This story reminds us that we need cops out there where the trees grow tall, the rivers run fast, and the critters have their home.
It is the same on the Parkway, a desperate need for more park rangers to protect the Parkway and create that sense of safety the public needs to become active users in the suspect areas, like the Lower Reach.
Here is an excerpt.
Game wardens feel they're under the gun
By Matt Weiser -- Bee Staff Writer Published 12:01 am PDT Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Inside a giant freezer in Rancho Cordova, state game warden Alan Weingarten combs through the gruesome evidence.
A pair of pheasants, still beautiful in their showy plumage. Bags of illicit salmon roe. Severed fish heads the size of basketballs. A whole female deer, solidified in death's icy claw.
Each carcass and body part is evidence in an unsolved crime against the Golden State's natural resources, a violation of hunting or fishing laws that game wardens are hired to prevent.
But those carcasses also prove another problem: a severe shortage of California game wardens. The frozen gore might not be here if the state had enough wardens to investigate these crimes.
"All we need to do is follow up -- find blood on a vehicle, blood in someone's residence," said Weingarten, who patrols Folsom Lake and Sacramento County. "But wardens just don't have time because we're always working new cases."
The Department of Fish and Game has 192 field wardens on the job to protect an area spanning 159,000 square miles, a landscape second only to Hawaii in wildlife diversity.
But hiring is difficult because a starting warden earns $37,000 a year, said Nancy Foley, the department's chief of enforcement. That is two-thirds the pay of a starting highway patrol officer.
At least 40 wardens are expected to leave this year because of retirements and low pay, said Bob Orange, vice president of the California Fish and Game Wardens' Association. The state already has 64 warden vacancies that are difficult to fill because of the pay inequity, he said.
"We're losing the battle big time, quite frankly," said Eric Mills, coordinator of Action for Animals, a Bay Area animal-rights group. "Morale is way down (among wardens) and there's major poaching going on all over the state right now, everything from deer to crab, surf perch, all kinds of stuff. It's a nightmare."
