
“We had quite a few bait cases. That was one of our prevalent cases. Unfortunately, many of those hunters kiiled a deer, which made it an illegal deer,” Febringer said.
On the last Saturday of the firearms deer season, Febringer said he and the six deputies in the county encountered 15 illegal deer violations.
Some poaching cases involve hunters killing more than one buck.
“There have been quite a few cases where we had to conduct investigations where guys killed more than one buck. Some were very nick bucks. One guy killed four. He just sat there all day and killed four,” Febringer said. “We’ve had a pretty good law enforcement year in Greene County this year. We’ve been very busy.”