BearHunter
01-11-2005, 12:14 PM
By VIRGINIA SMITH
Staff Writer
Last update: January 09, 2005
A loud lapping sound followed wildlife officer Jeff Gier as he drove.
Bubba, a 3-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, was drinking in his onboard kennel, a luxury unit with an automated cooling system that turns on if Gier's truck gets too hot -- even when the ignition is off. Somewhere in the back of it was Bubba's bulletproof vest.
Bubba is much higher-maintenance than his name would suggest. He's rough on Gier's pet dog, Bucky. He barks himself ragged around horses, and sports a permanent zany expression. He is allergic to beef and chicken and must be fed special chow made from kangaroo.
On Tuesday, as Gier pulled into the first of the West Volusia woodlands he and Bubba monitor for illegal hunting activity, Bubba whined incessantly.
"He gets excited when we get off a paved road," said Gier, the human half of the first such team in Volusia or Flagler counties. And soon Bubba grew so annoying that Gier let him run a mile, legs splayed and tongue flapping, behind the truck as he drove. They perform this ritual every day, Gier said.
After Bubba hopped back in, he was calm for about 20 minutes. Then he started up again. Such qualities, apparently, make Bubba a model detection dog.
"We look for the hyperactive dog no one wants, the one that ate the couch," said John Snow, head of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's K9 program. "The one that will retrieve all day long."
The program, which began in the late 1980s, has 12 dog-officer teams seeking illicit carcasses, bait and firearms around the state. Bubba and Gier started last spring. Gier is a former lieutenant with Fish and Wildlife; tired of paperwork, he took a demotion to scour the woods with Bubba. Bubba is trained on the scents of deer, alligator, turkey and bear, using the same methods used to train narcotics or bomb-sniffing dogs. His colleagues in the Keys are also trained on lobster.
Finding this stuff is a whole lot easier with a dog, and courts generally accept the dog handlers' interpretation of events, Gier said. The dogs can also track people, and have proven an effective deterrent at management areas, where people voluntarily admit wrongdoing rather than get sniffed out.
For these reasons, Florida's program has steadily added dogs and handlers to become the largest in the country. Other states, where conservation K9s look for trout, ducks or sturgeon, are also expanding their K9 divisions. Snow -- who once used his own dog to find crawfish in a woman's purse -- has trained dogs and handlers as far north as Ontario.
The first state to use conservation dogs was New York, which has trained German shepherds since the 1970s and now has six working teams.
Keith Isles, the New York conservation officer who heads the unit, has uncovered $10,000 worth of poaching violations in a single day with his dog; once he used a shepherd to successfully track a missing person, when the dog alerted him that the "victim" was hiding an illegal buck. A dog, said Isles, is to conservation officers what a radar gun is to a trooper.
Years ago, most of the New York shepherds were donated, but now they're imported from Eastern European breeders, for thousands of dollars a head. They come with warranties for joint ailments and guarantees that they're trainable, and they're taught to attack when cued.
In Florida, the dogs are mainly Chesapeake retrievers or Labs; they're donated and they are more likely to drool on a poacher than bite him.
Sometimes they die of something unexpected (last year the department lost one dog to encephalitis and another to cancer). And sometimes they flunk the 400-hour training course -- which is why each officer trains two dogs. "There's no remedial class," said Gier, whose first dog didn't make the cut.
But those who pass sure know how to find game.
In early November, the agency received an anonymous tip: An Orlando man had been bragging about two black bears, a protected species, that he'd shot on land he owned in Pierson. One of Gier's fellow officers checked the Pierson property to find a tree stand, trail camera and feeder; he also found a cardboard box covered in blood and bear hair. Nearby, under some upturned soil, were the remains of one bear.
The second was nowhere to be seen. It was a job for Bubba.
It took Gier and the dog about an hour to locate bear No. 2. They walked the 22-acre property methodically until at one spot, Gier said, Bubba "snapped his head into the wind -- then he put his nose to the ground. He did a little scratch and I saw a tuft of bear hair." Gier went and got a shovel.
The hunter, Julio E. Perez, who would not discuss the case when contacted, said he shot the first bear thinking it was a pig, and found the second by accident, already dead. Perez told the wildlife officers that until those incidents, he didn't know there were bears on the property.
Gier said he doubts that story will last through the hunter's arraignment on Monday, where Gier hopes Perez will just plead guilty. The officers found a bear picture on the hunter's trail camera, and "for a hunter, seeing that is like Christmas morning," Gier said.
Gier is an avid hunter -- his camouflage hangs on hooks in his truck, and his house is decorated with buck heads. But he has limited patience for hunters who cheat.
Many people get caught because they brag about their corner-cutting, and Gier said it never ceases to amaze him. "If you do the work and learn what trees are dropping, where the trail is, where a buck is bedding, that's skill as a woodsman," he said. "You used your brain. But to do it illegally, immorally? How does it show skill to shine a light into a deer's eyes?"
Deer season ends today on state lands, and on Tuesday Gier was bent on catching, once and for all, whoever was hunting above 100 pounds of corn in the Tiger Bay Wildlife Management Area. Weeks before, he'd found two tree stands set up close together, each above a mountain of corn.
Tiger Bay was his last stop after a long day's circuit of public and private lands. In the morning Gier checked some property to make sure a squatter's tree stand was gone; warned two equestrians to keep their dogs out of a preserve; peeked into the live well of a fishing boat and ran IDs on a suspiciously dressed-up couple walking in the woods. Bubba, for the most part, chewed a rubber toy.
Now it was late afternoon, about time for a hunter to be setting up. Gier hid his truck by a lake, so no one would see it at the entrance, and let Bubba run around again.
Baiting or luring animals with food on public lands is illegal, but to prove a hunter guilty of baiting, an officer must show that he or she was actually sitting over the bait. It's hard to do, unless you have a dog -- who can sniff the stand and tell you right away that the hunter was there.
Baiting also usually involves a few handfuls of corn, brought in a plastic baggie. But 50-pound piles are something else, said Gier, who had already issued $350 worth of tickets to a Daytona Beach man he caught "borrowing" one of the stands -- on two separate occasions.
When he arrived at 4:30 p.m. with Bubba, one of the stands was gone; only a picked-over corncob remained. Brown bottles of Attraction Brand Doe Estrus and Mega Tarsal Plus Tarsal Extract were scattered among the leaves, and the former corn piles were reduced to whitish specks.
People who leave scent bottles in the woods, Gier said, are the same type of people who would hunt over bait -- lazy slobs. But the good thing about them, he added, is that they tend to hunt right by the road.
Skilled, determined poachers who show up with flashlights at 3 a.m. are more or less impossible to catch, Gier said. But lazy opportunists are the vast majority of poachers.
Gier took Bubba to the spot where the stand had been -- had the hunter moved it deeper into the woods? Bubba would know. But by the way Bubba circled, Gier realized it was gone. "It's so frustrating," he said. The day before, all the officers had gone to a meeting in Brevard County, he explained, and it must have been then that the stand was removed.
But the second stand remained. Some pieces of corn had begun to germinate in the earth beneath it.
Deer season was all but over, and its owner would have to come by soon. Gier stared up at the stand, thinking; Bubba scratched his ear.
Staff Writer
Last update: January 09, 2005
A loud lapping sound followed wildlife officer Jeff Gier as he drove.
Bubba, a 3-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, was drinking in his onboard kennel, a luxury unit with an automated cooling system that turns on if Gier's truck gets too hot -- even when the ignition is off. Somewhere in the back of it was Bubba's bulletproof vest.
Bubba is much higher-maintenance than his name would suggest. He's rough on Gier's pet dog, Bucky. He barks himself ragged around horses, and sports a permanent zany expression. He is allergic to beef and chicken and must be fed special chow made from kangaroo.
On Tuesday, as Gier pulled into the first of the West Volusia woodlands he and Bubba monitor for illegal hunting activity, Bubba whined incessantly.
"He gets excited when we get off a paved road," said Gier, the human half of the first such team in Volusia or Flagler counties. And soon Bubba grew so annoying that Gier let him run a mile, legs splayed and tongue flapping, behind the truck as he drove. They perform this ritual every day, Gier said.
After Bubba hopped back in, he was calm for about 20 minutes. Then he started up again. Such qualities, apparently, make Bubba a model detection dog.
"We look for the hyperactive dog no one wants, the one that ate the couch," said John Snow, head of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's K9 program. "The one that will retrieve all day long."
The program, which began in the late 1980s, has 12 dog-officer teams seeking illicit carcasses, bait and firearms around the state. Bubba and Gier started last spring. Gier is a former lieutenant with Fish and Wildlife; tired of paperwork, he took a demotion to scour the woods with Bubba. Bubba is trained on the scents of deer, alligator, turkey and bear, using the same methods used to train narcotics or bomb-sniffing dogs. His colleagues in the Keys are also trained on lobster.
Finding this stuff is a whole lot easier with a dog, and courts generally accept the dog handlers' interpretation of events, Gier said. The dogs can also track people, and have proven an effective deterrent at management areas, where people voluntarily admit wrongdoing rather than get sniffed out.
For these reasons, Florida's program has steadily added dogs and handlers to become the largest in the country. Other states, where conservation K9s look for trout, ducks or sturgeon, are also expanding their K9 divisions. Snow -- who once used his own dog to find crawfish in a woman's purse -- has trained dogs and handlers as far north as Ontario.
The first state to use conservation dogs was New York, which has trained German shepherds since the 1970s and now has six working teams.
Keith Isles, the New York conservation officer who heads the unit, has uncovered $10,000 worth of poaching violations in a single day with his dog; once he used a shepherd to successfully track a missing person, when the dog alerted him that the "victim" was hiding an illegal buck. A dog, said Isles, is to conservation officers what a radar gun is to a trooper.
Years ago, most of the New York shepherds were donated, but now they're imported from Eastern European breeders, for thousands of dollars a head. They come with warranties for joint ailments and guarantees that they're trainable, and they're taught to attack when cued.
In Florida, the dogs are mainly Chesapeake retrievers or Labs; they're donated and they are more likely to drool on a poacher than bite him.
Sometimes they die of something unexpected (last year the department lost one dog to encephalitis and another to cancer). And sometimes they flunk the 400-hour training course -- which is why each officer trains two dogs. "There's no remedial class," said Gier, whose first dog didn't make the cut.
But those who pass sure know how to find game.
In early November, the agency received an anonymous tip: An Orlando man had been bragging about two black bears, a protected species, that he'd shot on land he owned in Pierson. One of Gier's fellow officers checked the Pierson property to find a tree stand, trail camera and feeder; he also found a cardboard box covered in blood and bear hair. Nearby, under some upturned soil, were the remains of one bear.
The second was nowhere to be seen. It was a job for Bubba.
It took Gier and the dog about an hour to locate bear No. 2. They walked the 22-acre property methodically until at one spot, Gier said, Bubba "snapped his head into the wind -- then he put his nose to the ground. He did a little scratch and I saw a tuft of bear hair." Gier went and got a shovel.
The hunter, Julio E. Perez, who would not discuss the case when contacted, said he shot the first bear thinking it was a pig, and found the second by accident, already dead. Perez told the wildlife officers that until those incidents, he didn't know there were bears on the property.
Gier said he doubts that story will last through the hunter's arraignment on Monday, where Gier hopes Perez will just plead guilty. The officers found a bear picture on the hunter's trail camera, and "for a hunter, seeing that is like Christmas morning," Gier said.
Gier is an avid hunter -- his camouflage hangs on hooks in his truck, and his house is decorated with buck heads. But he has limited patience for hunters who cheat.
Many people get caught because they brag about their corner-cutting, and Gier said it never ceases to amaze him. "If you do the work and learn what trees are dropping, where the trail is, where a buck is bedding, that's skill as a woodsman," he said. "You used your brain. But to do it illegally, immorally? How does it show skill to shine a light into a deer's eyes?"
Deer season ends today on state lands, and on Tuesday Gier was bent on catching, once and for all, whoever was hunting above 100 pounds of corn in the Tiger Bay Wildlife Management Area. Weeks before, he'd found two tree stands set up close together, each above a mountain of corn.
Tiger Bay was his last stop after a long day's circuit of public and private lands. In the morning Gier checked some property to make sure a squatter's tree stand was gone; warned two equestrians to keep their dogs out of a preserve; peeked into the live well of a fishing boat and ran IDs on a suspiciously dressed-up couple walking in the woods. Bubba, for the most part, chewed a rubber toy.
Now it was late afternoon, about time for a hunter to be setting up. Gier hid his truck by a lake, so no one would see it at the entrance, and let Bubba run around again.
Baiting or luring animals with food on public lands is illegal, but to prove a hunter guilty of baiting, an officer must show that he or she was actually sitting over the bait. It's hard to do, unless you have a dog -- who can sniff the stand and tell you right away that the hunter was there.
Baiting also usually involves a few handfuls of corn, brought in a plastic baggie. But 50-pound piles are something else, said Gier, who had already issued $350 worth of tickets to a Daytona Beach man he caught "borrowing" one of the stands -- on two separate occasions.
When he arrived at 4:30 p.m. with Bubba, one of the stands was gone; only a picked-over corncob remained. Brown bottles of Attraction Brand Doe Estrus and Mega Tarsal Plus Tarsal Extract were scattered among the leaves, and the former corn piles were reduced to whitish specks.
People who leave scent bottles in the woods, Gier said, are the same type of people who would hunt over bait -- lazy slobs. But the good thing about them, he added, is that they tend to hunt right by the road.
Skilled, determined poachers who show up with flashlights at 3 a.m. are more or less impossible to catch, Gier said. But lazy opportunists are the vast majority of poachers.
Gier took Bubba to the spot where the stand had been -- had the hunter moved it deeper into the woods? Bubba would know. But by the way Bubba circled, Gier realized it was gone. "It's so frustrating," he said. The day before, all the officers had gone to a meeting in Brevard County, he explained, and it must have been then that the stand was removed.
But the second stand remained. Some pieces of corn had begun to germinate in the earth beneath it.
Deer season was all but over, and its owner would have to come by soon. Gier stared up at the stand, thinking; Bubba scratched his ear.