Predawn stakeout kicks off busy day
Deer season in with a bang
MIDDLETON, Tenn. — Early last week, the regional office of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency in Jackson fielded a call about someone who was suspected of illegally baiting deer on a patch of property in Hardeman County.
So conservation officer Matt Canada slipped onto the property and found two bait piles — each with a hunting stand nearby — along with the remains of a recently killed whitetail deer and some empty shell casings from a .270-caliber rifle.
When the modern firearms season opened Saturday morning, Canada and fellow officer Bubba Spencer went back to see if they could catch the poachers in the act. They found two men hunting over bait, and one of them was using a rifle that matched the shell casings found earlier in the week.
Such is life for a Tennessee conservation officer on opening day.
“The opening day of gun season is easily our busiest day of the year, and there are a lot of times when the work actually starts before opening day,” Spencer said. “There’s a lot of detective work that goes into this job — a lot more than most people probably realize.”
Spencer and Canada wrote citations to the men and confiscated their guns.
Since hunting over bait is considered one of the most serious wildlife offenses in Tennessee, the men will have to make a court appearance and will likely face a hefty fine plus the temporary loss of their hunting privileges. More weather
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“We found the gut pile and the rifle shell casings before the modern firearms season started, so we knew the deer had to have been killed illegally,” Canada said, “When we pressed them on it, one of the men admitted he had killed a spike buck there previously.”
Conservation officers like Spencer and Canada often deal with 75-100 calls on opening day, and some are less exciting than the one they handled first thing Saturday.
After dealing with the Middleton case, they drove about 40 minutes to Whiteville to investigate a trespassing complaint.
They arrived just after the Hardeman County Sheriff’s Department and found a man who was indeed trespassing.
Since he was only squirrel hunting, the landowner elected not to press charges.
“You never know what you’re going to run into when you get a call,” Spencer said. “Some of them turn out to be nothing,
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1-7- 4 and some of them turn out to be a really big deal, like the one we had first thing this morning.”
In addition to investigating calls that are handled through a dispatcher at the Jackson office, conservation officers routinely use the flashing lights on top of their trucks to make traffic stops when they see someone carrying a dead deer.
Around 9 a.m. Saturday, just west of Whiteville, Spencer and Canada stopped hunter Billy Tillman of Drummonds, Tenn., with a freshly killed doe in the back of his truck.
Though Tillman had broken no laws while killing the deer in Toone, Tenn., he admitted he was shocked when the flashing lights came on behind him.
“I thought to myself that they couldn’t be after me,” Tillman said, laughing. “Then I realized it was the game warden just checking my deer, and I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Spencer said it’s not uncommon to find violations during a routine traffic stop.
“The main thing we’re doing is making sure the deer is tagged properly,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many times we stop someone and find something that isn’t quite right.”
Spencer and Canada began their day shortly after 6 a.m. because they wanted to give the suspected baiters in Middleton plenty of time to get settled into their stands.
But in Fayette County, conservation officer Ty Inmon began as soon as his phone started ringing well before daylight at 5 a.m.
No matter when they start, officers know they’re in it for the long haul on opening day.
“I’ve gone to investigate spotlighting complaints on the Friday night before opening day when I didn’t get to go back home for 30 straight hours,” Inmon said. “You have to be ready for a little bit of everything every year.”
CORRECTIONS
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