MARYSVILLE – It’s probably not a good idea to offer a taxidermist $15,000 to stuff an endangered grizzly bear, or to brag to a meat cutter about bagging the 850-pound animal, especially when your freezer is full of illegal deer meat.
Seems like common sense.
Maybe not.
A 20-year-old Marysville man is facing up to $10,000 in fines for poaching.
He’s not in trouble for bringing down one of the mammoth bears, which can’t be hunted legally in Washington. But he’s in serious trouble for illegally killing a trophy deer, whose meat was found when officers searched the man’s house for signs of a slain grizzly.
“If you sat down with a 12-pack of beer to come up with a stupid story, you’d never touch this one,” state Department of Fish and Wildlife Sgt. Rich Phillips said. “We say it all the time – hunting and alcohol don’t mix.”
Wildlife officers picked up the scent of some illegal hunting earlier this year when an Eastern Washington taxidermist reported someone called him about finding a dead grizzly bear near Concrete.
The caller told the taxidermist the bear had four-inch claws and was seven feet long. The man claimed the bear was wearing a tracking collar that he’d cut off before wrestling the 700-pound animal into the bed of his pickup truck using a winch, according to court records.
The caller said he didn’t have the appropriate license or tags but offered the taxidermist $15,000 to stuff the bear posed over a mounted “deer kill.”
The Eastern Washington man said the caller sounded “drunk or on some kind of drugs,” according to a search warrant affidavit.
The taxidermist told game officers he refused to stuff the animal, encouraged the man to return the carcass to where he found it and then called the Washington State Patrol.
The report landed on the desk of state fish and wildlife officer Chris Clementson.
It is illegal to possess or hunt endangered animals. In Washington, the grizzly bear, or Ursus arctos horribilus, is listed as an endangered species.
It was highly unlikely the caller would have found a grizzly near Concrete. It is believed that there are only 40 or 50 grizzlies living in the Northern Cascades. It would be rare for a grizzly to be so far south, although a confirmed grizzly sighting occurred in 1996 near Glacier Peak in Snohomish County.
There was just enough about the phone call for an investigation, Clementson said.
Clementson learned the cell phone used to call the taxidermist also was used to call a Camano Island meat cutter.
The meat cutter relayed a similar story about a man who offered to pay to have a grizzly bear skinned. In that call, the bear had bulked up to 850 pounds and the caller said he’d shot the bear after it attacked his hounds while he was hunting.
The meat cutter told the man he couldn’t help him and urged him to dump the bear where he killed it. The man reportedly said “the thing is still wiggling and I have to go anyway,” and hung up.
Clementson tracked down the owner of the cell phone and obtained a warrant to search the man’s Marysville house.
He found no sign of a bear.
Officers did find packages of frozen deer meat,
antlers and a story that still has them shaking their heads.
“God bless stupidity,” Phillips said.
The Marysville man was cooperative and told officers he and two friends were driving down to a sportsmen show in Puyallup when one of his friends used his cell phone to make prank calls to the taxidermist and the meat cutter, Clementson said.
The Marysville man said he would have made the call himself, but he was laughing too hard to maintain the ruse, Clementson said.
“I think they just thought it would be funny,” Clementson said. “For them to think that we wouldn’t come looking is just crazy.”
According to the game officer, the Marysville man fessed up when asked about the nine packages of venison in his freezer.
The man said he and another group of friends were hunting in November just north of the Snohomish County line when they came across a four-point buck.
The man said he shot the deer.
The kill was poaching, because it happened at night, and the deer had been frozen in front of the hunters who had illegally illuminated it with a spotlight, Clementson said.
“I think it was a target of opportunity for them,” he said.
The Marysville man had no deer tag, and was licensed only to hunt bear and cougar, according to the officer.
He and two others, also 20, could be fined up to $10,000 for allegedly “spotlighting” the trophy buck, Clementson said.
No charges have been filed, but the case has been sent to Skagit County prosecutors.
Game officers say this isn’t the first time a case has taken a turn for the strange.
In the hunt for crimes against animals, they’ve come across marijuana fields, gambling operations and even a pet cougar.
Following the trail of a dead make-believe grizzly and bagging a poached trophy buck “well that’s a 1 in a 100 story,” Phillips said.
Reporter Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463 or hefley@heraldnet.com.
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