Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden: A Memoir

Wildlife in the City

Wildlife in the City he city landscape was a never-ending source of “wildlife moments .” Several wildlife cases happened right in the city limits of Charleston. One afternoon I was enjoying a convivial oyster roast at a friend’s house near the Ashley River up beyond the Citadel. A good number of people were standing around the oyster tables in his backyard when their attention was attracted to periodic shots ringing out from across the river near Orange Grove Creek. More shots were heard as the evening progressed, and the guests began to ask me questions about what could the gunners possibly be shooting at and whether it was legal to shoot in the city limits. They also asked if I could tell from the frequency of the shots if the guns were plugged and if people in that section of the river ever got checked. Enough of that! I exited the party, dashed home across town, grabbed my johnboat, and sped to the boat ramp at the City Marina. From there I was soon running up the river. I went to the fork where Orange Grove Creek branches off Old Town Creek, and found a spread of decoys in front of two men in a small boat. They were not even a hundred yards away from several waterfront homes. When I pulled up in the marsh grass beside their boat, I could see a neat little pile of hooded mergansers on the seat between them. I politely informed them that they were legally allowed to have only one of those birds apiece and that they were violating a municipal ordinance by discharging firearms within the city limits of Charleston. I checked their “particulars” and found no other violations. (Game wardens did not enforce municipal ordinances.) Instructing them to pack up their gear, I wrote them T 190 Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden several tickets each for their excesses, seized their birds, and returned to the party where I was welcomed as a conquering hero. There were plenty of war stories told around the fire that night. Another downtown “hunt” took place in January 1982, off Lockwood Boulevard near the Charleston Coast Guard Base. My dispatcher contacted me on the radio to inform me of a phone call from the Coast Guard base in downtown Charleston reporting shots fired at a flock of ducks swimming in the open water between the street and the base. Being not too far away, I drove over to investigate. As I was coming down Lockwood toward Broad Street, I saw a pickup pulled over on the side of the road and a young boy at the edge of the marsh directing a black lab to fetch a duck floating belly up some distance out in the river. I walked up to the boy and asked him what he was doing, and he said that he just happened to be driving by and saw the dead duck and just happened to have his dog along and was sending it out to retrieve it. When I asked if I could look in his truck, he opened the door. I checked behind the seat and under it. There was no gun or shells, and since I really didn’t see anything that tied him with the ability to shoot, there was no case. I told him that the duck had been shot in the Charleston Bird Sanctuary and in the city limits, so if the dog returned with the duck, I was going to have to take it. That dog made an amazingly long retrieve and brought a canvasback right to the feet of its owner. I left after taking his name, address, phone number, and the bird. I stored the duck in my freezer, which was already bursting with plastic bags of frozen birds and beasts of every description that I was holding until they were needed as evidence. (That freezer full of critters became a large and nasty problem years later, in 1989, when the power was out for the better part of a week in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo.) A day or two after the duck shoot by the Coast Guard Base, someone told me the true story about what had transpired. My informant said that the boy I had interviewed on Lockwood and a friend had been watching that flock of canvasbacks just about every day. The two boys had concocted a scheme whereby one—after determining that the coast was...