Badges, Bears and Eagles
The True-Life Adventures of a California Fish and Game Warden
by
Steven T. Callan
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Coffeetown Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com
Callan.coffeetownpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The following is a work of nonfiction. Names and identifying details have been changed, except when used by permission.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
Badges, Bears and Eagles
Copyright © 2013 by Steven T. Callan—All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60381-158-3 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-159-0 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955784
Produced in the United States of America
* * * * *
To my father, Wallace J. Callan,
the first game warden I ever knew and one of the best.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank Catherine Treadgold and Jennifer McCord, at Coffeetown Press, for giving me the opportunity to tell my stories. I have never met two nicer ladies. Throughout the process of producing Badges, Bears and Eagles, Catherine and Jennifer have provided guidance, expert advice and constant encouragement.
Kathy Callan, my wonderful wife, could not have been more supportive during the long two years it took me to write this book—hours and hours of sitting at the computer. “Kathy, would you look this over for me—Kathy, what do you think of this—Kathy, how do you spell …”
What can I say about Dave Szody? We have been close friends for thirty-eight years. All that time, Dave has never failed to come through when I needed him. Thanks for the nice “Foreword,” Dave, and for providing many of the details contained in this book.
I am indebted to Fish and Game Patrol Captain Rick Banko, retired Fish and Game Patrol Captain Nick Albert, retired Fish and Game Patrol Lieutenant Don Jacobs, and retired Fish and Game Patrol Lieutenant Bob Taylor for providing invaluable information used in the writing of this book.
For their kind words, I cannot begin to thank former California Department of Fish and Game Director Boyd Gibbons, former California Department of Fish and Game Director Don Koch, former Shasta County District Attorney McGregor Scott, Sierra County District Attorney Larry Allen and Major League Baseball Sports Agent Randy Hendricks.
Finally, I would like to thank my dad, Wally Callan, for inspiring me to make wildlife protection my life’s work. What great times I had, as a boy, riding on patrol with you.
Foreword
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a hot July afternoon in 1975. I had graduated from the Riverside Sheriff’s Academy the previous month and was finally a full-fledged Fish and Game warden for the State of California. My Captain, Jim Reynolds, had instructed me to drive up to Lake Havasu to meet one of my new squad mates, Warden Steve Callan. Jim said, “Callan is a real go-getter. You two will get along.”
The plan was to work Lake Havasu that night—nothing special, just routine sport fisheries enforcement. We went out and worked from late afternoon until after midnight. As I recall, we wrote about two dozen citations. Steve and I got along well and made plans to work together again. Little did I know that we would work together again and again over the next thirty years.
Steve was eventually promoted to lieutenant and moved to Riverside. I was transferred to Fortuna, on the North Coast. He was transferred to Shasta County in 1981 and I followed in 1983, when a warden’s position opened up in his lieutenant’s district.
Working for Lieutenant Steve Callan was easy. He made the same work-related demands as Captain Reynolds, but there was one big difference: Steve Callan was the most focused, tenacious investigator I had ever worked with.
The bald eagle investigation, described in Chapter 1, is an excellent example. Two local poachers killed a bald eagle and had the temerity to threaten the life of one of Steve’s wardens by dumping the dead eagle, with a note attached, at the front gate of the Fish and Game office. At the time, Steve was supervising a diverse squad of Fish and Game wardens and had a heavy workload. It was a balancing act that I would witness again and again. The ensuing months were classic Steve Callan. He would phone at all hours of the day or night to bounce questions and theories off me. Days spun into weeks. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from him for three or four days; it wasn’t unusual for Steve to sequester himself in his office so he could write and think without distractions. These absences would be followed by frantic activity in the field, search warrants, interviews, interrogations, arrests, and then more report writing.
After the bald eagle case, all manner of people asked me for details. There was little evidence to begin with and, as is typical of most wildlife investigations, there were no witnesses. Everyone—prosecutors, other law enforcement officers, wardens, and pathologists—was amazed that this case was made and successfully prosecuted.
This was the first of many cases that Steve made with little or no evidence and a scarcity of witnesses. Fellow officers sometimes walked away from investigations, believing they were a “waste of time” and couldn’t be solved. Steve loved the challenge of these cases and literally picked them out of waste paper baskets at the regional office.
Enjoy this book—it’s a fun ride and a glimpse into wildlife enforcement at its best!
Dave Szody
California Department of Fish and Game Lieutenant (retired)
Shingletown, California
Summer 2012
Introduction
One September morning in 1975, California Fish and Game Warden Dave Szody and I were working dove hunters down along the Colorado River. A few miles south of Blythe, I spotted two men sitting in the shade of an old cottonwood tree. “Pull over there,” I suggested, pointing to a wide spot on the opposite side of the road. “Let’s see what those guys are up to.” As Szody turned his patrol car to the left, two citation books and a stack of mail slid to the right and across his dash. “When are you gonna stop using your dashboard for a book shelf?” I said. Without responding, Szody picked up a filthy, tobacco-stained coffee cup and deposited a wad of freshly-chewed spittle.
“How does your wife like that disgusting habit?” I said, as I directed my binoculars toward our suspected dove hunters.
“She hates it,” answered Szody, laughing. “What do you see?”
“Looks like a couple old-timers. They must be finished hunting for the day; their shotguns are leaning up against the tree.”
“Let’s go see how they did,” said Szody, opening the driver’s-side door and preparing for a 200-yard hike across the field.
“You might want to wipe that stuff off your chin first,” I said.
At a distance, the elderly dove hunters might have mistaken Dave Szody and me for brothers. We were only a year apart in age and recently out of the academy. Both of us stood six feet tall or a little more and weighed about 180 pounds. Unlike most game wardens, who preferred the traditional “cop-like” appearance, my working partner and I went a little longer between haircuts.
As Szody and I approached, one of the hunters stood up from his lawn chair and greeted us. Tall and slim, this elderly gentleman wore a wide-brimmed hat, a tucked in long-sleeved shirt and neatly pressed Khaki pants. What I noticed most was the curious grin on his face that told me he knew somethin
g I didn’t.
I asked to see the man’s hunting license, while my partner contacted his companion. The name scrawled across the top of the license looked familiar, but at the moment I was more interested in how many doves these guys had killed. “Looks like you had some luck,” I said, staring down at a heavily laden game bag that was hanging from the back of his chair. The man smiled and, without my asking, handed me the bag. I counted exactly ten doves—the legal limit. About the time I had pulled the last bird out of his bag, it dawned on me who this man was.
“You’re George Werden,” I blurted, a look of surprise on my face. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Werden laughed. “I was just letting you do your job.”
In his eighties, Werden had retired many years earlier as a patrol captain. He will always be remembered as Warden Werden, one of the pioneers of California wildlife law enforcement. Szody and I enjoyed a brief conversation with this Fish and Game icon and were about to leave when Werden called us back. “Do you boys mind if I give you some advice?” We had only been on the job about a year, so questions raced through our minds: What did we do wrong? Did we miss something? Werden seemed to enjoy making us squirm a little. With great anticipation, we waited for his words of wisdom. The old gentleman looked us both in the eyes and said, “You boys are just starting out on the best job in the world. Don’t take yourselves too seriously and above all, always think of it as a game.”
We never saw George Werden again, but his simple advice remained with us for the rest of our careers. Anyone lucky enough to become a wildlife protection officer should think of his occupation not as a job, but as a career-long adventure. We were getting paid to roam the fields, forests and waters of California, searching for anyone breaking the law or harming our precious natural resources.
This book describes what it was like to be a California Fish and Game warden during the last quarter of the Twentieth Century—working routine details from one end of the state to the other and conducting some of the most successful wildlife-related investigations in California history.
It’s important to point out that the overwhelming majority of North America’s hunters and fishermen are conscientious, law-abiding sportsmen who contribute hundreds of millions of dollars, every year, toward the purchase of wildlands and the improvement of fish and wildlife habitat. They do it through the excise taxes they pay on firearms, ammunition and fishing equipment. State and federal fish and wildlife programs are dependent upon funds from the purchase of hunting and fishing licenses, tags and stamps. Some people oppose hunting because they dislike the idea of individual animals being killed. I don’t want to go into exhaustive detail, but here is the theory of wildlife management in a nutshell: literally billions of animals exist today because of habitat saved, improved or created with funds provided by legal sport hunters and fishermen. These funds help not just game species, but nongame birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians and beneficial insects—butterflies, pollinating bees and hundreds of others.
Along with the good guys, there will always be a small percentage of individuals who choose to break the law—the outlaws, the game hogs, the poachers and worst of all, those who would exploit our fish and wildlife resources for personal profit. These people have little or no regard for the law or the rights of others. They often justify their actions with narrow-minded, self-serving rationalizations. Here is one example: Fish and Game Warden Rick Banko arrested a Del Norte County poacher for killing an elk inside Redwood National Park. When Banko asked this outlaw what he thought should happen to someone who kills an elk in the National Park, the man responded, “These animals were put here for us to use.” California’s elk population wouldn’t last a week if everyone shared that attitude.
“Habitat is where it’s at,” as they say, but the only way to maintain healthy populations of fish and wildlife in a state with thirty-eight million people is by establishing laws and providing dedicated, well-trained officers to enforce those laws.
Badges, Bears and Eagles is based on events that actually happened. The dialogue has been reconstructed from my memory, but also from interviews, officers’ records, transcripts and court documents. Some scenes involving the perpetrators have been dramatically enhanced in a way that fits the available facts.
I wrote this book because I want people to know that there are wildlife officers out there who are passionate about wildlife, proactive and capable of putting together complex investigations. More than just ticket writers and fishing license checkers, many of today’s state and federal wildlife officers are highly sophisticated professionals, putting their lives on the line for the protection of our rapidly diminishing natural resources.
Chapter One
The Eagle Case
I
“Hey, we caught a fox!” shouted Jake Stillwell, looking down over the steep embankment at his slower and much larger partner. It was early December, 1984, and recent rains had turned the exposed red clay hillsides of Cottonwood Wilds Subdivision into slop. With each stride, Mitch Davis added another pound of sticky mud to the soles of his size-thirteen boots. His pant legs were soaked through from repeated falls. Both forearms were caked with mud in an effort to keep the muzzle of his .22 caliber rifle from auguring into the wet ground. “Hurry up with that rifle,” ordered Stillwell, the thirty-four-year-old self-appointed leader of this duo of destruction.
Stillwell was a devious little creep with shifty eyes, a pear-shaped body and an uncanny ability to make people believe things that weren’t true. Davis, a stout, twenty-seven-year-old “tow head,” had an annoying habit of clearing his throat every ten seconds. He might have had a good side to him, but it didn’t have much of a chance when he was with Stillwell; he followed the man around and did his bidding like a well-trained puppy.
Davis looked up at Stillwell just in time to see him disappear over the rise. Stillwell walked back toward the third trap in their line of seventeen. As he approached, a small salt-and-pepper-colored animal watched him through the branches of a manzanita bush. Weakened and panting heavily, the little gray fox had been unable to free its right front paw from the trap’s metal jaws. The bone was broken, just above the paw, and the fur around it had been chewed away. Given another hour, the desperate little canine might have chewed its leg off and escaped. Now it was staring into the eyes of its captor.
As Stillwell came closer, the fox began thrashing from side to side, but only succeeded in wrapping its body in the anchor chain. Stillwell looked over his shoulder and told Davis, “Bring that rifle over here before this thing gets away.”
Davis handed the rifle to his impatient partner and cautioned him to make sure there was no mud in the barrel. Stillwell raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted the scope on a spot near the fox’s left ear. A curious look came over his face as he squeezed off the trigger. Snap! The sharp trill of a .22 caliber high-velocity bullet echoed through the canyon. The fox’s head dropped to the ground and its body fell limp. One of its back legs continued to quiver for a few seconds and a small stream of blood flowed from behind its left ear.
Mitch Davis walked over and stepped on the trap’s release mechanism. He pulled the fox free and threw it aside. Davis then reset the trap and covered it with debris. Taking a small chunk of jackrabbit flesh out of his backpack, he hooked it to a wire that hung over the trap. This practice is illegal, but effective for attracting curious foxes and bobcats.
By noon, Stillwell and Davis had checked all seventeen of their traps and walked back to Stillwell’s Jeep. Finding a low spot in the barbed wire fence, they each straddled the top wire and carefully stepped over. A few feet away was a white, ten-by-twelve-inch sign, reading:
NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Neither man gave the sign a second look.
Cottonwood Wilds Subdivision was a section of private land near the isolated foothill community of Platina. The absentee land owner had graded a lengthy road over the hi
lls and across several canyons in hopes of eventually selling off forty acre parcels. At the time it remained undeveloped fenced-and-posted property, which Stillwell and Davis saw as their own private trapping grounds.
On December 28, 1984, California Fish and Game Warden Merton Hatcher received an anonymous tip regarding illegal trapping activity in the Cottonwood Wilds Subdivision. Hatcher, a middle-aged throwback to the fifties, proudly displayed his greased-down, graying hair in a “ducktail”—combed back on the sides and flat on top. Tall and thin, he had feet that were so large, he had to order his boots out of a catalog.
The informant had seen the trespassers driving two different vehicles, depending on the day—a red Ford pickup and a blue Jeep.
Although trapping has become unpopular and pretty much unprofitable over the last twenty-five years, it was still common and borderline profitable back in the 1980s. Those who did trap in California were required to have a license and follow a strict set of regulations. One of those regulations prohibited the use of “sight bait”—exposed fur or meat within thirty feet of a trap. The purpose of sight bait was to entice an unsuspecting bobcat, fox or other furbearing mammal. Unfortunately, the exposed animal flesh also attracted raptors—hawks, owls and eagles. It was not uncommon to find these state and federally protected birds caught in steel-jawed leg-hold traps with their legs broken or severely injured.
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