Stopping Poachers is Worth the Wait

MOORE HAVEN, Fla. _ Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers John Snow and Eddie Brown lay flat on their backs in the rainy dark on the levee circling Lake Okeechobee early Saturday. The off-and-on drizzle dampened their uniforms, mosquitoes chewed on areas of exposed flesh and fire ants crawled inside their socks. About 50 yards below the officers’ uncomfortable hiding place, two men in a skiff shined a Q-beam spotlight along the banks of the rim canal.

It was clear the boaters were searching for alligators as part of the statewide public hunt that began Aug. 15 and runs through Nov. 1, but they aroused the officers’ suspicions because their boat displayed no red-and-green running lights, which are required by law.

The boaters might be poachers or they might not be.

Snow and Brown were prepared to wait them out, having discovered their truck and trailer parked at a nearby boat ramp.

Snow, a 28-year FWC veteran, couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation.

“Could you see a Metro-Dade cop out here in the rain and the mosquitoes over an alligator?” he asked.

Snow, Brown and 10 other officers were part of a special weekend law enforcement detail targeting gator poachers on the Big O. Though the FWC issued more than 4,500 alligator harvest permits in a lottery earlier this summer, some hunters are determined to take more than their legal bag limit of two apiece.

Like lobster mini-season poachers who make multiple trips after scoring their daily bag limit, gator poachers purposely fail to attach the required tag to the animal’s tail after harvesting it. After catching a small gator, they sometimes stash the animal on land, saving the tag for a bigger trophy.

But the FWC is onto them, thanks to helicopters sporting infrared beams that can pinpoint a gator tail from the air, night-vision binoculars that light up a distant airboat and its occupants, and specially trained dogs that can sniff out gator parts inside sealed containers.

Because of the drizzle, Friday night and early Saturday were fairly slow on the big lake, with only 10 boats visible to the chopper crew. Land-based officers figured their best bet was to conduct surveillance from levees and boat ramps. They relished the challenge.

“Hours and hours of total boredom and moments of tremendous exhilaration _ the active catch,” Snow said. “I’ve swam across sloughs to catch people. There’s no money in it. Just good fun, I guess.”

Earlier that evening, Snow and Brown had stopped three airboats and a john boat with five men, three women and two children traveling together near Fisheating Bay. Surprisingly, none of the craft contained alligator parts, hunting equipment, or fishing rods.

What were those people doing out on the lake on a rainy Friday night?

“They’re from Palmdale,” Snow replied cryptically, referring to a very small, nearby town.

Which means . . .?

“They were just out there, riding around,” he said.

With not much buzzing other than mosquitoes, it was a long and quiet night until Lt. Camille Soverel and her colleagues busted a Wellington alligator hunter in Indiantown.

The officers watched from across a ditch as the hunter brought a five-foot gator to a dock behind a house and began butchering it. The man threw the tail in the water without a tag and officers recovered it. He faces misdemeanor charges that could carry a $500 fine and up to a year in jail.

The officers’ delight in the “catch” is often mixed with frustration at the treatment their resource violations cases get from indifferent prosecutors and judges. Several related stories of seemingly airtight cases for fishing and hunting violations were dropped by states’ attorneys or dismissed by judges.

“You can’t let it bother you. You just have to do your job,” Snow said.

So what keeps them going despite low pay, long, inconvenient hours and little satisfaction from the court system?

“I don’t know,” Brown, 30, chuckled. “We ain’t right.”

Then, growing serious, he added, “Devotion to protecting the resources. If it wasn’t gator hunting, it would be snook fishing or deer hunting.”

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(c) 2007, The Miami Herald.

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