Recently Mary Alice and I were invited to the Tri County Sportsmen’s Club annual picnic and while we were there the club gave me an honorary lifetime membership in the club for my 35 years of service to the sportsmen of the state.

Randy Campbell, who is a member of the club, told me that he had a first while deer hunting this past year. He and one of his grandsons were standing on watch during a drive when another grandson came running to him. After catching his breath, the grandson said, “Grandpa, grandpa, the wood police are here.”

Campbell was then checked by a game warden. Campbell had been hunting for 50 years and never checked before, and they were at least a mile from the nearest road, which was a good walk.

The game warden was also at the meeting and gave a report of changes occurring within the commission. One change mentioned was that all calls now go into a central dispatch at the main office in Harrisburg. There will be 24-hour, seven-day coverage across the state, which means all questions and complaints will be heard by a dispatcher any time of the day.

Perhaps the dispatcher will not be familiar with your area, however your phone call will be forwarded to a game warden in your area.

After the game warden finished his talk, I had Mary Alice stand up and told the audience that she was my 24-hour coverage. At one time all calls went into the officer’s home, and when the officer was out working, his wife was expected to answer the phone.

If the phone rang in the middle of the night, we were expected to answer the call. Over the years there have been many changes in the way the commission operates.

Later in the week, I began thinking of the continuous changes that occurred with the job of being a game protector. I was a member of the 13th class and, unlike the officer that served before me, I never had set up a rabbit drive. I’ve been involved in signing up a farmer into the Rabbit Farm Program and approved a bounty claim or put out a trap line for predators.

During the commission’s early years, the rabbit was king and the No. 1 hunted species. Early officers would find themselves in rabbit drives, in areas where rabbits could not be hunted. They would drive rabbits into nets and catch them by hand and then release the rabbits in areas where they could be hunted.

Early officers would also sign up a farmer to have his farm become a rabbit farm. These farms became an ideal habitat for rabbits. In the fall, box traps were set to trap and transfer the rabbits.

George McCabe, who was a game warden in Bradford County, wrote in one of his diaries that during the 1920s and 30s, he spent a lot of his time checking eel traps.

Today the new game wardens will not have to attach tags to beaver pelts, keep a record of the number of pheasants being raised by cooperators, be involved in programs such as winter feeding of turkeys and construction of Norm Ericson deer-proof turkey feeders.

Winter feeding would begin in the early fall, by getting bids for corn from farmers and completing all the paperwork that the commission required. The idea was to get the bids approved before the heavy snow arrived, however Mother Nature would often win the race, and a heavy snowstorm fell before the bids were approved.

Often the corn was in the farmer’s corn crib, which was off the road, making it hard to get the state truck close enough to the crib and this required snow shoveling. The corn was shoveled from the crib onto the truck and then back to the commission’s building, at the top of Wheelerville Mountain on SGL No. 12.

The next day we shoveled the corn off the truck and into the commission’s corn crib. Most of January was spent filling turkey feeders. It was a lot of hard work because the feeders were in remote areas of Bradford County, and the deep snow made it difficult to get to them. Shoveling snow and corn and pushing the truck became an everyday occurrence.

Later, the commission changed their policy on winter feeding. Many sportsmen put pressure on the commission to re-institute the winter-feeding program; however, the commission held its ground and winter feeding became a thing of the past.

Picking up road kills was a constant chore. Although this is still done today, much of this duty has been taken over by the state. The chore of skinning out some of these road kills and saving the hides to be sold by the game commission has also been phased out.

Throughout my career I’ve nursed many animals — such as rabbits, bears, and deer — back to health. Today the injured animals are taken to rehabilitation centers to be nursed back to health.

Young officers no longer take the seedling orders and later deliver the seedlings to landowners in the Safety Zone Program. Today, this is mostly handled by the Food and Cover Corp.

Wildlife conservation is ever changing. To keep abreast of these changes the commission needs to continually change its training program to meet the new challenges.

Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.