Deer Poaching

Deer Breaking Into Your House and Poaching Your Eggs

I come from an urban culture. When someone mentions "poaching" I immediately think "eggs" or "salmon".

In Vernonia, "poaching" largely refers to the illegal practice of trespassing on another's property to hunt or steal game without permission. Yesterday I had my first run-in with this much discussed and frowned upon practice.

I was out front planting Weeping Plum (who, in fact, turned out to be Weeping Cherry...Japanese Weeping Cherry, actually) on the mound. I saw a large shiny black pickup drive up our road and then watched as it turned around and started heading back down again. The truck stopped and idled. It took me a moment to see that the driver was talking to someone on the side of the road--a person I was surprised to have not already noticed. The pickup drove off at a crawl and the pedestrian continued to walk in the same direction--that is, in the direction of our front gate. I discerned it was a woman, who looked, from far away, to be only partially unclothed--made more interesting by the fact that it was raining.
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Since I was on "the mound" I was quite visible. She waved at me. As I waved back I deduced that this must be our neighbor to the west--let's call her Anna. I stopped what I was doing and started walking over the pasture and toward the road. She was asking me something but I couldn't hear her well enough to decipher anything. As I picked across the field I heard her ask if I had seen a blue truck. Someone had hit a deer. She didn't think I had hit the deer. She didn't know who had hit it. At least she thought it was a deer. She wasn't sure. But the truck, the blue one, she thinks picked up the deer. From the road. If it was a deer. She's pretty sure it was a deer. 
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I was nodding and shaking my head and making noises of assent and questioning sounds when the shiny black truck came back. I could now see it was an Oregon State Fish & Wildlife vehicle. The officer was looking for the deer. Or the truck. Who may or may not have hit the deer. Or taken it away. If it was a deer. Because at this point there was no truck and no deer and nobody knew what was happening.

Especially me.

It turns out it is illegal to collect a dead or injured deer from the road. It is a type of "poaching". The only deer one is allowed to take home (or put in one's truck) are deer for which one has a license. A deer that can be accounted for, recorded and, essentially, paid for. One may not barrel down a road, hit a deer, take it home for dinner and call it a freebie. (I later learned this is a ridiculous thing to do even if you are desperate for deer meat. One, it can total your vehicle. Two, it causes all the blood to flow into the muscle tissue rendering the deer meat inedible. Three, it's stupid.) But, regardless of whether this blue pickup had hit the deer or not, it was still not ok for the driver to take the deer away. If there was a deer. To take away. 

The Fish & Wildlife guy got out of the truck and spoke with us. He really seemed to be taking this seriously and I respected that. Anna explained she had been driving home (I still can't figure this out) and she had spotted a small group of crows (yes, yes, I know, a murder) hovering and eating at something on the road that looked like a deer and yet she was "too far away" to tell if it really was a deer, but, come on, she's seen enough dead deer on the road to know a dead deer on the road when she sees one. She's pretty sure. (This would have put the deer in front of our property somewhere.) Anna then pulled into her driveway and was sitting on her porch with her grandson--I'm pretty sure this woman is younger than I am--and that's when she spotted the blue pickup suspiciously trolling up and down our road.  She called the F&W office and now here was this State Police officer looking for the deer. Or the truck. Or both the deer and the truck.

I feel I ought to qualify that Anna was not actually "partially clothed"-- she just had on a neutral colored spaghetti-strapped maxi dress that didn't register too well from far away. 

After I had asked and answered all the questions I could think of concerning people hunting on our land without our permission (poaching!) and blue trucks and dead deer, I extracted myself to finish planting Japanese Weeping Cherry. I had become a little concerned about men with guns going wherever they wanted and shooting things that moved. I didn't know if poaching was more often a planned thing or not. Does one purposefully go out to poach? Or does one find one's self tracking an animal that crosses a property line and decide to go after it anyway? Or does one simple spot a deer in someone's pasture while one is driving home from work, grab one's gun off one's gun rack, leap a fence and shoot it? Frankly, I'm not thrilled about any of these options.

When my husband and I were in the process of purchasing the property we found out we had "Land Owner's Privilege" which was the right to first refusal of a Buck Hunting License. We were entitled to two because there are two of us. I had planned on obtaining both licenses  and then purposefully not shooting the deer in order to preserve two lives. But I forgot. I suddenly regretted this.

My husband and I discussed what happened a bit later. Considering the myriad reasons one might stop at the sight of a dead deer in the road, it is hard to say whether a call to the Fish & Wildlife State Police was necessary. My husband and I once stopped to move a spotted baby deer from the road--to keep if from being more seriously mauled and for traffic safety. My husband once removed a deer to bury it--not on the side of the road--but on his own property. My point is, it would be hard to gauge the actual reason one might pick up a deer carcass. Anna mentioned trophy-hunting--possibly removing the head from a road kill and taking home the "rack". Not a trophy in my estimation--but then that is a cultural thing.

Sometimes I don't know where I am anymore.


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