Oklahoma’s game wardens will be entering their busiest time of the year shorthanded.The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation currently has 12 open positions for game wardens as deer gun season gets underway.“It’s probably the highest it’s been in a long time,” said Nathan Erdman, chief of the law enforcement division for the Wildlife Department, of the dozen openings.This hunting season, the game wardens in the surrounding counties where there are vacancies will have to cover more ground than usual, he said.“There are a few of them out there that are working a lot more hours and covering a lot more miles than they would in a normal year,” Erdman said.Erdman said about half of the current game warden vacancies are due to retirements and the other half are the result of people choosing to find other jobs with better pay or benefits. The starting pay for a game warden in Oklahoma is around $56,000 per year.“It’s usually a career for most people,” Erdman said of the profession. “The last five or 10 years it is slowly changing like any other profession where people stay for a number of years then move on to something different.”When fully staffed, Oklahoma has a total of 118 game wardens for the state’s 77 counties.The vast majority of counties have one game warden, but the counties around the metropolitan areas or around the larger lakes like Eufaula, Texoma, Kaw, Keystone or Tenkiller have multiple game wardens assigned, Erdman said.Laura McIver, Oklahoma’s representative for the Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever national conservation organization, said game wardens are overworked and underappreciated. Being down a dozen positions will just make that situation worse, she said.“They are stretched so thin. They work a lot of hours,” McIver said. “That is going to hurt somewhere, somehow, I’m sure. It’s hard being down that many people and truly being able to cover (the state) like it needs to be covered.”Counties where there are current openings for game wardens include Cimarron, Alfalfa, Texas, Washita, Latimer, Adair, Sequoyah, Bryan, Choctaw, Haskell, Garvin and Jackson.State Sen. David Bullard, RDurant, who chairs the Senate Tourism and Wildlife Committee, said game wardens are vital across the state. It can be a dangerous job, and they are paid less on average than other law enforcement officers in the state, he said.As a result, it’s difficult to keep people in the profession, he said.“They are absolutely underpaid,” he ...
