Gentleman officer

Encounters with snarling badgers, charging moose and landscape-munching elk on the South Hill are all in a day’s work for John McColgin.

“Dealing with wild animal complaints has become a huge part of the job, and occasionally they can get interesting,” the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department enforcement agent said.

Indeed, after 20 minutes of discussing his soon-to-end career, he hadn’t even mentioned poachers.

“Sometimes poachers are easier to deal with,” said McColgin, who will retire next week after 32 years of patrolling Spokane County. “I’ve never had to draw my gun other than in situations where it’s a routine thing, like night-time vehicle stop on a spotlighter or something.”

That alone puts McColgin in special category of enforcement officers who deal routinely with a clientele that’s armed with fishing knives or hunting firearms — and increasingly with criminals who have taken their drug habits to woods once occupied only by sportsmen and critters.

“He has a gift for dealing with the public and calming tense situations,” said Ray Kahler, a retired wildlife officer who worked with McColgin in Spokane County.

“He’s such a smooth talker, even poachers are willing to give up their stories to him. The next thing they know they have a ticket in their hand.”

With skills fit for a diplomat or counselor, McColgin has been a custom fit for overseeing a wildlife-rich landscape inundated by the rising tide of suburbia.

“The people moving into the outskirts of town aren’t like the farmers or ranchers who were scattered around there decades ago,” he said. “We have a lot of people coming into the area from different parts of the country and they aren’t as knowledgeable about wildlife. We get a lot more complaints about animals.”

Hunting is no longer an option to thin deer herds that are gobbling up many suburban landscapes, he said, noting, “It’s not safe to be shooting with houses every quarter mile.

“So people call us to do something about the problems, and we have to prioritize. I think people assume we’re like the county sheriff’s department, which might have a dozen officers on patrol at any one time, while Fish and Wildlife might have only one or two. The ladies who answer the phones in our regional office are good at explaining to people what we can do and what we can’t.”

The bottom line: “When you live among wild animals, sometimes you just have to learn to live with them,” he said.

“When we see somebody feeding deer in their backyard, we try to let them know there are consequences,” such as luring them across roads where they might be hit by a car.

“And we tell them, where ever deer concentrate, cougars are likely to follow.”

Anglers using bait and illegally keeping fish from the Spokane River create a steady stream of complaints, he said, noting, “It’s an education problem. It’s bad for the fishery and it’s bad for the people who eat those contaminated fish.”

Bears generate plenty of calls some years, especially during poor huckleberry crops, he said. “Sometimes the solution is so simple.

“People will call at night and ask for help because their dogs are in the backyard barking at a bear that’s gone up the tree. They seem shocked when we suggest that they bring the dogs inside, clean up the garbage, go back to sleep and let the bear leave.”

The dwindling knowledge of wildlife also is a concern in replacing seasoned officers such as McColgin and the other baby-boomers leaving the agency in a retirement exodus, said Lt. Richard Mann, the agency’s enforcement staff manger in Olympia.

Nearly half of the state’s 110 wildlife enforcement officers have retired in the past seven years, with most of the positions being replaced by new recruits, he said.

“We can teach new recruits the cop stuff, but the intimate wildlife knowledge these veterans are taking with them when they leave is harder for us to find,” he said.

Paul Mossman, a new officer who has been paired with McColgin on some patrols, said the veteran opened his eyes.

“He knows absolutely everyone,” Mossman said. “We’d drive the backroads and he’d point out good contacts. He’s been on my investigations and he always has a little different way of looking at them, maybe being a little less aggressive. He knows this area so well, and he’s fair and respectful with everybody. Now it’s just a matter of how much we can glean from him before he leaves.”

“One measure of a successful law enforcement officer is the number of public complaints received about his work,” said Capt. Mike Whorton, who supervises the Fish and Wildlife officers in the 10 easternmost counties. “Some officers have mannerisms that generate complaints. But in my 20 years as captain, I can remember only one complaint about John. It was not a conduct complaint. It was somebody upset that he had to take a fawn away from them.”

Area resident Ida Nokes praised McColgin for his investigation into the case of a man who shot a buck without permission on the acreage she and her husband own.

“With the information we gave, he was able to track down the deer. He used DNA to match the gut pile with the skin he found in Newport and he got the guy for trespassing and hunting without a license.

“He made a really good investigation,” she added. “We hate to see him retire. We tried to talk him out of it.”

As he has each year for many years, McColgin shared his knowledge of wildlife and enforcement with a hunter education class in Spokane last week. The students ranged from elementary school age to young adults working to become eligible to buy a state hunting license.

Wearing his uniform complete with sidearm, handcuffs, radio and more, he said chances are slim that they would ever meet in the field.

He urged them to be lawful hunters for their own good and ethical hunters for the good of the sport.

“Realize that (wildlife enforcement officers) are working for you,” he said. “We’re out there to make sure you all get a fair chance to harvest game, as long as it’s legal. When a poacher kills an animal illegally, he’s taking away something that otherwise would have been available to you.”

Some people approve of hunting and some people hate it, he told them.

“But there’s a lot of people in the middle, and you don’t want to turn them off to hunting with your conduct in public. Road hunting and draping bloody carcasses over the top of your vehicle are the types of things that can really upset some people.”

Being a sportsmen and a wildlife enforcement officer is much more complicated than it was 30 years ago, he said. To demonstrate, he unfolded the Washington big-game hunting rules for 1975, the year he began his career. The students chuckled as he revealed one 14-by-20-inch sheet, with a map on one side and the regulations on the other.

Then he held up the current big-game regulations pamphlet. “It’s nearly 90 pages,” he said. “Even I don’t know everything in here. I have to look things up, just like you.”

He held up the antlers of bucks and was pleased to see that even the 10-year-olds could distinguish the whitetail from the mule deer.

“That makes me feel good,” he said later. “There’s hope.”