This goose soared safely above the Quinnipiac, two days after game wardens swooped into the Fargeorge Preserve.
Following complaints of gunshots along the river, five game wardens interrupted a crew of out-of-towners who had been hunting duck and geese along the shoreline Saturday morning. Four men were issued warnings for hunting on the New Haven Land Trust’s property without permission.
“I didn’t mean to piss anybody off,” said one of the hunters, Bob Hruskocy, reached by phone. “I apologize to anyone down there” who felt that the gunfire disrupted the neighborhood’s peace.
Hruskocy, of East Hartford, recounted how he discovered what he thought was an ideal, perfectly legal hunting spot — then ended the day with a surprise visit from both state and federal authorities.
Hruskocy is a diehard of the sport: “Whatever you like to do, I like to do duck-hunting 10 times more,” he declared. These days, with more and more houses crowding out open space, “it’s harder and harder to find good spots” to hunt. When ice closes in on his regular hunting territory, he looks south for open water.
Driving up Interstate-91 to his East Hartford home, Hruskocy has often caught a glimpse of the lush marshland beside the Quinnipiac River.
“You always see birds sitting there,” he said.
He wasn’t too familiar with New Haven’s waterfront, but he thought he’d found the perfect place to catch some fowl. So he rounded up his buddies: Bill Korzon, Christopher Loos, and John Lonergan, of Durham, Meriden and Manchester.
Duck hunting is permitted on the water, as long as hunters stay in the boat and 250 feet away from buildings. It’s legal in some parks and some places in New Haven — including in the water near City Point and in certain places along the Quinnipiac River. The group called a game warden friend to see if Quinnipiac Meadows was legal hunting ground. The friend, unaware that the Land Trust had acquired the land, told them it was OK to hunt there, he claimed.
So at 5:30 a.m., Hruskocy and his buddies packed some coffee into a motorboat and pushed off from a West Haven boat landing. Before the sun rose, they took a chilly, 20-minute ride under New Haven’s three movable bridges to the reedy banks of Fair Haven Heights. By law, hunters are allowed to shoot half an hour before sunrise — about quarter to seven, by his calculation.
The group set its decoys, spread out along on the shore at the nature preserve. Then they started firing shotgun pellets into the air.
That’s when neighbors like Heather Findlay (pictured) woke up.
“It sounded like cannons going off in my backyard,” said Findlay, who lives across the river on Front Street. Her dog, a Russian wolfhound, ran in the closet to hide.
Findlay looked out the window. She saw four men at the edge of the river, in camouflage, shooting ducks.
Her reaction: “Are you kidding me? Seriously?”
“I just don’t want to see hunters in our neighborhood,” Findlay said. “There are condos very close to that area. You don’t know how accurate these guys are; how adept they are with their firearms. They’re a hop, skip and a jump from housing. They’re right there.”
Besides, she argued: “This is a nature preserve — you preserve what’s there, you don’t kill it.”
Findlay picked up the phone and started calling neighbors. They called the cops, who told them they don’t have jurisdiction on the water. Finally, someone tracked down a cell phone for New Haven State Rep. Bob Megna, who got ahold of the state Department of Environmental Protection. The process unfolded over the course of a few hours.
“Cripples” Retrieved
Meanwhile, Hruskocy and his buddies were having excellent luck.
After knocking down a few ducks in the morning, they hung around a little longer than usual to wait for the geese to fly in, around 10:30 a.m., he said. They shot from the shore, then used the boat to retrieve the “cripples,” he said.
Mid-morning, a game warden tipped them off that there had been a few complaints. They started seeing state agents pop up along the shoreline, peering at them through binoculars.
When all eyes are watching, “you try to do things that don’t give hunting a bad name,” Hruskocy said. They made sure to follow the rules, such as retrieving all the crippled ducks — even if it meant shooting one at close range because it kept diving under the water.
“You don’t want to piss off any neighbors or anything like that,” said Hruskocy, but he thought he had the right to be there.
Around noon, the crew had brought in seven geese and 13 ducks, which they’ll roast or turn into sausage.
“It was a decent day,” he said. “More often than not; you get up at four in the morning, you get out on freezing cold water and you don’t even shoot the gun.”
As they were pulling in their decoys, Hruskocy said, a boat pulled up. Out stepped five game wardens: Four from the state Department of Environmental Protection and one from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The game wardens checked the boat, and slapped Lonergan with a ticket for not having enough life jackets. (One flew out of the boat on the highway, according to Hruskocy.) The wardens told them they had trodden into a no-hunting zone.
“I just can’t believe it,” said Hruskocy Monday. “We didn’t realize we were not supposed to be on the land.”
While the land is clearly posted “NO HUNTING” from the pedestrian access point (pictured), no postings were visible from the waterfront, said the hunter.
“I apologize to anyone down there,” he said.
Neighbors can rest assured that the foursome won’t be back this season, Hruskocy promised: Saturday was the last day duck-hunting is permitted in that zone this winter.
But after the luck his buddies had Saturday, the hunter said it would not be their last visit to the Quinnipiac River waterfront.
“We will be back again next year,” said Hruskocy. Next time, he pledged, “we will be in our boat.”