Wildlife G-men on patrol: Outdoor scofflaws keep agents busy

By KARL PUCKETT, Tribune Staff Writer — Feb 21, 2010

Brian Lakes, a special Agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, holds an immature bald eagle. The eagle is keep frozen in a freezer in an evidence room. Enforcing the Migratory Bird Treaty and Bald and Golden Eagle acts is a big part of the job of special agents with the service. This young bald eagle was shot. Agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are investigating three illegal shooting deaths of grizzlies in Montana, including two that had their paws removed. This paw was taken recently from a bear that died naturally in the wilderness. (TRIBUNE PHOTO/LARRY BECKNER TRIBUNE PHOTO/LARRY BE)

The grizzly bear claws, once sickle-shaped daggers used for digging and defending, could be dangling harmlessly now from the mirror of a pickup truck, or adorning a piece of jewelry such as a bracelet.

In 2009, three grizzly bears were illegally shot dead in northwest Montana. Adding insult to injury, two had their claws cut off.

Shooting grizzlies, a threatened species, is illegal. So is selling wildlife and animal parts such as claws.

Brian Lakes, a special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is investigating the Montana grizzly deaths, hopes to get his own claws into the perpetrators. But the cases are testing his investigative mettle.

Remote crime scenes in the wilderness, where Lakes walks the beat, do not easily give up their secrets.

"It's the old paraphrase, 'Shoot, shovel and shut up,'" Lakes said. "That's common."

The grizzly killings are just a sampling of the wildlife crimes Lakes and two other USFWS special agents investigate in Montana.

The agents are, in effect, G-men - only for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, not the FBI. Their job is investigating and solving federal crimes against wildlife such as grizzlies, eagles and fish and hunting the people who kill or sell them or both.

Lakes alone has 20 active cases on his desk. Some are routine.

"And then you have long-term, covert and undercover investigations," he said.

Frozen forensic evidence is kept in a freezer at Lakes' office outside of Great Falls.

The evidence locker, which is stocked full of animals, is evidence of the scale and variety of wildlife crime in the state.

"This is from one of the dead grizzly bears," said Lakes, producing a frozen grizzly paw the size of an apple pie.

That bear, it turned out, died of natural causes, but agents removed the paws so its claws wouldn't be taken.

Lakes pulls out another plastic bag, this one holding a young bald eagle. The bird had been shot. A head and rack of a moose sits on the floor nearby. Agents seized it from a Kansas hunter who tried to illegally bring it into Montana. He had shot the moose without a license in Alberta.


Even Russian criminals might be checking out the state's paddlefish for their roe.

"Agents are looking at them nationally because we had documented Russians coming in and buying them illegally," Lakes said. The Missouri River in Montana is paddlefish habitat, and agents here are now investigating whether sales are occurring this far north, Lakes said.

The public face of the USFWS is managing important wildlife habitat, such as national wildlife refuges, and bringing endangered species back from the brink. In northwest Montana, for example, wolves were removed from the list of threatened and endangered species last year.

Working behind the scenes, in plain clothes, special agents are the muscle behind the mission, enforcing 20 federal laws or treaties designed to protect imperiled species, such as grizzlies, under temporary jurisdiction of the federal government.

"We're kind of like FBI agents for federal wildlife laws," Lakes said.

Transporting animals or animal parts across international or state lines illegally also is investigated by the federal agents, who number about 200 nationwide.

Among their ranks are former FBI and Secret Service agents, but Lakes used to be a National Park Service ranger, serving stints in both Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Being a special agent satisfies his interest in both the outdoors and criminal investigations.

"All of us like protecting the wildlife," Lakes said.

Laws that often come into play in Montana are the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty and Bald and Golden Eagle acts and the Lacey Act, which bars transporting wildlife taken illegally in violation of state, federal or tribal law.

In 2007, the most recent data available, special USFWS agents investigated 12,177 illegal wildlife cases nationwide.

The cases ranged from investigations into the illegal trade of wildlife, such as endangered ocelots in Oregon and leopard sharks in California, to the shooting of wolves in Montana.

Endangered Species Act violations made up more than half of the 12,000 cases and make up a big part of the workload of agents in the West.

"That throws us into the sometimes pretty controversial world of grizzly bear and wolf enforcement," said Casper, Wyo.-based Dominic Domenici, the agent in charge of special agents in Montana and Wyoming.

Agents based in the West need to possess wilderness savvy more than big city street smarts, said Domenici, noting that horses or snowmobiles are necessary to get to some crime scenes.

Domenici said solving wildlife crime is especially challenging.

"We don't have victims who can talk to us," he said. "We just start with a much colder trail."

Lakes' beat is 36,388 square miles stretching from the Continental Divide to Malta in the east. The expanse includes 450 miles of Canadian border and four Indian reservations.

Agents based in Billings and Missoula handle the rest of the state.

"It's amazing to me how much ground each of them covers," said Chris Servheen, the Montana-based grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Lakes spends a lot of time driving, but he also has two horses at his disposal just in case.

"You could be going into remote areas with no back up," he said.

Solving the shooting deaths of the three grizzlies in 2009 is proving to be a challenge, Lakes said. As usual, nobody's talking.

"You're left with no evidence other than the bullet, and that's it," Lakes said.

But Lakes said he continues to conduct interviews. "We have leads."

Claws, 30 in all, were cut from the paws of two of the bears. Lakes can't say for sure why they were removed, but they might have been sold in the illegal wildlife market, he said.

Commercialization of bear body parts, especially claws and gall bladders, is common worldwide, he noted.

Lakes said he once worked a case in New Mexico in which he seized 3,000 bear claws illegally imported from Canada. They were on their way to a jeweler. Grizzly claws can fetch up to $10 a piece, he said.

Bear managers with the Blackfeet Tribe and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said they don't think the commercialization of bear parts is becoming a problem in Montana.

"I know that some folks might point to Natives doing that because of cultural reasons or something like that, but to tell you the truth, I think that it would be pretty common for non-tribal members to do it as well," said Dan Carney, a wildlife biologist with Blackfeet Fish and Game.

One of the bears was shot on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. The other was discovered west of the reservation, in Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Bear claws might be seen by some people as a "trophy sort of thing," Carney said.

"If there's a big market out there for grizzly bears, I haven't seen it," Servheen said.

Servheen suspects the killings were opportunistic, with unscrupulous individuals coming upon bears and killing them. Maybe others just found the carcasses and then removed the claws, perhaps hanging them in their truck to impress friends. If selling claws was common in Montana somebody probably would have been busted by now, he said.

Crime scenes of protected animals killed in the forest are treated no differently than a homicide, Domenici said.

Grizzlies, he noted, can be shot in self defense, which is not a crime. That makes it critical for agents to establish the facts, such as time of death and the bullet path, Domenici said.

"Sometimes, we can determine whether the bear was running, walking or standing its ground," Domenici said.

Special agents also work closely with state game wardens on illegal big game hunting. Outfitters arrange to guide out-of-state hunters. Sometimes, they don't purchase the necessary licenses for hunters, or take them to areas where they don't have a license to hunt, Lakes said. Undercover work is sometimes necessary for these cases.

The illegal sale of eagle feathers and deaths of migratory birds also are problems in Montana.

Lakes reaches into the freezer and pulls out another bag of evidence.

"This is a whole bunch of dead birds taken from an oil pit," he said.

Oil production operations produce waste fluids stored in the pits, which are supposed to be protected by nets.

Larks, sparrows and other species of birds fill the bag. When the oil pits are not covered, Lakes  explains, birds can land and die, unable to fly with oil coating their feathers.

"They think it's water," said Lakes.

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