Considering that New Hampshire Fish and Game is the oldest department of its kind in the country, dating back to the end of the Civil War, you’d think the state would have figured out its role by now.
Think again.
Despite more than a century of discussion and legislation and rule-making, yet another legislative committee is in the midst of pondering what exactly the department should do and how to pay for it. The central question is how an agency created to make things better for anglers and hunters, and which is supported in large part by their dollars, should deal with the modern outdoors filled with snowmobiling and hiking and bird-watching and ATV riding, not to mention wildlife conservation.
“I think we’re at the point where we need to embrace everybody,” said Col. Kevin Jordan, chief of law enforcement for Fish and Game. “There was a time when we only should have been concerned only about hunters and fishermen – those days are gone. The sooner we embrace it, the better off we’re all going to be.”
Perhaps, but consider this: In 1935, the official title of Fish and Game’s field staff was changed to “conservation officer,” which even today has a modern ring to it. But to many people in the department, including Jordan, the preferred title for these men and women harkens back to the days when arresting poachers was the main job, reflecting an emphasis on hunting and fishing that remains central to the department.
“Warden – that’s the title we all like,” he said.
The Department of Fish and Game – not “fish and wildlife,” which is the title of the equivalent department in all neighboring states but is not the title here, despite a few tries – isn’t huge by state government standards. It has a budget of about $32 million and a theoretical staff of 191 full-time positions, although 14 of them have no funding.
But Fish and Game has a much higher public profile than its size might warrant, thanks to our interest in such tasks as dealing with bears in suburbia or rescuing hikers on Franconia Ridge. North Woods Law, a reality show about Fish and Game officers in the New Hampshire woods, also helps.
Glenn Normandeau, executive director of Fish and Game, thinks there’s a bigger reason why so many people care about, and argue about, the department. He says interest in the outdoors – hunting and trapping in particular – hits a nerve in New Hampshire.
“Most people aren’t overly passionate about paving a highway, other than they want it done, but people are real passionate about their point of view for this,” he said. “This runs from our traditional hunters on one side to animal rights activists on the other side. They are all real passionate about it.”
Adding fuel to the fire are the sometimes conflicting roles that Fish and Game has to do. For example, it raises pheasants and releases hundreds of them each fall, not to support the species but so they can be shot and killed by bird hunters. At the same time, it has spent 15 years or more helping re-establish the common tern on the Isles of Shoals for wildlife conservation reasons only, since the tern is of no interest to any hunter.
The conflicting passions were on public display in 2016 when attempts to reinstate a hunting and trapping season for bobcats drew legions of people from all sides. The 11-member Fish and Game Commission – whose members, under law, were required to have “a resident fishing, hunting or trapping license in at least five of the 10 years preceding the appointment” – turned the idea down but only because of concerns that the federally endangered Canadian lynx might accidentally get trapped. With talk in the Trump administration of rescinding that endangered listing for lynx, the debate might be resurrected.
The current legislative attention was prodded by a 2008 audit of Fish and Game operations that raised questions about the future of its traditional sources of revenue, especially stagnant and declining numbers of hunting and fishing licenses. The group, called the Commission to Study the Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Fish and Game Department Operations, has met several times, with discussions centering on health-care costs as much as hunting seasons, and is supposed to make a report to the governor and state Legislature by the end of the year.
As reported in an unofficial history of the Fish and Game Department by author and outdoorsman Jack Noon of Sutton, the whole idea of a state agency patrolling the outdoors stemmed from the lucrative business of fishing for river-run species like Atlantic salmon and alewife, which were being throttled by industrial pollution – mills dumping sawdust into the Piscataqua River was a source of dispute as early as the late 1600s – and the construction of power dams.
In 1865, Noon wrote, the state Legislature created a two-man Commission on Fisheries to look into the matter, and set the pattern for future government action by failing to give the group any money.
Soon the oversight of hunting, especially deer hunting, was wrapped into its job description. In 1831, the state Legislature had removed all state laws overseeing hunting and trapping, and there were increasing concerns about loss of wildlife throughout the state. In 1878, the Fish Commissioners “would thereafter be known as Fish and Game Commissioners” but change remained slow. It wasn’t until after World War I that a full-time director was appointed, and not until World War II that the Fish and Game Department became really codified as a state agency.
During those decades and subsequent years, the Legislature continued to give the department a wide-ranging set of jobs. These included overseeing bait dealers, selling “emblems” to raise money for wildlife habitat protection and placating landowners so they would not close off their property to hunting and other outdoor fun. (New Hampshire is unusual among states in that most private woods and fields are open to all uses unless the owner posts signs saying otherwise.) The department even owns about 115 dams in the state, most of which were built decades ago to create fishing ponds and have since become maintenance headaches.
Occasionally the Fish and Game Department has been able to fend off efforts to add to its job description – most notably when it blocked attempts to move marine patrol duties over from state police – but in general the number of its responsibilities for both game and non-game wildlife continues to grow.
That all comes on top of its initial jobs of overseeing populations of game fish – the state has six fish hatcheries where trout are grown and distributed into lakes and rivers – and keeping an eye on hunting seasons for everything from moose to otter. Those seasons were set by the Legislature instead of Fish and Game’s wildlife biologists until 1988.
Then there is the role of being the police force and lead rescue agency for all our wild lands, which just sort of happened.
“As long as there have been wardens in the woods, if somebody got lost we were out there looking for them – and that is probably part of why it ended up this way,” Normandeau said.
This work is an increasing burden. In recent years the agency has regularly overspent its search-and-rescue budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars. While part of that has been covered by roughly $100,000 received annually through voluntary purchases of Hike Safe cards, the rest has been taken from general funds.
It’s not just well-publicized rescues of stranded hikers that are a problem, Jordan said.
“The high mountain stuff is probably 50 percent of it. That doesn’t include looking for dementia patients that have wandered off, or suicides – there are a surprising number of those. . . . The dive team is included in this, for all the drowning recoveries, or when OHRV (off-highway recreational vehicle) becomes search and rescue, say if a snowmobile goes into a lake,” he said.
Another growth area in work load comes from the state’s push to expand recreation by ATVs and dirt bikes. This is a booming industry for the North County in particular, echoing the way snowmobiling became a major recreational outlet in the 1970s, and law enforcement is scrambling to catch up.
“It’s not out of control, but in my opinion, we don’t have the control over it that we need to, not like snow machines,” Jordan said. He said soon he will be shifting two officers to do nothing but OHRV work, focusing on ATVs and dirt bikes in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter.
“We’re reached the point where we could have a field force in the state to do nothing but that, very similar to highway safety with state police,” he said.
So where does this leave Fish and Game’s traditional focus?
Many people in the hunting and fishing and trapping communities are worried that any changes will be a zero-sum game, that doing more for hikers or ATVers will mean doing less for them. This is particularly a concern as the number of hunting licenses issued in the state has slumped from a peak of more than 85,000 to slightly more than 55,000 now, reducing the size of their advocacy group.
Col. Jordan, even as he advocates for expanding participation in Fish and Game’s governance, agrees that changes “need to be done carefully.”
“We’re not trying to eliminate hunting, fishing (or) trapping. That would be a mistake,” said Jordan, who like many people at Fish and Game is a longtime hunter and angler. “That will always be important.”
He admits that there’s a practical reason for reaching out: budgets. If Fish and Game wants to get money from a wider swath of outdoors enthusiasts, either through new fees or by getting a piece of the state’s Meals and Rooms Tax, it is going to have to pay more attention to those people’s wishes.
“If we’re going to ask for their money, we’ve got to be ready to open our doors a little better and wider. We need to incorporate more opinions from non-sportsmen,” he said.
Normandeau agrees, although in a recent interview he sounded a little jaded.
“Everybody wants to help, but there’s no political will to actually impose the costs on anyone. The success stories in terms of state funding of conservation agencies have come in states that have ballot initiatives and they circumvent the legislature. That won’t happen in New Hampshire,” he said.
“There’s an emotional impulse to just mix the bag different – it’s going to save us a whole bunch of money. But if you shift rescue from this agency to that one, it’s still going to cost as much.”
Part of the problem, he said, is biological.
“Probably the biggest issue is that fisheries and wildlife management does not work on a political time scale. There’s virtually nothing that happens here that works on a two-year election cycle,” he said.
“People talk today that we’ve got more turkeys than we know what to do with. They forget that for 125 years we didn’t have any. From the first successful stocking in 1978 of, I think, 25 birds, it took 40 years to get where we are today. You can’t go to the Legislature and say, ‘look, we’re worth more money because two years ago we had none of these (turkeys) and now we have them all over the state.’ ”
Overseeing hunting and fishing is a necessary part of that job, he said, partly because the best data about wildlife populations to guide management is often gathered by what is known in official terminology as “consumptive users” and partly because conserving sometimes requires killing. Saving the endangered terns, for example, required some killing of non-endangered gulls that were eating tern eggs.
How this will play out is anybody’s guess. But perhaps something will happen that will assuage Jack Noon, the writer and outdoorsman, whose unofficial history of the department ends with a pointed barb.
Noon wrote that his irritation about poor New Hampshire government oversight of the outdoors, starting with the 1831 decision to throw out every law related to fish and wildlife and continuing through 20 decades of refusing to pay for things that Noon thinks were necessary, he had taken a typographic swipe at lawmakers.
“As an extremely petty revenge,” he wrote, “I have referred to its … members throughout this book as ‘legislators’ rather than ‘Legislators.’ ”
“I look forward to the day when I might thank you Legislators or your successors … for the support, at last adequate, that you have given to the Fish and Game Department.”
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
