When a gun kills a bird, it leaves few clues that link a weapon to the crime.
“A rifle bullet rips right through and is long gone,” said wildlife forensic expert Ken Goddard.
But careful detective work by a team of state game wardens and Goddard’s team linked the deaths of 159 birds to a Lassen County ranch owner, leading to his conviction in April for one of the most baffling poaching cases in state history.
Authorities were stunned by the extent of the indiscriminate carnage, which included red-tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks and harriers, but also songbirds such as flickers and magpies and even a great horned owl.
The carcasses weren’t collected for sale or to eat but just left to rot, investigators said.
“It defied rational explanation,” said Patrick Foy, of the Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We sometimes see people who go on a wildlife-killing rampage.”
The investigation started in March 2018 when wildlife officers received an anonymous tip from someone who witnessed a man shooting a hawk near the town of Standish, near Susanville, in the rural northeastern corner of the state.
Visiting the site, an investigator discovered several dead raptors within plain view lying in the stubble of fields, said California Department of Fish and Wildlife officer Kyle Kroll.
The property owner, Richard Parker, 68, was an immediate suspect — but no one was home.
“We hatched a plan, working as covertly as possible,” said Kroll, who oversees six officers in the vast expanse of Plumas, Lassen and part of Butte counties. Dressed in plain clothes and wielding bird-watching “spotting scopes,” the officers watched the ranch from afar. After witnessing several potential violations, they had probable cause to get a search warrant.
A squad of seven officers, with dogs, were quickly deployed to the 80-acre ranch in a remote sagebrush steppe landscape that is famed for its migratory birds. Located in the upper northeast corner of the Northern Sierra Cascade range, where snowmelt drains into the large and shallow Honey Lake, the region is a fertile wetland area, which attracts many diverse species.
It was a long and gruesome day.
“We processed it just like a crime scene in a human murder case,” with officers dividing up the acreage and walking each segment in search of evidence, said Kroll. Using maps, GPS and cameras, they documented and collected each carcass.
“It was beyond belief, so hard to fathom,” he said, with bodies scattered under cottonwood trees. “In my entire career, I’ve never seen anything to this extent — all protected species.”
It’s far from California’s only case of wildlife that are killed and then simply abandoned.
Last December, officers in Humboldt County discovered four dead Roosevelt female elk, one of them pregnant, all recently killed with a firearm. There’s a $2,500 reward for any information that leads to an arrest and conviction for that crime.
Still unsolved are the deaths of three dead pronghorn antelope, left in a field near Mount Lassen, off Highway 395, in 2009.
In 2008, Gilroy resident Peter Ignatius Ciraulo was convicted of poaching 335 birds of almost every waterfowl species that migrates into California, including protected species of Tundra Swan and Sandhill Crane. Most of them were stuffed into freezers inside his Pacheco Pass area home and frozen whole, not processed for consumption.
“When we asked him why he had so many, he never really offered up a very valid explanation,” said Foy.
The Lassen County ranch killings involved almost all raptors: 27 adult and 48 juvenile red-tailed hawks, two Swainson’s hawks, four ferruginous hawks, two Cooper’s hawks, two northern harriers and one prairie falcon. Most are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
But the team also found four northern flickers, handsome black-bibbed woodpeckers that forage on the ground, eating insects. There were two dead magpies, with white wing patches and very long tails, and a magnificent great horned owl.
Some birds were newly killed, with glassy eyes and fresh red blood. Others were badly decomposed, damaged by sun, snow, rain and scavengers. A few were skeletal, with only a skull or wing remaining.
Parker, an insurance agent who previously served on the Lassen County Chamber of Commerce and graduated from Sacramento State University with a degree in psychology and criminal law, was interviewed and arrested. Searching his modest ranch house, officers found an embalmed and stuffed mountain lion. A freshly killed bobcat lay in the yard, according to the Attorney General’s office, which prosecuted the case.
Officers wrapped each corpse in a brown paper bag, packed them into a truck and drove them 200 miles to Sacramento, then shipped them overnight to Ashland, Oregon, where scientists meticulously necropsied the animals to determine a cause of death.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory is the only lab in the world devoted entirely to investigating crimes against animals. Every year, it analyzes feathers, fur and genes of hundreds of protected plants and animals.
The lab handles mostly U.S. cases, but it is also the official lab for the 182 nations party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. It processes whole animal carcasses, samples of meat and blood, and objects made from wildlife parts, such as fur coats, leather boots, feather headdresses and ivory carvings.
Goddard, 72, came to the lab after a career as a police crime director in Southern California. “I got tired of kids on morgue slabs, shallow graves in the desert, bodies in cars,” he said.
The facility features several kinds of labs, including a morphology lab to identify the fragments of animal parts, a genomics lab to determine species, a pathology lab that reveal how an animal died and a ballistics lab that helped crack the Lassen County case.
A 400-page report details the trauma to every bird, using a combination of X-rays and a computer to find tiny bullet fragments and create pictures of organs, bones and other tissues.
“When a small animal is hit by a rifle, there is shattering shock,” said Goddard. His technicians sliced the carcasses and used X-rays and computers to try to create a 3D image of the bullet’s path and detect any metal fragments.
When the results matched two rifles seized from Parker’s house, the state Attorney General’s office knew it had a case. Repeated calls to Parker’s Susanville defense attorney Eugene Chittock were not returned.
Parker pled guilty to 10 misdemeanor counts of California Fish and Game Code Section 3513, the illegal taking of birds, and was sentenced to 90 days in county jail and $75,000 in fines and restitution, including $36,000 to reimburse the state’s investigative costs and $20,000 to Lassen County to restore and protect the local raptor population. During five years of probation, he’s prohibited from hunting and fishing and can’t own firearms.
The two guns used to kill the birds have been destroyed.
“The analysis helped us solidify the case,” said Kroll. “Now a huge weight is lifted off our shoulders and allows us to move forward.”
But he’s haunted by the birds they didn’t find, that never made it to Oregon experts — bodies that were scattered and scavenged in the days, weeks or months before his team arrived at the scene.
“How many were ultimately taken?” he said. “We’ll never know.”