4 Minnesotans fined for shooting owls

[M.T. Bucket]

from Star Tribune

Quote:

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DULUTH -- Turns out that wildlife photographers weren't the only ones taking aim at the great gray owls that migrated into Minnesota by the thousands last winter.

Officials said Tuesday that four men from central and northern Minnesota paid heavy fines recently for shooting owls during an unusual invasion of the birds prompted by a rodent shortage in Canada.

In unrelated incidents, the men killed more than a dozen of the protected owls, and state conservation officers say they have other suspected violators they'd like to charge if they get more evidence.

One blamed the winged predators for a dip in the ruffed grouse population; another said owls attacked his pheasants.

"They're federally protected -- you can't shoot them for any reason," said Jeff Humphrey, a Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) conservation officer.

People who saw or heard about the poaching tipped off conservation officers, according to a DNR news release.

"Most people enjoyed driving around and seeing the owls," said Scott Staples, a DNR conservation officer in Carlton County. "So some people got pretty upset when they found out owls were being shot."

In January, Staples got a tip naming Jacob R. Line, 20, of Cromwell. Staples notified Brad Merrill, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Line confessed to Merrill that he'd shot an owl feeding near Cromwell, and he paid a fine of $850, the DNR release said.

"The owl killed a couple of pheasants; that's why he did it," Jacob Line's father, Roger Line, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "He told that to the DNR, but the DNR wasn't very understanding, I guess."

A similar tip in February led Staples to the nearby residence of Roy Line, 25, who reportedly shot an owl that attacked his chickens.

Like his relative, Jacob Line, Roy Line eventually confessed and paid an $850 fine, Staples said.

That same month, a tipster fingered Tyson Warner, 30, of rural Tamarack. Warner confessed to Staples and Merrill that he'd shot eight of the birds with small-caliber rifles.

When the DNR searched his fields with a dog, they found 10 owl carcasses.

Unlike the other violators, who received citations and did not have to appear in court, Warner was formally charged in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis with violations of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

He pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 24, the DNR reported.

He faces fines and restitution of $6,800 and a potential two-year suspension of his hunting, fishing and trapping privileges, the DNR's news release said.

Neither he nor Roy Line could be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, a tip to conservation officer Humphrey in March led him and agent Merrill to Ronald J. Mlaskoch, 54, of rural Willow River.

Mlaskoch confessed to shooting four owls in Pine County, and paid fines and restitution totaling $3,400, the DNR reported.

In an interview Tuesday, Mlaskoch said he knew that the birds were protected but that he shot them because "there's no grouse around here anymore; I took it upon myself to address the problem."

Humphrey said several people besides Mlaskoch have complained to the DNR that they believe the owls depressed the grouse population.

"My understanding is that's absolutely false," Humphrey said. "The owls are mousers. The reason people are seeing fewer grouse is because they're at a low point in their [population] cycle right now."

Scientific articles on great grays said that while they will eat grouse and other birds, they seldom succeed in catching them and subsist almost exclusively on small rodents.

Anyone with additional information or incidents can call the DNR at 1-800-652-9093.

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[Steve Foss]

This is a rough draft of the column I've written for the outdoors pages of the Timberjay. It will be online late tomrrow, on news stands Friday and in subscribers' mailboxes on Saturday.

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Really, they kill for one reason

By Steve Foss

You know there are people out there who are not as you are.

You believe in their right to be different. You must, because to deny them that expression is to deny your own. To squelch differences is to invite the sentence of a monochromatic society.

And I kill.

We’ll just get that right out there. I kill plants and animals to wear and eat.

I shoot deer for the dinner table, enable an industry to grow and slaughter cotton plants for my Fruit of the Looms, kill minnows to put on hooks to puncture fish for the so-called brain food they offer.

I have done, or condoned, these things most of my life. Expect I will continue as long as I’m alive.

I don’t, however, shoot great gray owls.

Well, it’s the law for one thing. But they only weigh a couple of pounds under those feathers, so I it would little profit an idle soul to try obtaining nourishment from one.

I’m talking, of course, about the fellows detailed in the story on this same page, the four guys charged with shooting great gray owls last winter. The owls came, along with northern hawk owls, in great numbers to Minnesota because populations of prey species such as voles and mice crashed in parts of Canada.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of owls came here, and birders and photographers from all over the United States came to be with them. We cherished their proximity while arguing among ourselves how much time we should spend that close to birds that were stressed and often malnourished. We hoped not to contribute even more stress. Stay off 200 yards and look through field glasses and spotting scopes? Spend no more than a few minutes with any given bird?

Photographers, faced with the need to get closer than that, grappled with ethics, with the idea of selling images for a living we obtained by taking advantage of another creature in an extreme condition.

Questions from sincere minds. Issues worth taking positions on. In the taking of those stances we found common ground in our respect for individual birds. For some of us, sitting near hunting gray ghosts brought benediction, an ease to the pain of everyday life among our own species.

But while we were pondering a responsible position among these birds, others were using them to sight in their rifles.

One man’s road to peace. Another man’s target.

Raptors have always been in the way of bullets.

From the “chicken” hawk that raids the hens scratching in the barnyard to the horned owl that grabs up the farm cat or eats the occasional game bird, people for centuries have eliminated predators rather than change their livestock husbandry practices to prevent depredation. Even after it became illegal under the Migratory Bird Act to do so.

I knew a man in North Dakota who called snowy owls “pole bunnies,” and drove around in his big Suburban with his high-powered deer rifle, experimenting with how many hundreds of yards away he could kill them from. I wondered at the time where the bullets landed after he missed shots at targets 40 feet higher than he and about 200 yards off. A .270 or 7mm mag will cover a lot of ground before expiring when elevated that way.

He told me he did this. I never saw it happen. But I didn’t doubt him.

They kill pheasants, he said. Just as there are those who say great grays were killing numbers of grouse last winter, which are in the early recovery stages from their periodic low population cycle.

A starving raptor might well tackle almost anything to eat, I guess. But the great grays, weighing as little as they do for their size, generally are adapted to hunting small rodents, and don’t have the body weight to carry off larger prey.

Did great grays kill grouse last year? I’d say it’s likely a few did.

Did such instincts warrant the death sentence of numbers of owls? Is that why these men pulled the trigger?

It’s not as though the owls made challenging targets. Big, they are, and anyone who wandered around in their presence realized you could practically walk right up to them. Rocks would have been as effective as rifles.

I could respect someone who wrestled with the ethics of killing these owls. Who weighed all the issues in his mind, who bent his thought on his relationship with the birds. Who, ultimately, after all that consideration, made a reasoned decision that it was in the best interests of the owls, of humans, of other animals, to shoot them.

Maybe that’s what happened here.

But probably I’m taking too great a pain to see it from the other side. Offering the potential credit of humility where it’s not due.

In my experience, people who shoot guns at harmless living things they don’t plan to utilize for food, clothing or ceremony do so for a single reason.

Because they can.

Contact Foss at (218) 365-3114 or [email protected].

[buzzsaw]

Well written Steve! People do things that are just not right and I hope they learn a lesson from the fines and press they are receiving. I think by writting about this issue you are educating alot of people who may or may not know better or have the common sense to not do something this foolish.

[fishwidow]

After seeing these birds last winter, it angers me that dopes like this are actually allowed to have the privleges of law abiding sportsmen. There could be no challenge in shooting a target this size at the ranges that were possible. Not only was this illegal, but uneduacated ignorant slobs like this lend credibilty to anti-hunting lobbies.

[M.T. Bucket]

I think you hit the nail on the head Steve. I think there are actually quite a few people out there that are opportunistic shooters. The kind of person that takes (or would take) advantage of laws allowing nongame animals to be taken because they are doing damage--laws pertaining to crows and cormorants come to mind--and shoots them for the pure pleasure of it rather than because they've actually experienced a problem with that creature. I feel that the "they eat all the grouse" line is about justifying the opportunity to pop an owl...but you've pretty much said this. I have no doubts that delisting the gray wolf will lead to the same sorts of events, only legally sanctioned.

fishwidow,

Nice point about this giving antihunting groups more ammunition.

[M.T. Bucket]

Wish I had a quacking dog....