1,000 reasons why you shouldn't trash any fish
Bowfishers who tossed gar pay $1,200 in fees, one takes 6-month license suspension
[Correction: ODWC biologists note the Red River kill was made up of a variety of gar that included shortnose, spotted and perhaps some longnose gar. An earlier version of this column focused only on longnose gar]
It’s an old story now; if you’re going to do something illegal don’t post photos or videos of it on Facebook or you’re likely to pay dearly.
It’s also that story where people probably posted things on Facebook because they didn’t simply didn’t realize they were doing something wrong.
Now we can all thank a trio of bowfishers who tossed more than 1,000 gar into a tributary of the Red River or providing a very public and egregious example that shows others the error of their ways.
It’s the hard way to learn, but maybe it’s good for folks in general.
I’ve been there. I kept over my limit on crappie one time and actually busted myself by writing about the number taken in my Tulsa World column. I turned myself in, happily paid a $100 administrative fee to the department (which I kinda saw as a donation) and wrote another column about how someone who should know better managed to screw up.
Three men who went bowfishing on the Red River in May, whacked more than 1,000 gar and shared photos and a video of themselves using a clicker to count them down as they emptied the filled-to-the gunnels airboat by tossing the carcasses overboard. They had their day in court early this week and they ended up paying a lot of fines—but actually paid less to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Department than I did.
Don’t dump fish in water or on the bank
Lt. Col. Wade Farrar, assistant chief of the Wildlife Law Enforcement Division said the agency was tagged and notified about the Facebook posts back in May.
The photos of the big Phoenix airboat stuffed to the gunnels with gar were not an issue. There is no bag limit on the gar they killed, only the larger alligator gar. But the video of the men throwing the fish overboard without gutting them certainly was an issue.
“We had personnel who knew who they were and where they fished,” Farrar said. “A fisheries biologist went to the area the next day and took pictures and documented hundreds of them floating along the banks,” he said.
The law against dumping fish is set in Title 29, Section 7-403-A, but most might recognize verbiage from the Oklahoma Hunting and Fishing Regulations Guide under General Regulations and the heading, “It is Unlawful To.”
The passage reads: “Catch fish that are dead or die as a result of angling from any waters of the state, and not remove those fish and bury or burn them, except nothing will prevent anglers from returning fish remains, meaning any fish that has been filleted or has had the entrails removed, to lakes and reservoirs (any fish that does not meet length requirements must be returned to the water immediately). No person may bury or burn any dead fish where it will become exposed through erosion or where that land is at any time subject to overflow.”
Farrar said the dead gar not only created a nasty mess, but added that biologists told him this many dead gar rotting in that section of Hickory Creek during the spawn would deter other gar from spawning in that area.
“So it impacts that stretch of spawning habitat and you lose that as well,” he said.
If they had taken a machete or a hatchet to the fish and gutted them and made sure they sank when placed back in the water they would not have had a problem, he said.
Just as an aside for the uninitiated, gar have big, tough scales and are not easy to cut.
Another aside, as I wrote this someone posted a Facebook rant about behavior witnessed at the Lower Illinois River. An angler tossed a big freshwater drum on the bank to die. He apparently told the person posting the rant that he was doing it because it was a “trash fish.”
The person posting the exchange on Facebook said he manage to make the person put the fish back in the water and it survived. Good for him. Not only is that native fish not “trash” but throwing it on the bank is illegal.
Farrar said this is a law that is difficult to enforce. Anglers and bowfishers really need to police their own, like the person who called out the guy on the Lower Illinois and like the people who tagged the video of the bowfishers to the Wildlife Department.
“When I was in Logan county we would get that call often. During spawning season a lot of the time the gar would be thick in the creek and there would be 500 dead gar on the bank stinking things up right through town, but the call was always after-the-fact so it was hard to enforce,” he said.
Experience doesn’t always count
From their social media posts the men appear to be experienced bowfishers, that at least one of them participates in bowfishing tournaments, and they have the investment in an airboat and archery equipment and skill and local knowledge that made them capable of arrowing more than 1,000 fish in what must have been a heckuva bowfishing marathon.
Still, they told officials they simply didn’t realize they were in error.
“They’ve been pretty humbled by the whole thing and have been very cooperative and helpful from the start, which isn’t always the case,” said Royce Gillham, game warden for Love County. “It’s been one of those ‘we screwed up’ kind of things and they’ve taken responsibility.”
It could be similar to an outdoors writer with decades of experience taking almost twice his limit of crappie one day, I guess. Experience can play against us when we become over-confident in our knowledge and think we know all the rules or assume the rules for one body of water are the same as another.
It never, ever, hurts to grab that rulebook and just review it as if you’re starting out like a newbie. It’s one thing to know the rules. It’s another to know them well enough to flip open the book and immediately point to a passage regarding your current activity because you’ve reviewed them.
Read the regulations, read them often. It’s a good habit.
In Love County District Court
Court records show Love County District Attorney Samson Buck brought misdemeanor charges against each man for “improper disposal of fish” and they appeared June 30 in Love County District Court.
Associate District Judge Todd Hicks gave each of the three defendants an option: They could pay a fine of $862.50 plus $346.50 in court costs and a minimal VCA (a non-violent misdemeanor criminal actor fine) of $30. Or they could take a sentence of six months in county jail, suspended, with 6 months hunting and fishing privileges revoked and a smaller fine of $100, plus $346.50 in court costs and the $30 VCA fine. All three men pled guilty.
Colton Cook of Ardmore paid the full $1,239 on the day in court, Shayne McDonald of Purcell took the larger fine and agreed to pay $200 a month beginning July 1, and Zachary Sewell of Mount Pleasant, Texas paid $476.50 on the day in court and had his license revoked for 6 months, according to court records.
Sewell’s licenses are in effect revoked nationwide for six months because of the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact, Farrar said.
According to the court records the amount of the fines going directly to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation was $50 each for each case.
