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Law and Order in the Wild
A behind-the-scenes look at the job of a Texas game warden

Although the sun is bright and the heat is tolerable, a quick scan of Lake Whitney turns up just a few boats on the water. Business also seems slow for a Friday afternoon in June at the Lakeside Village Marina, where two men seated in canvas chairs are fishing from the wooden deck.

“How y’all doin’? Any luck?” hollers Mike Sibila from his dark green Ford pickup. “Just sittin’ in the shade?” The anglers wave, grin and yell back greetings.

Typically, that’s what happens when Sibila — a game warden with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department — drives by: people wave. But not always.

Protecting 170 Ranches and Deer Camps
A half hour later, Sibila pulls off the highway and stops to question a driver who is about to pull through a ranch gate. He asks for the man’s driver’s license and proof of insurance.

“He works on this ranch, just like I thought,” Sibila says, after climbing back into his truck. “I wanted to ask if he knew who owns the property. I came by here last fall, and that gate was torn down. Even if I’d caught someone, I wouldn’t have known whom to contact. Now I do.”

From the insurance card, Sibila keys the ranch’s location and the owner’s name into a global positioning system (GPS) unit set atop the truck’s console. The hi-tech gadget contains data on more than 170 ranches and deer camps spread across Bosque County, which Sibila and partner Preston Spiller oversee as game wardens.

Watching for Boaters, Poachers and Terrorists
But that’s not all they do. As the seasons change, so does their work. Summer months find them on their patrol boats, skimming Lake Whitney, enforcing water safety regulations during daylight hours. Come fall, the officers stay out after dark, watching for poachers and checking deer tags. As game wardens, they also sometimes make drug-related arrests and issue traffic citations. Under the Homeland Security Act, they patrol areas around the dam at Lake Whitney.

“We deal with everything,” says Sibila, who was named the 2005 Midwest Game Warden of the Year for Texas by the Association of Midwest Fish and Game Law Enforcement Officers. “As commissioned peace officers, we’re authorized to enforce all state laws, but we mostly deal with wildlife regulations. We assist local law enforcement, too.”

His job as a Texas game warden is a second career for Sibila, who graduated from Sam Houston State University with a major in wildlife management and a minor in agriculture.

“Like most people, I didn’t get hired the first time I applied,” he says. “So I got on with the Dallas Police Department and worked for them as an officer from 1984 to ’88. I got interested again in working as a game warden when I met one in Dallas. I applied again and was hired in 1988.”

Enforcing Fishing Regulations
After six months of training, Sibila and his wife, Paige, moved to Port Lavaca on the Texas Gulf Coast, where they lived for seven years and became the parents of two children, Alexis, now 13, and Shane, 11. As a game warden in Calhoun County, Sibila spent most of his time enforcing commercial- and sport-fishing regulations.

From Port Lavaca, Sibila transferred to Decatur, north of Fort Worth, where he and his family lived for nine years. “My work there in Wise County focused on hunting and water safety on Lake Bridgeport,” he says.

In 2004, Sibila moved to Clifton in Bosque County, where he currently resides. To finance the purchase of 15 acres and a future metal home, he took out a loan with Capital Farm Credit in Clifton. “They’ve been real easy to work with,” he says. “Plus they’re the only ones who’d finance construction of a metal house.”

Monitoring Scientific Deer Breeders
Since his transfer to the rural county, located approximately 50 miles south of Fort Worth, Sibila has dealt heavily with the Texas Scientific Deer Breeder Program, which issues permits for the commercial breeding and selling of white-tailed and mule deer. Across the state, approximately 150 breeders hold state permits, some of which are located in Bosque County. The breeders may sell their deer to non-permitted buyers, who are allowed to relocate the animals onto their land.

“Per capita, we have more high fences than anywhere else in the state, so we have a lot of scientific breeders here,” Sibila says. “But the big problem is monitoring. We need to be able to track these deer so we can prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease.”

Another problem: Some breeders fraudulently sell, buy, drug and transport wild deer within the auspices of the state program. Covert investigations by Sibila and other law officials have led to several arrests in the high-dollar industry. Convicted violators have paid fines totaling more than $106,000.

Pros and Cons of the Job
As much as he enjoys his work, there are times when he’d rather be somewhere else. “The worst part of my job is pulling drowning victims from the water, especially kids,” Sibila says.

His favorite parts: having flexible hours, working outside and interacting with people. While on patrol, he sometimes stops and checks on residents who live alone. Other times, he may run into a colleague along the way, like state trooper Jay Sparkman and his four-year-old son, who are fishing on a private lake this warm June afternoon.

“Look!” the boy says proudly, showing Sibila a small crappie he caught.

The game warden grins and crouches down for a closer look. The two men chat a few minutes, then Sibila climbs back into his pickup. Time to run to Lake Whitney and check fishing licenses.

As the dark green truck pulls away, Jake and his father — both back to their afternoon of fishing on the pier — turn and do what most people do when the game warden drives by: wave.

Article and photos by Sheryl Smith-Rodgers