Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 23, 1994 TAG: 9401230114
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Inside are a couple of guys with loaded shotguns resting beside them. Road hunters.
They round a curve and spot what they've come for, a grouse standing at the road's edge.
The bird does not flush as the vehicle approaches. It is a sitting duck; a fish in a barrel.
One of the pickup occupants eases his shotgun out the window. The stillness of a winter day is shattered by the crack of a magnum load. The grouse flutters on the ditchbank amid specks of red in the snow.
Grouse are among the wildest of the upland game species, earned by reputable sportsmen only after laborious hikes in the deep woods and wing shot that demand both skill and luck.
But there is something about the late winter that can drive them out of the woods to the roadsides where they are easy pickings. Shooting them this way is a debasing charade of real hunting, a time when the self respect of all hunters dies along with a docile game bird.
Road hunters, be they after grouse or deer, generally are condemned by most hunters, yet the hunting fraternity has been slow to give enforcement officers the tools needed to deal with them.
A simple solution would be a law that makes it illegal to carry a loaded gun in a vehicle or a law that requires a gun to be both unloaded and cased.
"I think that would curb illegal hunting," said Col. Jeff Uerz, chief enforcement officer of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
Some fine sportsmen, however, would view that as an infringement on their rights.
The game department did pass a regulation last year that makes it illegal to carry a loaded firearm in or on a vehicle while on national forest or game department land.
"That has been very effective in curbing road hunting on the national forest and on our lands this season," Uerz said. "The biggest thing it has done in the mountain regions is protect the grouse."
The regulation makes anyone who carries a loaded gun in a vehicle a suspect. Without it, a game warden can follow a road hunter all day but can't make an arrest unless he sees a shot taken from a vehicle. While it is illegal to shoot from a road, in most parts of the state it is not a violation to carry a loaded gun.
That's why wardens have had to place decoy deer along highways to deal with serious road hunting problems.
Game department officials would like to see the unloaded gun regulation extended beyond national forest and department-owned land. The legislative wish list they sent to the Secretary of Natural Resources contained such a request, but no bill to accomplish that has appeared in the General Assembly.
There are, however, a couple of bills that do deal with road hunting. Harry Parrish, a veteran legislator from Northern Virginia, is sponsoring one that would make it illegal to fire a gun within 100 yards of a road. That provision was in the code until it was deleted by action of the 1993 General Assembly.
Without it, a road hunter can step out of his vehicle and just beyond the road shoulder and legally shoot an animal spotted from the highway.
Creigh Deeds of Bath County has introduced a bill that expands the current prohibition against shooting a firearm from a road to include bows and arrows, crossbows, spear guns and other weapons.
Even some game officials have reservations about this measure, wondering if it unduly would restrict bowhunters who might have a tree stand along a rural road or even along an interstate highway.
by CNB