Behind the Badge - Stop Signs Apply to All
Stop Signs Apply to All
District Game Warden Zachary Schuchard
I often get asked about my favorite day as a game warden and it’s awfully hard to pick just one.
There are far more good days than bad.
But one story comes to mind just about every time I get asked this question.
Sometime in 2017-19, we had been getting numerous calls about problematic turkeys in residential areas of Dickinson.
After receiving many complaints and not being able to catch the turkeys, we were getting a bit frustrated.
On this day there happened to be three of us available to respond to the turkey call.
It was district game warden Zane Manhart, warden Jake Miller, and me.
The call was from the southwest portion of Dickinson, so disposing of them was out of the question.
We grabbed an extra-large fishing net, a regular fishing net, and a cast net from the Dickinson Game and Fish office.
We set out with low hopes of accomplishing much because we had been repeatedly bested by the turkeys, and we didn’t have many options to try to take care of them.
But we gave it a try anyway.
Zane and I went looking for a couple of them in a backyard while Jake went along the street to look for them.
In the backyard, Zane and I found 3 turkeys.
We were able to corner one of them behind some lilac bushes and ended up getting one of the nets over top of it.
The other two turkeys had flown up on the roof of the house and began to walk up to the crest of the roof and down the other side toward the street.
Zane and I went around front to get a look at them again.
We were standing in the street when out of nowhere we heard wings flapping.
We looked up the street and saw a turkey flying about head high off the ground.
A second later, we saw Jake in a full sprint chasing the turkey.
Zane and I burst out laughing at the sight of Jake chasing a turkey on foot.
I went up to the intersection to see where they went.
I got there just in time to see the turkey fly headfirst into a stop sign and hear a loud “Thung!”
The turkey was alright and flew off just fine, but I think Jake and I might have pulled something from laughing so hard.
We took our one captured turkey back to the Dickinson Game and Fish office where we marked the turkey before taking it out to a wildlife management area to release it.
I never heard from anyone who had shot a marked turkey in the area after that, so I’m not sure what ever ended up happening to it.
Maybe it found a flock of turkeys and joined them or maybe it made its way into another town to get back to its rooftop perches.
I don’t know that this was my favorite day as a game warden, but it was definitely the day I laughed the hardest.