Stupid criminal tricks from Texas game wardens field Nnotes

Editor’s Notes: After chucking through a book called Bear in the Back Seat by Kim DeLozier and Carolyn Jourdan telling the real stories of a wildlife ranger, I realized- again- that there are more stories from game wardens, rangers and conservation officers than we ever see. With that in mind, I wanted to share what one sample week from the Texas Game Warden’s Field Notes really looks like. It’s true, you really can’t make this stuff up.

The following items are compiled from recent Texas Parks and Wildlife Department law enforcement reports.
from The Fishing Wire

Paper Shuffling Pays Off

An individual stopped by the Brownwood law enforcement office asking for information on his boat so he could report it as stolen. Office clerks were helping the customer when they realized the boat had been registered the week before in the customer’s name but with a different address. The clerks showed the paperwork to a game warden, who began a search for the stolen vessel. When he found the boat, the suspected thief admitted partial guilt. Other suspects were interviewed, but the vessel was returned to its rightful owner.

Turn Around, Don’t Drown

A Brown County man ignored warning signs, drove his pickup truck across a flooded roadway and was swept away. A deputy saw the pickup floating downstream with the man on top of the cab, until at one point the water became too strong and the man fell in. The deputy observed the man being washed downstream with a blue bag in hand until he was out of sight. Two wardens launched their boat and began a search and rescue, which continued for several days with no luck. Eventually, they found the blue bag, and then recovered the body of the 61-year-old disabled vet from under a pile of logs.

The Disappearing Child

Small children standing up in cars tend to attract attention. A small child did just that when a Williamson County game warden passed by on his way to Austin. The warden waited for the car to pass him so he could get a better look, but by that point, the child had disappeared. When he passed them again, he looked into the back seat and could not see the child or a child seat. He pulled the driver over and found the kid hiding on the back floorboard and the driver without a license. When asked if she had ever been ticketed for her lack of license, the lady replied she had been ticketed a couple of times and even had a warrant for her arrest. The warden instructed her to find licensed drivers who could bring a car seat, and she said her sister would be there in 20 minutes. But almost 45 minutes later, the sister arrived on foot to drive the car back, but without a child’s seat. The warden called for a wrecker who took possession of the vehicle, and the driver was placed under arrest for her warrant and was issued two citations: one for driving without a driver’s license, and one for the child not in a seat.

Two are Better Than One

An overturned yellow kayak caught the attention of two Bexar County game wardens on Calaveras Lake. While navigating the choppy water to examine the kayak, the wardens observed another kayaker waving his arms to get their attention – with good reason. His 80-year-old friend had flipped out of the upturned kayak and had been floating for several minutes, exhausted. The wardens were able to get the elderly man and his friend out of the water and into their vessel. Both were taken to the bank where the San Antonio Fire Department was waiting to provide medical attention. Both of the friends checked out fine after some rest.

A Reason to Sweat

A red passenger van was driving slowly on the shoulder of the road near Dumas. A warden stopped the van and noticed a white crystal substance on the driver’s shirt and a loaded syringe on the floorboard. The driver was confused and profusely sweating. The warden found 2.7 grams of liquid heroin in the syringe on the floorboard alongside .30 grams of methamphetamine. The driver, who had an invalid license, was arrested and taken to the Moore County Jail.

Uniform Doesn’t Match the Badge

In Lubbock County, a man wearing a McDonald’s uniform and claiming to be a police officer, was flashing a security guard badge as he asked for gas receipts for tax write-off purposes. A warden tracked him down, and he insisted, “You know me, I’m one of you, I’m an officer, too.” He said he worked at the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office, but he had left his badge at the office. In reality, he was a volunteer in the ministry for the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office and possessed an expired security officer license and badge. An arrest warrant was obtained and he was booked for impersonating a public servant; as well as, a security officer.

More than One Reason

Two men with their watercrafts were stopped by wardens on Lake Georgetown for safety violations and expired licenses. The wardens were escorting them to their truck to retrieve their identifications, but after a brief exchange between the boaters, one of them took off at high speed. A white Ford F-350 was found waiting at the ramp with its trailer in the water. They immediately loaded up their watercraft and drove off. After the warden notified the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office, the vehicle was stopped and the driver was arrested for driving with an invalid license. Both boaters were arrested for evading detention, lack of boater education, expired registration, lack of fire extinguisher, no sound producing devise, and failure to obey a Marine Safety Enforcement Officer – a full package deal.

Im a pretty good club fisherman. Over the years I have won the yearly point standings in the Sportsman Club 19 times and 18 in the Flint River club. And I have made the state team finishing in the top 12 fishermen out of over 500 at the Top Six tournament, the club championship of all clubs in the state, five times over the years. But I will never be as good as the top level fishermen, or even those guys that do well at the state level.

I love fishing and writing about fishing. The articles I write in GON and AON and Georgia sportsman are really like research reports I wrote getting masters degrees and a doctorate. I do research, going out with other fishermen, and report what they say. The research part is the fun part, the sitting at a computer for three hours writing it is not the fun part

The research can get hectic tho. I often drive four or five hours to the lake, go out in the boat for four to eight hours, then drive home. Makes for a long day!

The longest day I ever had was several years ago. I was doing an article with Karen Elkins on Neeley Henry Lake in Alabama. I made the mistake of telling her I could get her picture on the cover of the magazine if we could catch a five pound bass for pictures.

I drove four hours to meet her at 6 am. We went out and stayed on the water until 9 PM that night – 15 hours! And then I drove 4 hours home, arriving 23 hours after I left. And the biggest bass we caught was about two pounds!

I also write my column in the Griffin daily News each week and every other month in Kitchen drawer. And I do a web site on fishing. In those I sometimes try to write creatively but Im not sure how successful I am. But I write about anything that I want in them. Some of my favorites are about growing up wild in Georgia – my memories of the 1950s and 60s – a very different time.

In 2001 I wrote “The Everything Fishing Book” for Adams Media. An agent contacted me and asked if I would be interested. I had just retired from my day job and it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I found out the details I almost backed out. They wanted a very specific book, kinda a “fishing for dummies” covering all the basics. The worst thing was they gave me four months to write 85,000 words! I did manage to get it done and I think it sold a few thousand copies.

I have also put some of my Map of the Month articles into book format. For both Clarks Hill and Lanier I put together an article for each month of the year. It is in eBook format and I also sell it on CD and email it in Microsoft word format. Some fishermen have found it useful.

Those articles do help. I have won a good many tournaments following the old articles. One of the best was at Allatoona. I don’t fish that lake much, I had been on it only three times, all for articles, when the flint River Club scheduled a September tournament there. So I pulled out those articles, printed out the one for September and took it with me.

The article was with David Millsaps, one of the best fishermen on Allatoona and in Georgia. The article said start by going around a certain small creek up the Little River, fishing a jig and pig, so I took off at the start of the tournament and ran to it.

After going around the creek and catching two keepers I fished the upstream rocky point of it with the jig and pig with no bites. That was hole number 2. I pulled in the trolling motor, cranked the big motor and pulled out the article to check where hole three was. I noticed the last line on hole two said throw a big crankbait across the rocky point before leaving.
I turned off the motor, picked up a rod with a big fat free shad on it and the first cast caught a 3.5 pound spot. That fish turned out to be big fish in the tournament. And on hole three and four I got a keeper on each one, filling out my limit. I had five weighing 11 pounds that day – second place was five pounds! So the article works.

My wife says I can remember every bass I have ever caught, and I used to be able to. I still remember most. I may not remember her birthday or our anniversary some years but I do remember bass!

Its funny. I have been the secretary of both bass clubs pretty much since I joined, and I have all the old tournament results. A lot of times someone will talk about a tournament from years ago and how they weighed in a limit of fish weighing 18 pounds or in a tournament they had a nine pounder. But when I look back at the actual results, they had ten pounds. Or the big fish they caught was actually five pounds, not nine. Fishermen don’t lie, but our memories surely do grow! I have always heard a fish gets bigger the longer it has been since you caught it and that seems true.

Sometimes lucky bounces happen at tournaments even if they don’t seem lucky at first. Last weekend the Flint River club fished Clark Hill for our August tournament – which Niles won, by the way. I went over on Wednesday to practice two days before the two day tournament.

At 1:30 Thursday – On my birthday of all things – I was about five miles from the ramp and ran out of gas. No problem, my boat has two 25 gallon tanks and I knew I had at least ten gallons in the other tank. But for some reason I could not get the motor to pick up gas from that tank. It took me over two hours go get back to the ramp with my trolling motor in the hot sun.

But going in I saw the symbol for an old underwater house foundation on my GPS – something I would not have noticed if riding faster with the gas motor. Friday afternoon I rode over it with my depthfinder, saw fish on it and caught a two pounder. During the tournament my partner and I caught our three biggest bass from that foundation.
Another lucky bounce!
You have to take advantage of all your bounces! When life gives you lemons, make lemonade – or Margaritas if you prefer

Sun protection

I like a baby sunscreen of 50 to 100 rating. It is supposed to be “tear free” and not burn your eyes, but after sweating all day it always seems to get into my eyes and burn.

In early June I fished four days in a row at Guntersville. Every day was bright and sunny , and very hot with little breeze. To make things worse I was three weeks into a 30 day round of Tetracycline – an antibiotic that makes your skin very sensitive to the sun.

I knew I had to block all the sun. At the Bassmasters Classic in Birmingham two years ago I was given something in my media pack from Dicks Sporting Goods that I had no idea what it was. It was a tube of light cloth of some kind with Dicks logo on it. my wife had seen them and told me it was a sun mask that you could wear around y our neck and pull up over your nose, cheeks chin and ears. She even showed me a couple of different ways to wear it.

Now I see lots of people wearing them but they looked hot. But at Guntersville I had to try it. And it was surprisingly cool and comfortable. I wore long nylon pants, sox, long sleeve shirt and even bought some cheap cotton gloves and cut the thumbs and first finger out so I could fish while wearing them.

As you can see in the picture above, almost no skin was exposed to the sun. Soon after that picture was taken I lost my cap. One problem with the mask is with it pulled up over your ears you don’t really feel your cap. I forgot to take it off when we made a run. So I pulled out a wide brim straw hat and wore it. In the picture below I had it on. You can see the cigarette in my mouth – I guess the caption should say “How to avoid skin cancer and get lung cancer.”

Straw hat for sun protection

A few days after I got home the blisters shown below were on my left hand that was exposed while holding my rod. My right hand, the one turning the reel handle, had a couple of smaller ones. I guess if I had not worn everything I had on my whole body would have been one big blister!

Blisters on my fingers from the sun

Bottom line – protect yourself from the sun while fishing!

Digging Holes

Do kids still dig holes or is it a lost art? When I was growing up we dug holes all the time. Some had a purpose but many were dug just for the fun of digging in dirt.

I grew up in Dearing, Georgia on Iron Hill Road and it was named that for a reason. The red clay made the ground look like rusted iron, and it was about that hard. Digging holes was not easy.

We still dug holes for everything from traps to trying to dig to China. Back then we actually thought we could dig all the way through to the other side of the earth, and adults encouraged that belief with a grin.

Our holes usually got a couple of feet deep before we gave up. The ground was just too hard. And on our farm, it was full of rocks. But we never gave up starting a new hole when the notion struck us.

Our traps never worked, either. Reading about pit traps made it seem easy to dig a hole, cover it with small limbs and leaves, and catch dinner. We dreamed of catching rabbits, possums and raccoons, but never got one. I realize now our small shallow holes would have been easy for a critter to climb out and we never thought of putting Punji sticks in the bottom.

Wouldn’t have really mattered, anyway, since I don’t remember ever seeing one of our traps where something has actually broken through the cover. Maybe it was because we dug them where the digging was easy, not on some kind of game trail.

My grandmother and an aunt lived in Ocala, Florida and I looked forward to our twice-annual trips there. The soft sand in her back yard was really easy to dig holes. We dug them on every trip at Christmas and during summer vacation.

It took no time to dig a hole deeper than we were tall. But that created a problem. It is really hard to get dirt out of a hole deeper than you stand. That made us give up a little bit before we got to China.

My Uncle Roger lived on a farm near Thomson and Uncle Adron lived about a mile away. Roger, Jr. who we called Dunnie, and Adron’s son Bobby were a few years older than me. On Uncle Roger’s farm out in a field were two huge boulders side by side, touching each other.

Those boulders stood about eight feet high off the ground. Bobby and Dunnie were convinced they marked buried treasure or some kind of Indian burial place. They spend many hours digging around them. On some trips I helped.

We tried digging under them from the side. I guess we never considered the danger of one rolling a little and crushing us, like we never thought about the holes in Florida caving in on us. And we never found the treasure!

We dug a lot on Dearing Branch, too, but most of that digging was trying to build a dam on it. We would dig sand off the edges and bottom of a big pool, making it deeper and bigger as we dug, and filling croaker sacks with the sand for the dam.

One summer we actually go the pool deep enough for the water to come up to our necks – when we kneeled on the bottom. It never got deep enough to swim and every winter the rains filled the branch and sand washed in and filled in our efforts. And the rushing branch washed away our dam. But that just gave us something to do the next summer.

It is kind of funny, but when daddy made me dig holes for a purpose, like setting fence posts, I hated it. I liked using post hold diggers but not for a purpose. And we had to put up posts to repair fences every summer on the farm.

And digging a drainage ditch was somehow different from digging for fun. We often had to work on the shallow ditches around the chicken houses to drain the water away from them, and the only good thing about digging them were the earthworms we uncovered. At least we could collect them and go fishing!

I still dig holes sometimes, but always with a purpose. Post holes and drainage ditches mostly now days and they are still not a lot of fun. But I guess my aches and pains keep me from wanting to just dig for fun, anyway.

Encourage your kids to dig holes but safely. It will get them out of the house, keep them out of trouble and keep them fit. And they may have as much fun as we did.

While working on Masters and a Doctorate degree I learned a little about scientific investigation. One of the cardinal rules of any scientific study is to start it with no prejudices and no expected outcomes. The purpose of a truly scientific study is to find accurate information, not to try to prove your prejudices.

That basic fact of doing any kind of accurate research seems to be lost on many so-called researchers now. Anyone that really knows about research knows you can prove anything you set out to prove. You may have to adjust the data a little or ignore some that doesn’t fit your goals as “outliers,” but you can get to your preconceived conclusions if you want to.

One of the big pushes of the gun ban fanatics right now is a “universal background check,” requiring all gun purchases, not just those from licensed dealers, to go through the database of those prohibited from legally buying a gun. Right now if you go to Berry’s Sporting Good to buy a gun, you have to show a valid ID and have your name run through this check unless you have a valid Georgia Firearms License. It is an inconvenience and usually takes just a few minutes, but most of the time it returns accurate data.

There are exceptions. If your name happens to be the same as a convicted felon you can be turned down. If you don’t think you have to worry about that, do a Google search on your name. You might be surprised how many people have the same first and last name.

For example, I know Ronnie Garrison died suddenly on September 28, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee and Ronnie Garrison was arrested on felony drug, burglary and grand larceny charges in Oklahoma on January 2, 2014. I have a firearms license so I have never had a problem, but I’m not sure if I could instantly pass the background check.

The gun banners crow that background checks have stopped 1.2 million gun sales since started. There is no follow up. How many of those were mistakes later corrected or how many of those people got guns illegally anyway.

A supposedly “study” at Duke University of the current background check found the following: ““If these handgun denials were successful in preventing violence-prone people from arming themselves, we would expect to see a larger reduction in gun crimes committed in the 32 Brady states compared with the non-Brady states. Disappointingly, our study did not find significant trend differences between the Brady and non-Brady states in the most reliably measured gun crime – homicide. Thus the direct effect on gun crime that advocates expected from denying disqualified adults in the Brady states does not reveal itself in our data.”

Notice the key word “Disappointingly” in that report. The so-called researches were not happy with their results. They set out with an agenda to prove their prejudice that background checks make a difference. But even with their goals, at least they admit they could not prove what they set out to prove.

So why make the system of background checks that does not work “universal?” That is like saying drinking water doesn’t cure cancer so drink more of it. It is not rational.

And what would the effects of these universal checks on law-abiding citizens? If I wanted to sell you one of my guns, not that I would ever sell one, we would have to go down to Berry’s, pay to have the check run and only then would the government allow me to sell you my property. In states that have universal checks it cost from $50 to $150 to have one run, adding to the cost of the sale.

What if you want to give one of your children one of your guns? You are still required to have the check run. If you wanted to leave a child a gun in your will? Could a universal background make that impossible?

Gun banners will grasp at anything they can to achieve their goals of making it impossible to own a gun. Gun control laws affect only the law-abidiing. They do not affect criminals in any way.

Which brings me to another of my pet peeves about scientific studies. In 1975, while working on a Masters Degree at West Georgia College, I took a course titled “Environmental Science’ and was assigned to write a paper on the coming Ice Age due to air pollution.

Forty years go the science was settled. The earth was cooling and half of North America would be covered with glaciers within one hundred years. Governments, especially the US government must take immediate steps and spend lots of tax payers’ money to keep the earth warm.

Sound familiar? Some of the same people and same groups that made those claims 40 years ago are now saying exactly the same thing about global warming or global climate change as they call it now. Its just weather – of course the climate changes. Always has, always will.

Don’t forget at one time the science was settled that the universe revolved around the earth and that you would fall off the edge of the earth if you sailed too far on the ocean.

Anytime you are told “the science is settled” you can be sure that is being used to stop others from trying to get the truth. Anytime a study sets out to prove something, rather than find facts, it is suspect. Anytime some in the government want to spend your money on the latest fad, be very skeptical!