Intrepid reporter cracks evil black helicopter plot

I‘ve heard these rumors before, but this time I reluctantly agreed with the caller who left me a voice mail message. All the pieces in the government scheme seemed to fit:

A black helicopter was flying low over Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge on Oct. 3. When the muzzleloader elk season opened on Oct. 7, a bunch of hunters didn’t fill their tags.

Those are the facts.

If that’s not enough to convince you that something fishy is going on, consider that just one month later, the Democrats are taking over Congress.

Holy Undercover Agents! This is a mission for The Spokesman-Review Outdoors Department’s hotshot conspiracy-busting team.

I’d like to say I slaved over this one, risked my life, drank cocktails with James Bond and exploded bombs to evade camouflaged double agents trying to keep this secret out of the press.

But honestly, at the cost of just a half dozen phone calls I solved most of the mystery – not the part about how the Dems duped America – just the important facts for sportsmen.

Nothing gets the rumor mill going faster than a black helicopter flying during fall hunting seasons. While I was elk hunting a few years ago in Pend Oreille County, a local hunter told me that he knew for a fact that the state Department of Fish and Wildlife used helicopters in northeastern Washington to herd the elk eastward, over the mountains and into Idaho just before the opener.

He was dead serious. Never mind that herding elk through the thick brush and timber of PDO County would be impossible even with hundreds of helicopters. And why would a Washington agency want to push elk into a neighboring state where hunting seasons occur?

The rumor is absurd, yet wildlife agencies in any state are blamed for trying to foil hunters when aircraft fly over big-game country.

Idaho Fish and Game Department officials issue press releases to warn hunters of scheduled aerial surveys, but they still routinely are accused of trying to ruin the hunting.

“If anyone looked at our budgets, they’d know we don’t have the funding to scare wildlife,” said Kevin Robinette, WDFW regional wildlife manager in Spokane.

Indeed, the agency had to skip aerial surveys over Turnbull last year to scrounge the $4,800 needed to fly a nine-hour day on Oct. 3.

“If we could have picked the color of the helicopter, we’d have gone for red or green or something, but black is all that was available from Inland Helicopters,” he said.

Here’s the scoop on the Turnbull flights.

State biologists are working with Turnbull Refuge staff on a proposal to issue for the first time a few elk permits for hunting inside the refuge boundaries. Elk that take sanctuary in the refuge have increased to the point that they are doing serious damage to the ecology.

The most obvious impact is the reduction elk have caused in aspen stands, which in turn affects all sorts of critters, including woodpeckers and songbirds.

Hunters inside the refuge could take a few animals, but more important, they would keep the herd moving, reducing their impact on the refuge and making more of them available to hunters outside the refuge.

But before this can happen, biologist must make the case scientifically. Getting good surveys of the elk population will help them set the proper number of permits and monitor the elk in future years to make sure the elk aren’t overhunted or disturbed too much.

While most aerial population surveys are done in winter, spring and summer, biologists occasionally have good reasons for flying during fall.

“We flew Turnbull in November of 2004, after the hunting seasons and we counted 354 elk,” said Howard Ferguson, WDFW district biologist. “But of the 36 bulls we counted, only three were mature branch-antlered bulls, so we suspected we weren’t seeing them all.”

This year, he timed the flight for the week before the muzzleloader season.

“We wanted to survey when the elk were still a little in the rut so we’d have a better chance of seeing the big bulls in the open,” he said. “We didn’t want to interfere with the archery season, and we were done four days before the muzzleloader season. We thought that would be the least impact on hunters.”

The hunch was right. This year, they found 369 elk in Turnbull, including 39 bulls, 11 of them big mature bulls. This gives them a better idea of herd composition.

Of course, like any sportsman, I don’t trust biologists to tell me the truth about everything, so I called Dave Valenti of Inland Helicopters and asked him point blank:

“Why the black helicopter? Don’t you know it screws with the minds of hunters?”

“Not just hunters,” he said. “I flew over to Kellogg one time for a car dealership and I couldn’t believe it was in the Coeur d’Alene Press the next day. They reported the black helicopter flying over the area and then the article ended saying, ‘The helicopter mysteriously disappeared to the west.’

“Well, of course it disappeared to the west because I flew back to Felts Field for lunch. If I’d have been in a pink helicopter, they’d have said, ‘The cute little helicopter pranced off to the west.’ “

Valenti said the black helicopter he flies is often associated with some sort of clandestine operation, maybe from the top-secret Area 51 military base in the Nevada desert.

“A pilot buys a black helicopter for the same reason you might buy a black Chevy,” he said. “It looks cool. I’d prefer to fly a red or orange one because, if you ever crashed, it would be easier to find. But the people I lease this from originally bought it for a toy, and they liked black.”

Case closed.

Warning: WDFW biologists have funding for a special aerial rutting deer survey to occur on six days from mid to late November in Lincoln and Whitman counties. These guys will be wearing white hats, even if they’re in a black helicopter.