Agents in Poaching Sting Describe Hunt

On Oct. 1, 2001, an anonymous caller left a short but intriguing phone message on a turn-in-a-poacher hotline at the California Department of Fish and Game.

The caller said a guide was hunting black bears illegally with dogs in the mountains east of Bakersfield. The caller also accused the man of shooting bears out of trees to feed his dogs.

The phone message and several more like it troubled Fish and Game officials. Poaching -- the illegal killing of wildlife outside hunting season -- has long been a problem in California, where there are too few game wardens to cover vast tracts of mountains and forests.

But the sheer number of complaints about this one guide was cause for alarm. And if one poacher was acting with impunity, the agents suspected others were doing so too.

The Department of Fish and Game launched a 16-month investigation that ended with the arrests of 11 men in the San Joaquin Valley last month. Fish and Game officials said it was the largest bear-poaching bust in California in 20 years. All 11 have entered not guilty pleas.

“The more we learned about these guys, the more disgusting it was,” said Lt. Kathy Ponting, a member of Fish and Game’s anti-poaching unit.

Based on evidence collected in the case, wildlife officials say they believe several of the suspects were operating two loose-knit poaching rings that may have killed hundreds of bears illegally over the years.

“They ran bears anytime; it didn’t make a difference when it was,” said Michael Yraceburn, a Kern County deputy district attorney who is prosecuting the case. After receiving the initial tip about a guide named Mike Milam, two undercover Fish and Game agents called the Bakersfield hunting service that employed Milam and arranged to go hunting with him for a guide’s fee of $1,295 apiece.

Reports written by the undercover agents and filed in Kern County Superior Court gave the following account of what happened next. Milam’s Bakersfield attorney, Larry Fields, would not comment on the case.

In early December 2001, two agents said, they met Milam at a Denny’s restaurant in Bakersfield at 6 in the morning. Milam told them that bear hunting was slow, but the two agents stayed in touch with him.

In August, one of the agents said in the report, Milam invited the agent to go along while he trained his dogs. The agent quoted Milam as saying that the bear hunting was “hot” and that his dogs had treed 55 bears in the preceding weeks.

According to the report, one evening the agent and Milam drove from Bakersfield into the mountains. Along the way, Milam mentioned that it was against the law to pursue bears with dogs at that time of the year, but he said he didn’t care.

The agent said Milam boasted that Fish and Game couldn’t catch him.

As they drove slowly that night through the scrubby terrain dotted with oaks and pines about 30 miles south of Lake Isabella, Milam’s five dogs -- one named Scar -- began barking from the back of his truck. Milam stopped, released the hounds and, within seconds, the agent reported, they had treed a bear and her three cubs.

Standing under the pine, Milam threw a rock at the adult bear and then called off his dogs. Milam and the agent drove farther down the road before releasing the dogs again. Soon they ran another bear up a tree.

“We need to give them a reward once in a while,” the agent quoted Milam as saying of the dogs, which, depending on the level of training, can be worth thousands of dollars.

The agent said Milam then told him to shoot the bear in the neck and keep firing until it was dead. After the first shot, the bear fell to the ground; the agent killed it with four more shots.

“The dogs ran to the bear and started biting and tugging at the dead bear,” the agent wrote in his report.

Dogs can be used to pursue various species of game for 11 months of the year, but can be used to hunt bears only during the three-month fall bear-hunting season.

Although Milam hadn’t pulled the trigger, he would still be charged with killing the bear because he had allegedly led a hunt out of season and used dogs in an illegal pursuit.

“It’s our hope that taking one animal will save the larger number of animals in the long run,” said Capt. Nancy Foley of Fish and Game’s anti-poaching unit. In this case, it had been decided ahead of time that it might be necessary to sacrifice an animal so that the investigation could continue.

Under similar circumstances a month later, a second undercover agent shot a bear that he said had been treed by Milam’s dogs.

In the meantime, Fish and Game agents, tipped off by another informant, were pursuing a second suspected bear poacher, who was reported to be harassing bears in the Sequoia National Forest.

That investigation targeted Lodis Williams, 70, of Greenfield, Calif., a small town in the Salinas Valley.

According to Fish and Game officials, Williams and other hunting dog owners -- known as houndsmen -- often gathered to camp and to train their dogs in a remote part of the forest known as Landers Meadows.

After the agent gained Williams’ confidence, the report said, Williams repeatedly sent his dogs after bears.

In late January, agents arrested Milam, Williams and nine other men who frequently hunted with them. Nancy W. Keough, a Pacific Grove attorney, is defending Williams. She had no comment on specifics of the case. “He’s almost 71,” she said of Williams. “As you can well imagine, for someone who has never been in trouble in his entire life, it’s difficult.”

Milam was charged with several violations of state hunting laws, including conspiracy to kill bears illegally, which is a felony, using dogs to injure a bear and illegally hunting at night. Williams was charged with conspiracy to illegally hunt bears with dogs and several misdemeanors, including illegally shooting a deer.

The suspects were arraigned in the last two weeks in Kern County Superior Court. Milam, Williams and five others face felony charges of conspiring to break state hunting laws.

All 11 defendants pleaded not guilty and all but Williams, who remains in jail on $75,000 bail, were released on bond. Preliminary hearings for the suspects begin this week. For Fish and Game officials, the arrests represent a chance to beat odds stacked heavily against them. California has 250 to 275 game wardens patrolling the entire state, about one for every 600 to 1,100 square miles.

Officials said they are frustrated because they don’t know how many bears and other animals are killed by poachers in California each year -- although the state’s bear population is estimated to be more than 25,000 and growing.

“We know there’s a lot of poachers out there we didn’t get,” said Lt. Ponting.

Hunting animals such as bear, bobcat, fox and raccoons with hounds remains popular and legal in California. About half the bears killed legally in 2001 were taken by hunters who used dogs, according to the latest statistics available from Fish and Game.

One problem frequently citied by wildlife advocates is that hounds are also poachers’ preferred method of hunting because dogs will find and corner bears more frequently than people stalking the woods on foot. It is not always easy, for instance, for game wardens to distinguish between legal use of dogs to pursue a raccoon and illegal use in a bear hunt.

Another problem cited by critics of the practice is ethics. In the 1990s, voters in Oregon and Washington barred hunters from pursuing bears or mountain lions with dogs because many people found the practice unsporting.

Some Fish and Game officials have said allowing dogs into the woods for 11 months of the year makes it even more difficult to catch poachers.

“We have to be pretty lucky for someone to turn these guys in,” said Capt. Foley. “Sometimes that takes a poacher going above and beyond what even their friends think is acceptable.”