All In A Day’s Work

We tend to think of game wardens as having a pretty simple, straight-forward job: protect fish and wildlife, police anglers and hunters. But it’s so much more than that. I’m always struck at how many things officers handle, and the Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife Division’s monthly newsletters provide a great glimpse into their day job. To be clear, most newsletter stories are about busting poachers, but the November 2022 is interesting for the scope of other activities. Troopers …

• Rescued a stranded motorist in Lake County after the driver slid off a Forest Service road, two injured bald eagles in Yamhill County and the Columbia Gorge, two Labradoodles that ran away from their Columbia County home, and a Wheeler County five-point bull elk that had caught its antlers and legs in a wire fence;

• Recovered two rifles, meds, a wallet and other gear for an elk hunter who drove off a road in the Elliott State Forest, rolled his rig multiple times and came to a rest 400 feet downhill before crawling back up to the road and being rescued by loggers;

• Dealt with not one but two traffic stops on the way to a daybreak wildlife enforcement decoy operation, including a woman who jumped out of her car on the Youngs Bay Bridge then tried to get back in before being found to allegedly be “significantly impaired by drugs,” and a man who attempted to steal a cargo trailer from a Warrenton business but found it chained to 11 other trailers and ran off into the brush before reemerging and claiming “he wasn’t trying to steal the trailer, he just wanted to make sure his hitch fit because he was interested in buying it,” lol;

• Participated in an Oregon Hunters Association youth upland game hunting event in Prineville and in a parade through The Dalles celebrating the Hood River High School Girls Varsity Water Polo Team after they won the state championship (and for the fourth time in six years);

• And aided and volunteered to plant bitterbrush and sagebrush at OHA mule deer Hope and Habitat Project sites on winter range in the Interstate Unit burned by 2021’s Bootleg Fire. Kudos!