Retired wildlife investigator has seen it all out in the field

In his long career as an investigator, Brian Sommers has dug into some of Northwest Montana’s most interesting and tragic cases involving people and animals.

Sommers, a Missoula native, graduated from the University of Montana and went to work with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks as a game warden in 1985. He was assigned to a post in Shelby before an opening in the Flathead brought him closer to home in 1987.

Sommers is recently retired from the agency now and while headlines of cases he’s been involved in are of the more sensational nature, his memories include many of a fonder nature.

“It’s bittersweet leaving the agency, but it’s all good,” Sommer said.

Encountering young or first-time hunters has been a true joy.

“Talking with a kid with his first buck or the woman who flagged me down to show me her first buck, those are things which stay with you forever,” Sommers said. “They’re just so excited, it’s the coolest thing.”

Sommers also has helped bring lost hunters out of the woods.

“There was one guy hunting with his 12-year-old son and they had shot at a buck. They tracked it and when we found them they were 22 miles from where their truck was parked, 9 miles as the crow flies,” he said.

OTHER STORIES have been nothing but comical.

“One guy had a white-tailed buck in the bed of his truck, but he never tagged it,” Sommers said. “When I asked what was going on, he told me he had to shoot the deer because the animal had an enlarged heart and had charged him.

“There was a case where I caught a guy using a pitchfork to catch big rainbow trout migrating out of a lake to spawn and another where two guys had taken 105 brook trout out of a high mountain lake when the limit was 10 or 15.

“Those fish are the future of the population, so when you think of the impacts that can have on a lake or stream it can really add up,” Sommers said.

Another case popped up when Sommers was patrolling Little Bitterroot Lake.

“I watched this [man] make five different trips to the shore. When I went over, there was a motorhome from Washington parked there and he had been coming and going from it,” he recalled.

“When I knocked on the door, he opened it and the steam rolled out. He was taking the kokanee salmon he was catching and his wife was canning them as he caught them. He had five times the legal limit of fish.”

Sommers said some of life’s lessons learned as a youngster proved to be valuable when he became an investigator.

“My parents grew up in the Great Depression, so for them there was a certain mindset that as long as you ate what you caught or killed, it was OK,” Sommers said. “We depended on wild meat growing up and while I would say we weren’t poachers, we didn’t always abide by the law, so that helped me when I became a warden.”

One of Sommers’ guiding principles was that hunters and anglers should have the same opportunity as anyone and breaking the law wasn’t being fair to others.

There was an encounter one time with a group of about a dozen Hell’s Angels at West Shore State Park on Flathead Lake.

“I pulled down to the lake and waved at them and got out of my vehicle,” Sommers said. “A few of them were fishing and I asked if they had licenses. One of them said ‘No, but what do we owe you?’”

Sommers said Lake County investigators were a bit dumbstruck by the encounter after learning some of the criminal histories of the gang members.

IN 2006, Sommers also started investigating animal attacks on people. Bear encounters are the most numerous and have grabbed the headlines, but there was one featuring two adult otters and another involving one of the famed horses of Wild Horse Island.

The otter case involved a boy who was swimming in Lake of the Woods east of Kalispell. The child had several bite wounds to his legs, but he was treated for them.

In 2014, a 7-year-old girl was injured after being kicked while trying to feed hand-picked fruit to a horse on Wild Horse Island State Park in Flathead Lake. She was treated for injuries at a Polson hospital and released.

But there have also been tragic cases.

In 2015, a black bear attacked and severely injured an 85-year-old woman living in a rural area between Batavia Lane and Ashley Lake. The woman later died from the injuries she suffered after the bear got inside her home.

“She called them her babies and there had been a lot of illegal feeding of bears in the area by her and others who lived there,” Sommers recalled of the tragedy. “We don’t know if the door was open or she let it in, but there was some thought she may have had dementia or Alzheimer’s.”

Sommers said the bear had been inside the home for some time before the woman encountered it when she came down the stairs.

“The bear had been trying to get out and you could tell it was pretty agitated,” he said. “The bear had destroyed a set of metal French doors trying to get out and the house was very torn up.”

The bad cases were typically balanced by the good memories of his time on the job, though.

“We started a kid’s fishing derby at Happy’s Inn in 1991 and it’s still going today,” he said.

Sommers is especially thankful for the support of his family.

“It is really hard to do our job without the support of your family,” Sommers said. “They understood my hours and the job that I did so I would like to say thanks as well to my wife Judy and my son Nate for their support over the years.”

Sommers isn’t entirely leaving the workforce. He is now the chief of security with Flathead Ridge Ranch, which will afford him the opportunity to stay outdoors.

Scott Shindledecker may be reached at 758-4441 or sshindledecker@dailyinterlake.com.