An Aerial Hunt for Poachers of Black Abalone

The radio crackles. A voice descends from the heavens, from all-seeing eyes in the sky.

“Three guys on the rocks just below the pier. One has a bucket. Can you handle?”

Copy that.

Lt. Jorge Gross, a state Fish and Game warden, swings his dark green pickup back onto California 1. Following directions from a warden in a plane overhead, he races off in pursuit of suspected abalone poachers.

California’s central coast is prime poaching territory for black abalone for a good reason. It’s one of the few places where there are any left.

A recent winter day seemed perfect for “rock-pickers,” as abalone poachers are called.

The ocean has pulled far back; a minus tide exposed the abundant sea life clinging to the rocky shoreline. The late-afternoon sun is an orange blob, ready to be swallowed by the sea, making anyone on the rocks hard to see.

So Gross joined half a dozen other wardens racing along California 1 to locate poachers before darkness allows them to slip away unseen. The race never seems to end as wardens mount a desperate attempt to save the remnant population of a vanishing species.

Pity the lowly black abalone. For decades, it was dismissed as a trash shellfish more suitable for bait than a gastronomic treat. It is smaller and its flesh far tougher than its more delectable cousins: the red, white, green and pink abalone.

But when fishermen had picked the sea floor clean of other species, they turned their pry bars on black abalone, pulling them off rocks in the shallows where they live.

Black abalone that eluded harvesting were claimed by insidious bacteria that disrupt their digestive system so they wither and eventually die of starvation.

Biologists estimate that 99% of the millions of black abalone that once inhabited coastal waters off California are gone.

“Extinction rarely happens for any one reason,” said Konstantin Karpov, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game. “It usually takes cumulative impacts to knock an animal off the planet.”

That’s why he and other abalone experts worry. Poachers often think that their small harvest will make little difference, wardens say. Yet, the poachers’ prey represent the few remaining black abalone likely to be resistant to the fatal withering syndrome. Their survival offers the only hope for the species.

Any poaching, as wardens like to say, is a recipe for disaster.

It has been illegal to harvest any type of abalone from Southern and Central California since 1997, when wildlife officials realized that size limits and other management techniques had failed.

The only legal harvest is of red abalone in the cold, murky waters north of San Francisco by sport divers who are barred from using scuba tanks or other underwater breathing devices.

Such free-divers are now limited to three red abalone a day, and a maximum of 24 a year. The catch limits were lowered last month by the state Fish and Game Commission, partly in reaction to intensive poaching.

The price of abalone continues to surge on a black market, where one abalone can fetch as much as $100. Often, the illegal catch is smuggled overseas to Asia, where it is sold in top sushi restaurants as a rare delicacy or in traditional medicine shops as an aphrodisiac.

Larger poaching rings focus on red abalone along the northern coast, where poachers sometimes scuba dive at night to avoid detection.

Unlike their deeper-dwelling cousins, black abalone are the most vulnerable to human hands because they live in the tidal shallows. These ear-shaped mollusks are often left exposed or within easy reach during the lowest tides.

So poachers focus on isolated stretches of the central coast. The craggy shoreline provides countless hiding places, mainly tide pools that are often difficult to spot by wardens patrolling California 1.

That’s why every few months, Warden Drew Brandy clamors in a twin-prop observation plane owned by the Fish and Game department. Flying about 500 feet above the surf and using powerful binoculars, he can easily pick out humans squatting among the rocks.

“It is too remote for a warden to check all of these areas,” Brandy said. “The bad guys get on these private ranches and think they have carte blanche.”

So, all afternoon Brandy is radioing reports of suspicious characters on the rocks, directing officers below in their dark green pickups to head for Cayucos, Moonstone Beach, Piedras Blancas and the cliffs just above San Simeon Point.

Gross and two other wardens converge at one spot. They hop a barbed wire fence and stroll warily across pastures that hold the Hearst Ranch’s prized bulls. From the bluff top, they scan the beach for one fellow that Brandy has reported in a white shirt and blue backpack.

“Got a visual?” Brandy asks from the plane circling overhead.

“No, not yet,” Gross reports from the ground.

The cat-and-mouse game continues as the sun sets. Wardens try to match each vehicle parked along California 1 with people as they come up the bluffs.

Gross greets a family of five as it emerges from a steep embankment. Two girls are carrying shells. A 12-year-old boy holds a starfish upside-down in his hand.

The lieutenant frowns. He explains that if everyone took home a starfish or other critter, there would be nothing left.

“Oh, we’re not supposed to have it?” the father asks.

“No, you are not supposed to have it.”

Gross could have written a ticket for the offense. Instead, he offers to return the starfish to the tide pool from which it was removed. The family gratefully accepts his offer and hurries away.

During the previous day’s operation, Gross belly-crawled to a bluff top to bust a poacher with an illegal bucketful of owl limpets. He wrote tickets for fishermen for undersized cabezon and others for using a gaff to skewer baby octopuses from their hiding holes in the rocks. (Octopuses can be caught only by hand or fished by hook and line.)

But on this day, neither Gross nor any other warden comes upon a single abalone poacher.

All of the green pickup trucks converge on one isolated spot so the wardens can compare notes and await a trio of people who have not returned to their van even though it is long past dark.

“Oh, wow, what’s going on?” asks a longhaired, bearded mountain biker emerging from the darkness. He takes a few steps back as he notices uniformed wardens and their trucks. “Nothing fishy on me, honest,” he says, holding up his hands in surrender.

Usually, the eye-in-the-sky operations result in seizing buckets of abalone and citing a dozen poachers. Not today.

Is the word finally getting out about the plight of the abalone or about the wardens’ aggressive enforcement tactics? Or are the wardens just unlucky?

“I guess it’s good,” Gross says, none too confidently. “In the big picture, we want compliance. But as a warden, you always think you are at the wrong place at the wrong time.”