28 // Grant County Hunting Journal 2020 // MyEagleNews.com
MEET BUCK
Oregon’s only anti-poaching K-9
Blue Mountain Eagle
F
resh snow had just melted and the scent trail was
more than a day old when a yellow Labrador
retriever named Buck went in search of evidence
linked to an elk that had been poached on
March 19 near Cottage Grove. Time — and
snow — work against tracking dogs. Still, Buck was
hot on the scent of gunpowder and shell casings.
He found casings, also known as brass, among
grass and twigs, invisible to the human eye.
Three times Buck signaled his handler, Oregon
State Police Fish and Wildlife Senior Trooper
Josh Wolcott.
Finding three casings confirmed the story OSP
F&W Senior Trooper Martin Maher had heard
from two suspected poachers, according to a press
release. Five shots had been reported through the
Turn In Poachers Line, five bullets recovered, two
elk were down. During his interview with members of
the hunting party, the deceptions of that morning came
out. First, the teenager claimed he had shot both elk. He
had a tag for one, and the other he had shot accidentally. How-
ever, his tag was for a different unit so it was invalid. Both kills
were poaching. The penalties would be severe.
Then another member of the group confessed. He had
poached the second elk in two shots, then picked up his brass
to conceal evidence of the crime. They had not anticipated the
shots would be reported. Or that they would be approached
by Senior Trooper Maher, who would spot the second carcass
nearby. And they certainly hadn’t anticipated that Buck, Ore-
gon’s only anti-poaching K-9 unit, would be able to track the
scene of the crime to confirm the number of brass casings fol-
lowing an overnight snowfall.
Buck is just one resource in Oregon’s anti-poaching arse-
nal. The culture of poaching is pervasive and entrenched, as
demonstrated by the young elk hunter’s inauguration into the
deceptive practice of hiding a wildlife crime.
The Oregon Hunters Association and Defenders of Wild-
life, a national conservation group, both lobbied for stron-
ger legislation and prosecution against poachers. In January,
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife launched a new
anti-poaching education and awareness campaign to teach
Oregonians how to recognize and report poaching. Because of
Oregon’s vast land and water areas, assistance from the pub-
lic is the only hope for unearthing crimes that are all too easy
to bury.
That’s where Buck comes in. Buck locates gunpowder res-
idue, human scent and evidence trails that troopers would not
find visually. Sometimes that scent leads to additional evidence.
Sometimes the scent itself marks a specific location.
Earlier this year, OSP F&W troopers served a search war-
rant on a residence in Roseburg. Residents were suspected of
poaching various bird and game species in the area. Troopers
suspected the evidence had been burned or buried. Or both.
Contributed photo
Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife Senior Trooper Josh
Wolcott and anti-poaching K-9 Buck pose after patrolling
during pronghorn antelope season.
They were right. When Wolcott gave Buck the “show me,” com-
mand, the dog surveyed the area by scent and found remnants
of a burned turkey carcass and feathers in a fire pit. They found
deer bones in burn barrels. They thought they were done, but
Buck signaled a find to Trooper Wolcott, in front of an old over-
turned boat.
“We could smell something bad,” Trooper Wolcott said. “It
smelled like old rotten insulation.” Buck gave the signal that he
had found what he was looking for. Trooper Wolcott and OSP
F&W Trooper Jason Stone started looking. They found a par-
tially decomposed buck deer under a blue tarp under the tran-
som of the boat.
Buck started his career with OSP F&W and Senior Trooper
Wolcott in 2018. They completed training in Indiana at the
Canine Resource Protection School and began working as a
team in May of 2019. Buck proved his worth immediately.
Their first assignment as an anti-poaching team was a satu-
ration patrol during pronghorn antelope season on Hart Moun-
tain in Eastern Oregon. Trooper Wolcott positioned himself on
a high plateau and glassed the ridges and valleys around him.
He saw a pair of hunters aim for and kill an antelope buck. He
continued watching, waiting for them to tag the animal. They
didn’t. He watched as one of the pair started hiking out of the
kill zone. Wolcott knew what would come next: The man would
return with a four-wheeler, they would load up the animal and
be gone. He suspected they would try to get away with the ani-
mal without tagging it because either they didn’t have tags and
were poaching from the start, or they had tags, but would high-
grade. High grading, also called trading up, is when some-
one kills an animal, but delays tagging it in hopes of get-
ting a larger one later. In those cases, the smaller animal
is often hidden and left to waste.
When Trooper Wolcott saw the man leave the
site in a hurry, he knew the race was on. He got
in his pickup, started the engine and looked for
a road that would take him nearest the kill site.
But he was unfamiliar with the territory and
had to loop around, then hike in to where he
thought it was. When he got there, 30 minutes
had passed, and there was no sign of the men,
the antelope or a four-wheeler. He thought he
had lost them, and was going to give up, but Buck
started signaling that he was on a scent. Wolcott
followed Buck more than a mile across two ridges
and another canyon, eventually finding the kill site.
Both men were loading the antelope onto a four-wheeler.
It had been over an hour, and the antelope still had not been
tagged. When the men saw Wolcott and Buck, they placed a
tag on the antelope. Wolcott cited them for failure to immedi-
ately tag their animal.
Buck and Trooper Wolcott will continue as a team, barring
the unexpected, until Buck reaches retirement age, which is
about 9 years old. Part of Buck’s assignment, along with all
Oregon State Troopers, is community development and rela-
tionship-building. A larger part is paws-on-the-ground nose
work to detect poaching.
It can be difficult to find the scene of a crime with no vis-
ible evidence. For Buck, it is a game.
“He has the best job a dog can have,” says Trooper Wol-
cott, “He’s doing what comes naturally to a dog like him and
then he gets to play.”
When Buck catches the scent, it looks like a fish on the
end of a line. His grace changes to chaos as he whips his nose
high in the air, holding it in place to catch the scent. His body
flails behind, changing direction in mid-air. Then its game on.
He plunges to the ground and runs his nostrils along the turf
like a vacuum, sucking up every morsel of scent. He is thor-
ough if not methodical, sampling grass here, ground there,
and the wind constantly. When he finds the scent, he signals
by stopping, sitting and then looking over his shoulder expec-
tantly at Trooper Wolcott.
For Buck, the payoff for a job well done is straightforward:
play time with Trooper Wolcott. Buck switches from working
the case to retrieving a ball in an instant. Watching Buck switch
from working dog to playing dog is a transformation exemplary
of perfect work-life balance. He has mastered the art of com-
partmentalization. When he runs fast after the ball, every ounce
of his purpose dedicated to the chase, he demonstrates what it
means to live in the moment.