In his nearly 30 years as an Oregon state trooper focused on fish and wildlife, Mark Prodzinski has encountered poachers both dumb and clever.

The dumb include poachers who fling arrows at deer in subdivisions. The clever include those who find loopholes in laws and test what they can legally bag.

“It seems like whenever you think you’ve seen it all, there’s always something new,” said Prodzinski, who is stationed in Madras.

Prodzinski, 50, has earned national praise for his persistence in pursuing poachers, as well as his other efforts to protect natural resources in Central Oregon. He’s the first law officer from the state to win the Guy Bradley Award, which the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation gives each year to one state and one federal officer.

“He has a long list of accomplishments,” said Krystyna Wolniakowski, regional director for the nonprofit group.

Those include training a team of five seasonal cadets who patrolled 100 miles of the wild and scenic section of the Deschutes River and developing and implementing a bull trout protection plan for Lake Billy Chinook and the Metolius River.

A hunter and outdoorsman when not on the job, Prodzinski relishes his role as a protector of fish and wildlife, said Lt. Randy Scorby, who oversees the Oregon State Police’s Fish and Wildlife Division east of Baker.

“This is something Mark has wanted to do since he was a kid,” Scorby said. “And he’s never lost a passion for it.”

Covering Central Oregon from the crest of the Cascades to the John Day River and from Bend to Maupin since 1993, Prodzinski said he deals with poachers year round.

Rarely lucky enough to come across a poacher just after he’s made a kill, Prodzinski said he usually relies on evidence found at the scene. There seldom are witnesses.

“We can’t go out and ask all the other animals out there, ‘Hey did you see anything?’” Prodzinski said.

Poachers often leave behind trace evidence such as footprints, shell casings and tire tracks. Along with cases of dumb or clever poachers, Prodzinski said he’s had bizarre cases.

Those include the 2008 case of a Prineville man who was shooting deer north of town at night with a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle, then leaving all the meat and their antlers behind. He also recalls a case earlier in the decade involving two Madras men who tried to take an elk from the ranch that once was home to the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s commune near Antelope.

In an attempt to be sneaky, the men pulled up a section of the ranch’s fence, laid it on the ground, drove their pickup over it and then put it back up. A rancher spotted them on the ranch and Prodzinski was waiting for them as they went to leave.

In that case, collecting evidence wasn’t difficult.

“They basically drove up to us with this big bull elk in the back of the truck,” Prodzinski said.

A Salem native, Prodzinski joined the Oregon State Police as a cadet in 1979 after graduating from Sprague High School. He spent two summers rafting the Deschutes River, enforcing fish and wildlife laws.

“I considered that a job of a lifetime,” he said.

He said he came to love Central Oregon and made it a goal to return as he started as a full-time trooper in 1983 in Klamath Falls. In Portland from 1985 to 1993, he began his work as a trooper focused on fish and wildlife. He’s been in Madras since 1993 and is now a senior trooper and one of the 120 troopers who enforce fish and wildlife laws.

He’s the first to win the Guy Bradley Award.

Created by Congress in 1984 to direct public conservation funds to environmental projects, the NFWF has given the Guy Bradley Award since 1988. The foundation named the award after the first wildlife law enforcement agent killed on duty in 1905.

Along with the award, Prodzinski received a $1,000 check from the foundation.

Prodzinski said he’s surprised that none of his mentors won the award before he did.

“We’ve got some very, very talented people,” he said.