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, R-Durant, 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 said. “They have an exceptionally tough job. Everybody they are trying to apprehend who is poaching is armed with a high-powered rifle.”
Bullard sponsored passage of the Oklahoma Wildlife Modernization Act which increased the prices of Oklahoma’s hunting and fishing license fees starting July 2024.
The Wildlife Department is funded largely through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses with no state appropriations.
“They had not had a fee increase of any type in 23 years so they were hurting,” Bullard said.
Bullard hopes the fee increase will result in enough additional revenue to provide future pay raises for game wardens.
No previous law enforcement experience is required to become a game warden in Oklahoma, although Erdman said the agency has hired former police officers and deputy sheriffs in the past.
Many are hired straight out of college. A bachelor’s degree with a minimum of 12 credit hours in a wildlife-related field is a requirement for the job.
Successful applicants must complete four months of training through the Council on Law Enforcement Education Training (CLEET) and a 10-week Game Warden Academy through the Wildlife Department. That would be followed by 12 weeks of field training with another game warden.
The Wildlife Department has received more than 100 applications for the dozen openings but they can’t be filled immediately, Erdman said. It will be February before successful applicants can attend a Game Warden Academy.
The academy is taught by active game wardens who are all needed in the field during the hunting seasons which run through January, he said.
Game wardens work every weekend with their days off always being during the week, Erdman said. They are on call 24 hours when they are working, he said.
Game wardens also assist other law enforcement agencies when needed and help during disasters such as tornadoes.
“When I started, you went out and worked fishing and hunting stuff and really didn’t have much else to worry about, but the last 10 or 15 years, we get involved in a lot of different things out there,” Erdman said.
Erdman became a game warden in 1995, spending 11 years in the field in the Oklahoma Panhandle then 10 years as a game warden in Okfuskee County.
“I had a little bit of the western Oklahoma experience and a little bit of the eastern Oklahoma experience,” he said.
Erdman moved from the field to administration in 2016 as assistant chief. Three years later he was promoted to chief of law enforcement at the Wildlife Department.
Game wardens must have a passion for the outdoors to do the job properly and a good work ethic is vital, Erdman said.
“I want somebody that is responsible,” he said. “The way we are set up and spread out across the state, they’ve got to be their own motivator. We are not going to have somebody waiting in the truck for them every morning saying, ‘We’ve got to go work.’ They’ve got to be the one pushing themselves to get up and go do stuff.”
McIver, the conservationist, urges the public to help game wardens do their jobs and protect wildlife, especially since they are shorthanded.
“I encourage our hunters and fishermen when they see something wrong to get a hold of a game warden and let them know,” she said. “I love our game wardens. They are essential for making sure that our wildlife exists into perpetuity.”
Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: [email protected]. Follow Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and X.
