Flying for a Game Warden

Author Matt Odenbrett often flew Cessna 172s on his assignments flying charters for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct low-altitude survey flights. (Photo credit: Cessna/Textron)

January 2001

I am cruising over the frozen Prairie of the Northern Plains at 1,000 feet above ground level in my Charter Company’s Cessna 172. My Outside Air Temperature gauge reads slightly above zero degrees Fahrenheit. The airplane’s heater has warmed up the cockpit area enough that I can take my gloves off, and it is doing a good job of keeping the frost off the windshield and forward side windows. My two passengers and I are staring out the windshield at the nearly all-white landscape below us. The only good terrain features on this tabletop-flat landscape are the trees that line the property lines of the landowners, the buildings and trees surrounding their homesteads, and the blacktop roads that have been mostly cleared of snow. Those features came out as gray against an otherwise white landscape, although the clear day allowed shadows to appear on the surface.

I was working as a charter pilot for a mom-and-pop fixed-base operation at a small town situated in the middle of the seemingly never-ending prairie of the upper Midwest of the United States. I had been flying here for nine months and having a blast doing it. My employer operated just about every type of piston single and twin-engine airplane Cessna had built up to that time, and this meant that I never knew what I might be doing from one week to the next. One week I would fly day trip charters in the Cessna 303 and 310 for business executives around the region. The next week I would be giving primary and advanced instruction to students in everything from a Cessna C152 to C210 or T210. The next week I would be helping to crew a Cessna 404 Titan that we operated as a corporate shuttle for a construction equipment manufacturer. When I was not flying, I was at the office – answering phones, washing airplanes, being a mechanic’s helper and go-fer, and fueling transient airplanes and the commuter airline’s Saab 340 aircraft. 

In the summer of 2000, I had passed my study course and received my authorization card from the U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Aviation Services. With my OAS Card in hand, I was assigned to flying charters for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct low-altitude survey flights. The Fish and Wildlife Service had purchased easements from landowners throughout the region to keep their lands in a state conducive to the local wildlife, and they chartered our airplanes to check on their easements on an annual basis. This meant many hours of hand flying in either a Cessna C172, C172RG, or C210 at low altitude for many miles along a section line, and then whipping around a field in a tight circling turn when the wildlife service officers saw a discrepancy in a field.

The winter of 2000-2001 was one of the coldest and snowiest in recent years. By January, over five feet of snow had fallen on the Northern Prairie. Temperatures were dropping at night to 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit during the overnight hours and seldom rose into the single digits in the daytime.  Thanks to this, the snow was very dry and powder like, and since it could not melt, it would be picked up by every breeze that blew down from Canada. The Great American Prairie can be described as a sea of grass, with almost no wooded areas for the snow to pile up within, so ground blizzards were a daily occurrence. There were trees that grew naturally along the streams and creeks, as well as where people had planted trees as windbreaks around their homesteads and property lines. These wooded areas quickly became buried by snowdrifts 15 to 20 feet deep, which made life difficult for both the residents who had planted windbreaks, as well as the wildlife that fed on the shrubs that grew beneath them.

It was the deer that suffered most during this period, and this led me to what I would call an “Out of the Ordinary” charter mission.

On this morning in Jan. of 2001, I came to the office and my Director of Operations introduced me to my passengers for the day. They were game wardens for the state and oversaw the local area. They explained to me that we were going to fly a wildlife survey operation about 40 miles north of our home base. We were going to specifically look for a farm that had a huge problem with the deer in the area. 

White Tailed deer are browsers. Their natural food sources are the leaves and shoots of shrubs and young trees, but they will also eat grass and corn from farm fields. During this winter, all the cornfields had been harvested, and snow covered the other natural food sources. Deprived of their natural food sources, the hungry deer began going to where the farmers in the area stored their hay that had been baled up during the growing season and eating that hay to avoid starvation.

The game wardens explained this to me and told me about this farmer’s problem; the farmer had several hundred large round bales of hay stacked in a field near his farm, which was the winter food supply for his herd of cattle. A herd of starving deer estimated at 700 in number had gathered at the farm, feeding on the hay. While doing this, the deer were climbing up on the bales to feed. Deer being deer, they were urinating and defecating on the hay bales while they were feeding on them. This ruined the hay bales as fodder for the farmer’s cattle, which refused to eat the spoiled hay. By state law, the farmer could not shoot these deer, and he had appealed to the game wardens for help in getting rid of them.

I said, “Ok, but what good can we do from an airplane? Are we just going to count them all?”

“No, we want to see if you can herd the deer away from the hay bales and stampede them out into the prairie.”

“Really? This will require me to fly at an altitude lower than allowed by FAA regulations.”

My DO interjected, “Under your OAS authorization, you are authorized by the Department of Interior to deviate from FAA obstacle clearance regulations to the extent necessary to meet the requirements of this mission.”

My eyebrows rose up. I asked them, “So what you want me to do is to drop down as low as I can and stampede a herd of 700 deer?  Is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You’re on!”

At the tender age of 37, I relished such challenges!

We climbed into the Cessna C172 and departed into the frigid morning of around five degrees Fahrenheit. The cold was intense, but the heater managed to keep the frost off the front windshield and side windows effectively but not the rear windows. Good thing I had GPS coordinates for the object of our mission today. From the air, the prairie has always reminded me of a crazy quilt, with fields divided into square-mile sections of land, and then subdivided into many smaller sections. It would be much tougher to find this farm by going X number of miles up the north/south highway, and then left at such and such gravel road. It would be too easy to mistake one gravel road for another.

Once we did reach our destination, there was no mistaking it! The stack of hay bales was in an open field a short distance from the homestead. It was surrounded by a pack of light brown objects, in stark contrast to the snowy field. As we approached, we could make out the individual deer. They paid no attention to us as I began to circle them at 1,000 feet. Both game wardens were sitting on the right side of the Skyhawk, so I entered a turn around a point maneuver, keeping the deer-surrounded haybales at an equal distance. As we circled, I calculated the winds aloft and how it was affecting our flight path, then determined that my best approach would be to drop down from the east in a descending right turn so I could level my wings facing westward, which would make my left wing block the sun and improve my visibility.

While circling I had dropped down to 500 feet, so we could better make out details, and I could check for obstacles. When we had agreed on the plan of action, I began my approach:

When I was eastbound abeam the haybales and herd of deer, I throttled my engine back to 1,800 RPM, dropped my nose to keep my speed up, and soon began a right-hand descending turn. When I rolled out of my turn, I was less than a quarter mile from my target at under 200 feet and my airspeed indicated 120 knots. The sudden increase in apparent ground speed was palpable. I slowed my descent and added power to maintain my speed. The deer were already beginning to run away from the sound of my approach.

I levelled off at less than 50 feet, and the deer were directly in front of me, galloping at full speed and splitting left and right away from my path! It was as if I was watching a high-speed parting of the Red Sea! I had to bank slightly against a light crosswind to keep myself over the thickest part of the herd, and when I reached the haybales, I eased my nose up, added full power, and began a standard-rate turn while letting my airspeed bleed off. What a rush!

Back downwind at 500 feet, I rolled wings level and asked the Wardens, “Are they scattering?”

“No, they stopped and are now trotting back to the haybales.”

WHAT!?!?!?

We made another full circle to make sure our eyes were not deceiving us. Sure enough, despite running for their lives at full tilt, the deer herd’s hunger compelled them to return to the only source of food in the region. They were not going anywhere.

I asked the wardens, “Should I try it again?”

“Yes.”

Back around we went. Back I went down to the deck, going full tilt at an altitude that seemed to be so low I could have hit these deer in the head with my propeller. Once again, they scattered at a full gallop.  Once again, we went back up to altitude. Once again, the deer inexplicably returned to the haybales.

“Again?”

“Again!”

We kept this up for nearly half an hour. Seven different times I came down and buzzed the herd of starving deer. Seven different times they scattered before me, only to return after I had left. Our attempt to disperse the herd of deer from the farm had failed.

“Well, this clearly isn’t going to work,” said the warden seated next to me. “Let’s head back.”

I set a course for home base and tuned into the AWOS frequency for the local winds and altimeter setting. Once done, I asked the wardens, “So what happens next?”

They replied, “Well, we wanted to try this herding maneuver with you before we fell back on our last resort.”

“And what is your last resort?”

“We and the farmer are going to set out two lines of corn about 100 yards away from either side of the haybales. We will set out one line of corn, and the farmer will set out the other. The deer that eat our corn will live, and the deer that eat the farmer’s corn will die.”

Red foxes usually weigh between six and 15 pounds, standing 16- to 18-inches high at the shoulder. The most common color is rich red-gold, with black legs and feet. The chest and underparts are usually white with a long bushy tail also tipped in white. (Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

“Die!?!? How are they going to die?”

“The Farmer’s corn will contain poison.”

That was a gut check. I said, “Wow, this really was a do-or-die situation for those deer.”

·       

Two days later, I had another charter flight scheduled with the game warden. This time, he arrived with two female acquaintances. They were introduced to me as his girlfriend, and a mutual friend who was a wildlife artist that lived in town. The Warden explained to me that he wanted me to take them all back out to the farm where the deer were so they could view the situation from the air, and then we would fly out west to a ranch where a nature conservancy group was keeping a herd of buffalo. As soon as he mentioned buffalo, I said to him, “For the record, I am not going to stampede a herd of buffalo for you.  Buffalo have a reputation for not respecting fences once they start running.” The warden smiled and replied, “That’s okay, Matt, we are going out to view both the deer and the buffalo from altitude. While we are up, I would like to keep an eye out for any other wildlife that we may see on the prairie.” I said, “That sounds great to me.”

The weather was no warmer on this day. In fact, it was colder. I recall that my thermometer in the Skyhawk was reading near 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit when we took off. The heater did its job on the windshield and front seat windows, but the additional breath of an extra passenger meant that there was so much moisture in the little Cessna that the rear windows frosted over and the ladies in the rear seats had to scrape off the frost occasionally to see outside. We went directly to the farm and circled the herd of starving deer for about 15 minutes before we set off on the 45-mile journey west to where the buffalo were.

As we approached, the buffalo were readily apparent. There were maybe 50 of them on an open section of prairie, with no wind shelter around them. Given this, the buffalo were huddled together in a tight mass to maintain their body heat, and they appeared as a dark blot on an otherwise dazzlingly bright field of snow-covered grass. Due to the lighting conditions and the fact that we did not want to scare the buffalo, we kept our distance and were not able to see much detail of the herd, although the wildlife artist had her 35mm camera out and was taking photographs like crazy. Finally, my passengers had seen enough. The warden told me, “Ok, let’s head back for home, but along the way, we will continue to scan for any wildlife.”

I turned back east for home base and kept my scan going both inside and outside the cockpit. There was not much to scan for, but after about 10 minutes of flight, I caught a sight of a moving speck of red in the corner of my eyesight. I looked down at the moving speck in a field just off to my left and focused on my target. I realized I had spotted a Red-Tailed Fox, who was running as fast as he could opposite to my direction – across a field that only had maybe a foot of snow on it. I turned to the warden and said, “I see a Red-Tailed Fox moving across this field. Shall I buzz him so we can get a good view of him? He replied, “Yes, please do!”

The wildlife photographer had her 35mm camera ready, so I cut the power to my engine, added full flaps, and made a sharp descending turn to the left to get on the Fox’s tail. I slowed to 70 knots with the power at idle, so we could prolong our viewing time of our target. My angle of descent was steep enough that my passengers in the back seat could see the fox that was still running as fast as he possibly could away from us. I kept the descent going until I was around 50 feet above ground and maybe 50 yards behind the fox, and then added power to stop my descent and begin a go-around procedure.

Lo and behold, when I began adding power, the fox must have realized how close we were, because when I did, he stopped his run dead in his tracks. The Fox then turned to face us and CHARGED AT THE AIRPLANE WITH HIS TEETH BARED IN A SNARL! This guy was NOT giving up without a fight! We went over the fox so close that to this day I can still recall seeing the individual teeth in his mouth!

I added full power, retracted my flaps, and started a climbing 180-degree right turn back towards home base. As I completed my turn, we all looked down at the fox. He was now standing still in the field, watching us as we began moving away from him.

I said to my passengers, “Now THAT is something you don’t see everyday!”