In editorializing on the Pennsylvania Game Commission's Stormygirl fiasco, it's almost impossible not to use a bad pun: birdbrains.

The PGC apparently thinks it can ride out the storm over its seizure of a tame house finch from Pati Mattrick, of Elizabethtown, and so last week the commissioners refused to budge.

Or even apologize. At this point, returning the finch that Ms. Mattrick rescued after it fell from a nest four years ago is likely impossible.

But the PGC needs to reconsider the way it handled the incident. The agency needs to say "sorry" to a woman who didn't realize she was breaking the law and deserved better treatment than she got when a wildlife conservation officer and Elizabethtown police showed up at her front door in May to grab the finch.

Two days after an Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era story on Ms. Mattrick's rescue of Stormygirl — which had become a beloved and pampered pet — the PGC swooped in. It's illegal to remove a protected animal from the wild (although Ms. Mattrick says she wasn't aware of the law and had contacted wildlife rehabilitators when she found the baby bird, without success).

At a meeting of the game commissioners last week, Ms. Mattrick said the authorities who came to her house threatened her with FBI involvement and arrest if she didn't comply. She said she was promised a chance to visit Stormygirl after the bird was taken to a rehabilitator, but that promise was hollow.

The FBI? What, Pati Mattrick is a finch terrorist? Ridiculous.

Certainly the law is the law, and the PGC is charged with enforcing state game law. But, as Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman has noted, there's such a thing as discretion in enforcing the law.

Couldn't the PGC have issued a warning letter and given Ms. Mattrick the opportunity to comply before staging a police-state raid for harboring a finch?

This isn't the first time the PGC has overreached — remember the case of the tame fawn, "Baby," rescued and cared for by a 90-year-old woman in the Conestoga area three years ago? With the PGC threatening to kill the fawn (because it might present a danger to the public), the deer mysteriously "vanished." No one's talking, and maybe neighbors spirited Baby away — but if the PGC had acted more reasonably, Baby's case could have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

So it's time for the Legislature to step in. State Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-100th District, said recently that it appears his legislation, House Bill 181, setting some limits on the powers of game wardens, might move out of the Senate Appropriations committee after having won approval in the House, 192-0.

The legislation is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. It was drafted prior to Stormygirl and doesn't address situations like Ms. Mattrick's. We hope the Senate will amend Rep. Cutler's legislation so that the PGC's enforcement actions are more clearly defined.

Rep. Cutler's bill came in the wake of an earlier draft by retired Sen. Gib Armstrong, R-13th District. Sen. Armstrong introduced his bill, which would have stripped deputy game wardens of much of their authority, shortly after one of his sons had a run-in with a game warden in York County.

We don't condone what looks like retribution for his son's problem, but maybe Sen. Armstrong had a point about the PGC. The Stormygirl seizure sure looks like an agency running amok.

The game commissioners seem to think public outrage over Stormygirl will die down — and it might. That doesn't excuse heavy-handed and overzealous enforcement of the law.

The PGC needs to have its wings clipped. blog comments powered by Disqus