Murray Bates, a retired game warden who was on the job for close to 35 years, released his fourth book last week, nine years after the release of his third book.
Game Warden lV concludes the Game Warden series and is a compilation of his first three books: Game Warden (released in 2002), Game Warden ll (released in 2003) and Game Warden lll (released in 2004).
The book also includes information regarding fish and wildlife enforcement in Alberta over the course of the past nine years.
It outlines highlights of his career in 60 chapters and offers several illustrations. It took him about a year to put the book together, with the support of his wife Carol in their home just west of Sundre.
Throughout his career, he apprehended, arrested and prosecuted about 1,700 poachers. Some cases have taken him years to uncover and he has gone beyond Alberta boundaries when he wasn't supposed to, to catch a poacher.
He says part of the reason he was successful in his career was because he spent a lot of time in the field. He said there were times when he spent weeks at a time in the bush to find what he was looking for.
“Catching poachers is a lot like hunting. You have to have sharp senses and instincts as good or better than your prey,” said Bates, in the book.
Having fully retired in 2008, he remains very interested in wildlife protection. Born and raised in Alberta, he has worked in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Slave Lake, Cochrane and Medicine Hat.
One of the highlights of his career was catching the Irvine poaching gang in the 1980s.
“Fifty-eight deer were poached. I investigated it, the perpetrators got the maximum fine possible and they had three vehicles forfeited,” he said.
“I had a Canada-wide warrant issued for the gang leader and I'm the only wildlife officer that's ever had a Canada-wide warrant issued in a case. You know what they're for, the worst of the worst criminals.”
Bates said his success on the job also came from having a network of confidential informants. He has supplied information to arrest and convict poachers in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the Yukon and Idaho.
He says he is the only person in Canada to have been successful in convicting a rattlesnake trafficker, which he takes pride in.
At age 63, he says he is already thinking about his next book, but is still contemplating the angle he would take.
“I'm thinking of writing another one, but the Game Warden series is done. I covered my entire career,” he said.
He has been able to write about detailed moments of his career from keeping field notes, diaries, logs, analysis reports and personal files.
The book covers several interesting cases, including one where he convicted a poacher who was also fined and suspended from hunting for a year, after he caught him with a black bear he poached at a garbage dump in Slave Lake.
“Whenever I prepared a case, I never presumed a guilty plea. I collected every bit of evidence possible,” he said in the book.
He will be signing books at the Sundre Museum this weekend.
