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TEASDALE, Wayne County — Two deer were illegally killed sometime late last month and discarded in a rural part of southern Utah west of Capitol Reef National Park, adding to a growing number of poaching cases in the area that has state conservation officers concerned.
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources Sgt. Seth Decker was patrolling near Teasdale on March 28 when he came across a pair of doe carcasses in a field near the junction of Teasdale Road and Birch Creek Road in Wayne County. When he went over to the dead deer, he found both had been shot and killed and left for waste.
Both deer are believed to have been killed sometime between March 23 and March 28, but that’s the only information the division has about the case, Decker said. The incident comes just months after six deer were killed and left to waste near Lyman, which is also in Wayne County, about 10 miles northwest of Teasdale.
Conservation officers received a tip about that case on Dec. 9, 2019. The tipster said they had witnessed a pickup truck circling an area near Foothill Drive in Lyman; the two people inside the truck were firing guns. It happened around Nov. 23 or 24, 2019.
DWR officials were alerted when the tipster located the deer carcasses two weeks later. The evidence conservation officers found at the scene indicated that someone had been circling around the deer — two bucks and four does — in a vehicle as they shot them dead, Decker said. Neither case has been solved, and it’s unclear if they are connected in any way.
"I haven’t found any correlation between the two, and you always hope there isn’t a correlation," Decker said. "But they both did happen in agriculture fields, and so it is a possibility that they’re related in a way."
In addition to the eight deer killed in the county over the past few months, Decker said a bull elk was illegally killed around Memorial Day 2019 and pronghorn that were also killed in the general area last year.
"We have had multiple incidents in that area, so it’s possible that a person is going around doing this," Decker said, adding that he was concerned because not only are poachers killing wildlife and leaving their carcasses to waste, they could be jeopardizing people’s lives because they might shoot toward the plenty of remote homes scattered across the area where the cases were reported.
Anyone with information about the recent poaching cases in Wayne County, or any other poaching case in the state, is encouraged to call the divisions UTIP hotline at 1-800-662-3337 or report it on the division’s website. Division officials said they will honor requests for confidentiality.
Officials added that a monetary reward may be available for any information that leads to a conviction of poaching crimes.
