TWRA
Like pulling on a yarn that soon unravels an entire piece of clothing, Tennessee officials did just that when a tip about a couple of dead birds came in earlier this year. That tip spawned an intense investigation that ended up costing a Tennessee man a complete ban on hunting for the rest of his life.
It was late March when a concerned citizen rang up the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, reporting a couple of dead turkeys down in the Alexandria area. The caller was even good enough to forward along a photo they took of the vehicle they believed to have been involved in the killings.
Well, it didn’t take long for wardens to trace the tags and come up with a suspect for what they believed to be a small yet pursuable case. They soon ended up at the home of Austin Hale and managed to have a sit down where Hale admitted that he’d been in the area where the turkeys were shot, but denied being the one who killed them.
Acting on what turned out to be a pretty good hunch, they kept looking and soon found a bit more than what they bargained for.
Wardens started by reviewing harvest reports and noticed that most of them didn’t match the animals in his possession. Deer he had on hand had been taken outside legal seasons, then checked in later as if they’d been killed when seasons were open. That discrepancy alone enabled investigators to obtain a search warrant for his phones and other digital devices.
Hitting the evidentiary motherlode, what came off those devices pointed to illegal harvests going back to at least 2023.
A second warrant was served for his home and inside, wardens found what TWRA later called a substantial collection of illegally harvested wildlife parts that included eighteen deer mounts, fifty-two turkey beards, eighty-four turkey spurs, and one turkey fan mount. The agency said they believed that the vast majority of it was illegal and seized every bit of it as evidence.
Bling, bling | TWRA
Now with a tip, a truck photo, dirty harvest reports, phones, and a house full of parts, wardens sent him packing to court to answer for what he’d done. In late July, Hale entered a guilty plea to six counts of illegal possession of wildlife. The court stripped him of hunting privileges for life, ordered forfeiture of every wildlife part seized in the investigation, and put him on six years of supervised probation. He was also tasked with donating $1,000 to the Tennessee Hunter Education Fund and was entered into the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact, which means participating states will recognize and enforce Tennessee’s revocation.
In cases like these, a lifetime ban doesn’t sound like much for a man who already treated seasons and harvest reports as optional paperwork. Unfortunately in this case, the court was presented with a possession case, which was enough to seize the mounts, make him cough up $1,000 and put his name in the Interstate Compact.
While we’d all like to have seen him saddled with some real financial penalties or even jail time, for now, the ban will at least follow him across state lines. Whether it follows him into the field is another question, and one most of us likely already know the answer to.
