In Tom McElroy's 20 years as a Virginia game warden, his daily rounds patrolling north of Charlottesville to Fauquier County went from being mostly about animals to mostly about people: new people in new homes, reporting a bear in the street or complaining about a deer that just wiped out a $50,000 landscaping job.
"Calls for service are astronomical compared to what it used to be," said McElroy, 41, who described urban refugees alarmed by the sight of a hunter or the sound of a gun. "Every orange hat they see, people call."
Sgt. Carl Martin checks the fishing documents of Ryan Dean of Luray. Martin is patrolling trout-stocked areas of Happy Creek.
(Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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The landscape for Virginia's game wardens -- law enforcement officers who deal with wildlife -- has changed in other, less obvious ways, and times are hard.
As development has made Virginia wardens' jobs more demanding, their number has declined steadily. Salaries have stagnated, and morale has been hammered by what some describe as a vengeful upper management bent on stifling dissension. Wardens have been especially irate over an incident in February 2004 in which they say four employees were unfairly disciplined after an all-terrain vehicle accident that severely injured a warden in Stafford County.
Tensions escalated in December after four top officials with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, which employs the wardens, took a private hunting trip to Zimbabwe and reportedly charged $12,000 on their state credit cards. The agency's board has reimbursed the state on their behalf, while Virginia's internal auditor investigates.
"People used to make a career out of being a game warden, but that's not true anymore," said Owen Heine, 29, of Woodstock, who quit last month after working as a warden for seven years. "The higher-ups can get away with whatever they want, but those of us in the field are punished for everything. It's those actions combined with the lack of pay that's causing this exodus."
Positions for wardens have dwindled from 165 in 1992 to 140, of which seven are vacant and 17 are filled by recruits in training. Agency officials blame the decline on the budget, flat since 2001, but wardens say -- and officials confirm -- that some warden positions have been turned into management-level jobs as wardens leave.
By the time McElroy left in November, he was one of two wardens assigned to patrol a five-county area east of the Blue Ridge, where there had been as many as seven wardens.
In northern and eastern Virginia, wardens whip from one world to another in the course of a day. In the morning, they can be patrolling rural waterways and woods -- on foot, by boat or on an ATV -- checking hunting and fishing licenses or investigating reports of illegal hunting or fishing. By afternoon, they can be responding to reports of shots fired in a subdivision, leading a wildlife class or stocking ponds and rivers with fish.
Even as the work expands and changes, salaries have not kept up, the Virginia Game Warden Association says. Wardens' salaries are 34 percent less than those of state police officers, according to the association. Many wardens make in the low $30,000s after a decade, and many hold second jobs. McElroy also worked as a paramedic. Another warden runs a dump truck business. One picks up deer roadkill for the state.
Before quitting last year, one warden sent an e-mail to his colleagues saying, "I found out that under both federal and state guidelines my family is living in poverty." The warden, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was making $28,000 after five years.
"I'm trying to right some wrongs and fix things that are broken . . . and compensation is at the top of my list," said Col. Terry Bradbery, chief of the state's game wardens.
The department is trying to fill warden slots by offering a higher starting salary this year: $31,000 to $32,000. That is more than the state pays about 14 percent of wardens already in the field, according to the wardens association, and a slap in the face to some veterans.
Past and current wardens say another slap came after the ATV accident, in which warden Kristin Headrick, 33, was severely injured when the ATV she was driving overturned. Headrick suffered brain damage and facial injuries and still has short-term memory problems. She was patrolling the woods along the Rappahannock River to keep people away from Embrey Dam, which was being blasted with explosives that day as part of its demolition.
