include more and more young people in our organization so that they can get that writing has starts and not have to wait until retirement before they take it on. >>. >> i want to say thank you to sharon olds for inviting us here at your meeting. >> thank you, we are thrilled to have you. >> we are standing on sun outward, one of redding's main attractions. where thousands of visitors every year, continuing our coverage with literary culture, we speak with offer author steven callan about his time as a game warden in the state of california. >> i grew up as the son of the game warden so my teenage years i spent a lot of time writing on patrol of my dad so i had the great adventures working with him as well so that's where the name of the book came from area and later on i became a fish and game warden myself and then i

continued with my writing stories about my generation of an wildlife so the book is called "the game warden's son". being with mike's dad during that year was like having a storybook childhood, i did things most kids wouldn't dream of. when he started out, he was on what you call marine patrol and his duty was patrolling the channel islands in the california channel islands which are fantastic and anywhere from 26 miles across the sea like the song says or clear out in the ocean so i got to go on these excursions or these patrols out into the channel islands and see things that most kids would only dream of, there was oneparticular chapter i wrote about in the book , i call it to the islands where we went out and took it to national park scientists from washington dc

out to santa barbara island and the island hadn't been declared by the president franklin roosevelt as a national monument years before and it was their job to turn this island back to its natural state because during the previous century, all these ranchers had come in and brought in all these exotic animals and they brought in cats and goats and pigs and they were literally destroying the island so anyway, while we drop these assignments off on this island, we went on an adventure of her own and my dad made this great case while we were there and so that was just the beginning. here i am peeking out of the galley, watching this whole thing take place and you got besides yelling and screaming, these poachers and it was quite an experience. >> then later on, there was a case where i was with my dad when i was a teenager on a night patrol where there is these poachers down in the willows area which is south of here where there were a

lot of rice fields and they call them market hunters who would go out at night and they would sneak up on these huge flocks of, in the thousands of ducks and he's and they fire their shotguns into them and kill hundreds of the same time. >> so one night we were working and i ended up, there's three or four words in the same place so they all going different directions and one of the old-timer wardens said why don't you ride with me instead of your dad so i and not calling this guy and we go down the road and the bark and get out of his car and i get out of the car like i'm going with him and he says you stay here and watch my car. i'm thinking i don't want to do that. watch your car? i wanted to go out. so about half way through this, this night, i thought whilehe's out there on this levy , with this.

i'm going to walk back to my dad's car. this is a lie away so i walked out to the road and i'm walking back out back down toward where my father's patrol car is and i hear this , these voices and coming across the field i hear these people slapping through the mud and here comes these 2.poachers out of the field. i'm hiding behind the julie while these guys from swapping through the mud over the road and then they disappear. >> and they ended up hiding all their gunnysack's full of these illegal docs they had killed in a colbert area so i end up hoping to make this case later and showing my dad and these two wardens i'm working with where these guys are getting their docs and the next day they captured them so it was quite an adventure for me. that's two examples that i had all kinds of them and the book is full of these kind of investigations. so watching my dad, learning the little tricks to being a

good wildlife officer, like don't slam the door when you get out of the car, that kind of thing because they hear you and it's over. all these little things so i couldn't wait when i got old enough and i graduated from college. i wanted to be a fish and game warden myself. so i had a head start whereas a lot of these wardens when they start their job, they have to go through a process of learning. i had already gone through all that on-the-job training for thelast 10 years of my life . >> being a fish and game warden is not an appointed position, it's like any other civil service job, you have to take a test, you take the written and oral and you are on a list and if you're lucky and you do well enough, your name will come up on the list and they'll do an investigation and a background check and everything else and if all that goes well, then you'll

get a call and they'll say we decided to hire you and your first position is going to be in my case my first position was in a place called herb down in the colorado river which was one of the hottest places in the world in the summertime but i was so excited i couldn't believe it. so that's how it all started for me. at the same time working down in the southern california area was a great learning experience and i had a lot of fun down there and learned a lot. later on i was there in the colorado river area and i got promoted to lieutenant and went to the san bernardino riverside area and work all kinds of interesting investigations related to exotic animals and reptile collectors and a lot of things you'd never do up here. i worked the case for over a

year involving, there was a bald eagle, and endangered species. and i left at the front game of the fish and game officer and one day i showed up at work and they told me i'd find a siegel and everybody said we will throw it in the freezer and there's not much we can do. there's a note attached to the siegel threatening the life of one of the wardens that supervised at the time, it was like a message to leave us alone or more of this was going to happen so rather than give up i started doing a lot of research investigation and asking around and i started getting tips here and tips there and i came up with twosuspects , ended up getting these guys handwriting example where i tested and i sent off the handwriting to the fbi for this note and the fbi

confirmed that my suspects were the ones that wrote the note. i ended up sending the feathers of this bird to the smithsonian institute. we did a search warrant on both of their houses and came up with a lot of other evidence and different feathers and things so we ended up sending them off to the smithsonian institute in washington dc and they pinpointed what species these were. and there was another example of that was some of the evidence went to the san francisco homicide forensics unit and these guys only investigate murderers. their thinking this is great. i get to work and eagle case? they end up telling me the exact position that eagle was in when it was shot and the angle the bullet came into the eagle and whether it was a female or male, the whole thing and so anyway after all

that was done i narrowed it down to these guys and convicted them and one of them ended up going to prison, the other one spent six months in jail. the greatest issue is habitat loss. if are going to have wildlife, we have to have habitat, places for wildlife to live. water, cover and space and more of that space is being covered with houses and shopping centers and buildings and highways and the longer we go, the more there's going to be coverage and that's a huge issue for what little wildlife we have left, you have to have somebody to enforce those laws to keep people from going out and killing illegally. the biggest problem is money. if there's a way to make money, someone will kill it to get money and the that's a huge problem. there's 1100 miles of coastline on california and along the coast there's all this illegal commercial

fishing going on and there's only just a few officers to go around to enforce the laws and to keep it so that we will always have fish and wildlife. it's a long story but they're setting up marine protected areas where they closed certain activities to allow these overfished species to come back and then there's a huge issue on the federal level with an example of what's going on right now in washington dc where a lot of the agencies are being defunded and environmental agencies are being defunded. we can't have your cake and eat it too. if you don't fund these agencies, don't count on there being much wildlife left in a few years so you can't take that away and expect to have wildlife. california is fortunate because california has always been a state that values its resources and all the

policies have remained good and one of the issues has been the fact that there not being enough wildlife authors to go around because right now what is there, like 40 million in california and the field, the number of wildlife officers in the field is probably around 400 that gives you an example but working with the legislature, california officers have done very well, they say they're pretty well supported. i wrote both books for three reasons. first reason i had all these great stories to tell and i want people to enjoy these great stories and understand and the second reason was for people to understand the game wardens job allows more than catching checking fish and game licenses, there are 1 million things they have to

do and that the most important reason was i wanted to include a resource, conservation message and everything i write so that's what people i wanted people to take away is each one of those stories has a message about how valuable these resources are and what it takes to keep them. so people can, future generations can enjoy them. and that's what i would say and everybody that's talk, i've heard hundreds of people telling how much they enjoyed the book. it's not just hunters and fishermen, we've got a lot of people who say i love your book because they are great stories and i understand the message you are trying to convey. >> i'm standing in front of the redding library which is the main ranch of the public library. come inside with us as we learn about the early history of shasta county. >> today we are here in redding california and we are at the redding library