When Hunters Become Sitting Ducks

Brian Wolslegel makes robo-wildlife. Call it turning the tables on the bad guys.

Wolslegel, owner of Custom Robotic Wildlife Inc. of Mosinee, Wis., creates mechanized game animals so real that greedy hunters break the law to get a shot at them--and sometimes go to jail for doing so. They fire at them from roadsides and from the front seats of their cars and trucks.

Wolslegel’s decoys come in all shapes and sizes--from deer to bear to turkey and more. He sells 200 to 300 robotic decoys a year, the majority of them to law enforcement agencies intent on busting poachers. At last count, he had sold anti-poacher decoys to authorities in 47 states, plus all the Canadian provinces.

“Every year it gets a little bigger and busier,” said Wolslegel, who’s been building his robo-decoys for the last six years.

One of his customers is the California Department of Fish and Game, which uses deer, pheasant and turkey decoys to catch poachers.

Patrick Foy, a Fish and Game spokesman, said that in the past, the practice has produced mixed results in court, because some hunters have successfully argued that the lifelike decoys amount to entrapment.

Because of that, Foy said, the department now puts the decoys only in places where an errant hunter will be charged on multiple counts, such as shooting out of season and trespassing. “We want to get people clearly violating the law in many different ways so it’s pretty much a slam-dunk,” said Foy.

Wolslegel said the secret of his success is to take the hides of animals and mold them painstakingly onto life-size plastic forms, then install motors that move the head and tail via remote control. He said it’s a far cry from his first efforts, when he tugged on fishing line to cause head and tail movements.

He said he has heard dozens of stories about hunters who kept blasting away at the decoys when it should have been clear that they were fake. “The local warden tells me that sometimes the hardest thing he has to do is keep from laughing when he’s making an arrest,” Wolslegel said.