Game Wardens

I take offense at your Dec. 15 article "The Night of the Hunter" because of its irresponsible use of the title "hunter." In several different paragraphs, the writer refers to poachers as "hunters." Even though this article is about a California (Department of Fish and Game) warden on his night patrol, it casts a bad reflection of legitimate hunters to non-hunting residents. Please note the word "non," not "anti." The non-hunting people who have already come to the conclusion that hunting is the needless slaughter of animals has done so by articles such as the one printed Dec. 15. The article makes hunters out to be bad people.

Miles deep in the Angeles National Forest, Glendale's favorite bear might be wondering whether he can make it back in time for trash day. After snoozing nearly five hours in a Glendale tree, the bear known to his social media fans as "Glen Bearian" and "Meatball" was tranquilized Sunday and driven back into the wild. This is the second time in four months that California Department of Fish and Game wardens have shipped the wayward bear back to the forest. Policy dictates that bears cannot be moved more than about 30 miles for a "return to habitat.

After a three-hour pursuit, game wardens shot and killed a mountain lion believed to have attacked and killed several pets in the La Crescenta area, authorities said Saturday. California Department of Fish and Game wardens, in conjunction with a team of trackers and three dogs from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, began their chase of the cougar about 2 a.m. Wednesday, Fish and Game Capt. Jerry Spansail said.

A mountain lion found dead in the western Santa Monica Mountains was killed and mutilated by poachers, according to state fish and game wardens who are seeking tips in the case. "We're going to have to get lucky on this. There's virtually no forensic evidence," said Andrew Hughan, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game. Investigators, he added, are hoping a member of the public will hear "somebody bragging about how they killed a mountain lion, and they'll call us" at (800)

State game wardens, previously blamed by Azusa police in the May 20 shooting death of a California black bear, contend that it was the police who were eager to shoot an obviously drugged and groggy animal.

A Somis man accompanying a state Fish and Game warden on patrol was shot in the chest after apparently being mistaken for a coyote, authorities said Monday. Thomas Gregory Frost, 21, who had left the patrol car when the warden got out to investigate gunfire Sunday night, was hit by a single bullet from a .22-caliber rifle, authorities said. He was in serious but stable condition at Ventura County Medical Center.

A mountain lion from the suburban wilds of the San Fernando Valley regained her freedom Saturday in a Ventura County forest, but state wildlife officials say a pair of big cats are still prowling around Fillmore. State Department of Fish and Game wardens released the 70-pound female lion in a remote, unpopulated portion of Los Padres National Forest after she was captured Friday in a condominium complex in Chatsworth.

It's Friday. The tall man in khaki with the badge and the gun is working the fish and game beat in the Eastern Sierra. He works alone. He is a few minutes late. "I had to check out a tip from the campground host at Chris Flat about over-limits (of fish)," he says. Routine. Not many calls for bank robberies or drive-by shootings on his beat. But he could handle those if he had to. Richard J. (Dick) Padgett, 53, has been a game warden for the California Department of Fish and Game for 25 years.

Forty Nevada law enforcement officers, including FBI and DEA agents, police, deputies and game wardens, carried picket signs protesting the auction here Saturday of "Mountain Man" Claude Dallas' personal effects. The auction netted close to $10,000 for Dallas' defense fund set up by friends and admirers to win him a new trial in the latest episode in the continuing saga of the hunter-trapper considered a cold-blooded killer by most, a folk hero by some.

State Fish and Game Warden David Brown's face lit up with a smile Saturday when he spotted the clam poachers at Oxnard Shores beach. "There's four of them out there," he said shortly after sunrise, as he looked out of his binoculars from a distance. "You can see them digging up clams and throwing them into bags." On this gray, misty morning when the tide was low enough to expose a wide expanse of sandy beach, Brown, 38, would score the biggest clam bust of his four-year career.

A former Orange County sheriff's deputy has been charged with obstructing a state game warden for allegedly falsely telling him that an off-duty deputy about to be cited for poaching lobsters was a confidential informant and for asking that he not be punished. Prosecutors say Phillip Glenn Romero, 39, who was on duty at the time, made up the story about Deputy William Robb while Robb was being questioned by a California Department of Fish and Game officer. The game officer stopped Robb and two other off-duty sheriff's deputies on Nov. 18 after they pulled their boat up to a launch ramp at Dana Point Harbor.

The country's financial tumult is exacting a toll on wildlife in California and Florida, where game wardens are seeing a surge in poaching for money as the economy declines. In California, where officials are calling 2008 "The Year of the Extreme Poacher," state records show that arrests for the illegal killing of game birds, deer, bear, fish and abalone, which fetch $100 a pound, have risen dramatically since 2005. One man was arrested four times for poaching lobsters in a La Jolla marine conservation area.

State Fish and Game Department officials moved up the release of an orphaned bear cub to Wednesday to beat winter storms forecast for the rest of the week. The 80-pound cub was rescued in September after its mother was hit by a car near Truckee. The cub has been cared for since then in a pen at the department's Rancho Cordova facility near Sacramento. Game wardens think the cub now weighs enough to survive. This is the first of five orphaned cubs set for release this winter. Officials say that is an unusually large number of rescued cubs.

SACRAMENTO -- A fatal shootout between a game warden and a fugitive this week illustrates the increasing dangers faced by state Department of Fish and Game agents, officials said Wednesday. The warden was serving a citation Monday for illegal burning in a remote area of the Sierra foothills north of Oroville, Calif., when he discovered that the suspect was wanted in Hawaii on an outstanding warrant for selling methamphetamine.

The battleship-gray fishing boat roared past in the dead of night with its running lights off, catching the attention of game wardens patrolling the open ocean just outside Los Angeles Harbor. An onboard inspection turned up hundreds of California spiny lobsters -- prized for their sweet flavor and meaty tails -- but the skipper's story about where he caught them didn't seem to hold water.

It was a typical, if rainy, Monday morning in Altadena and Zach Bovinette was getting his two children ready for school. Then he looked out the front window and saw a mountain lion in his yucca plants. The 70-pound cat's gaze was fixed on the two fake deer in the yard across the street. Bovinette calmly called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, then let in his two house cats, who were scratching frantically at the backdoor of the ranch-style home on Pine Street. At 7:15 a.m.

Marty Wall is one kind of lone ranger. He's the only state game warden assigned to a 480-square-mile area encompassing the Santa Clarita Valley. Although his job is to protect wildlife, he says it's a tossup whether he spends more time "saving the people from the wildlife or the wildlife from the people." That's why he was so angered early this year when he learned about the dead bear alongside San Francisquito Canyon Road.

He's a bush policeman, guardian of deer and fish, the guy who writes tickets to fishermen who catch more than the legal limit. Ken Walton is game warden in Angeles National Forest, and he finds hunters in the brush despite their camouflage. He checks their licenses and tags, keeps tabs on their movements and knows where to find their prey. In a sense, he hunts the hunters, and sometimes, he hunts the most elusive prey of all: poachers. Walton, a five-year veteran, wears sneakers and a pistol.

As a young game warden in the mid-1980s, Jon Heggen was ordered by his boss to read a book. The required text? "Give a Boy a Gun" by Jack Olsen, a crime writer who chronicled how poacher Claude Lafayette Dallas had killed Idaho Department of Fish and Game officers Conley Elms and Bill Pogue in an execution-style slaying in the remote Owyhee desert on Jan. 5, 1981. Dallas, 54, now bespectacled and graying, walks out of an Idaho prison a free man Sunday.

State and federal game wardens culminated a two-year undercover investigation into sturgeon poaching with the arrest Friday of five immigrants from the former Soviet Union and three others suspected of black market sales of the giant fish, prized for the production of caviar.