Fans of Animal Planet’s North Woods Law television series may recognize Lt. Heidi Murphy from the show, which follows New Hampshire Fish & Game conservation officers through various job duties, from tracking down illegal hunting activity to banding peregrine falcons. Despite spending lots of time exploring the outdoors while growing up, Murphy didn’t have childhood aspirations of a career in wildlife management. That came later, and she’s embraced her work at Fish & Game, where she is the only female conservation officer on staff. She lives in Andover, New Hampshire, with her husband and their two boys, ages 11 and 12. When she’s not at her desk at Fish & Game Headquarters or out on patrol, she is often coaching – or playing – soccer or hockey, or possibly picking a tune on the ukulele.
Being a conservation officer, people ask me all the time if I grew up hunting and fishing. I did not. I grew up fishing a little bit, but not hunting. I grew up in Woodsville, New Hampshire, with four sisters. We had a tree in our yard that we liked to climb, and we played outside all the time. We went hiking a lot as a family, and we camped a lot.
My dad was a state trooper for 30 years. He had a bloodhound named Oscar, and sometimes we would help train Oscar by hiding in the woods. That was fun and seemed like a big deal. My dad would let my sister Haley and me just go off. At the time, I’m sure we were thinking that we were way out in the woods. We probably weren’t. But Oscar would come find us, and we would feed him hotdogs.
I would not call myself a hunter, although I have gone hunting. The one time that Dad took us all hunting, I was probably seven or eight. We thought we were going on a hike. We were all dressed in red. We practiced stopping when he put up his hand to stop. The idea of hunting didn’t even cross my mind. I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is cool. We’re going to stop when he puts up his hand. We’re going to walk real quietly.’ And then he put up his hand, I heard a big bang, and that was it. He got his deer. And I just started bawling. I thought we were going to bring it home as a pet. It was a day that I definitely remember.
For me, New Hampshire just feels like home. I went to St. Lawrence University, which is where I met my husband, Ryan. After college we went out to Colorado and worked as outdoor educators at YMCA of the Rockies. And when that ended, we were ski instructors at Winter Park, and when when that ended, we thought, ‘What do we do now?’ We came back to New Hampshire, and we both became science teachers. We love what the state has to offer in terms of mountains, forests, oceans, and opportunities to get outside.
During college, I was able to do a semester abroad in Kenya. We went on what you would consider a safari to the Ngorongoro Crater (in Tanzania) and looked at the wildebeests, zebras, lions, giraffes, elephants, and hyenas. We hiked Mount Longonot in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya and Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania, which is an active volcano. Once I walked far away from the group, and when I got back, my homestay father started yelling at me because of the danger of elephants nearby. Another time we were hiking in an area with Cape buffalo, and one buffalo looked at me and another girl who were kind of in the back of the group, and he charged us. I was behind this acacia tree, which was not going to protect me in any way, shape, or form, and then our guide shot his rifle a couple of times, and the buffalo just veered off. It was definitely a scary feeling of – holy crap, this 1,000-pound animal is coming at me pretty fast.
Once we got involved in playing wildlife manager near Ngorongoro Crater during the wildebeest birthing season. Our driver stopped so we could watch a birth from a distance. He told us calves usually stand up within five minutes and drink milk from the mother. This calf took more than 10 minutes, and then it fell and seemed like it couldn’t breathe. Just like in the books, in the background we saw hyenas lurking. There was a quick discussion of whether we should let nature takes its course or intervene. The driver chose to intervene and went over and flopped the baby around. It eventually got up to feed, but I still wonder if that was the right thing to do.
I think I’m atypical in the field of conservation officers, because I think if you ask other wardens and conservation officers, they’ll say, ‘I wanted to be a conservation officer since I was five.’ And I didn’t. For one summer after college, I worked at Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, which is a hunter education camp. I met some Vermont game wardens and foresters. That piqued my interest at that point, but it never really crossed my mind that I should become a conservation officer until we got back from Colorado. Both Ryan and I took the test, and we both failed. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t really know anything about hunting except what I had learned from those Vermont game wardens.
I was an 8th grade science teacher for three years. But that idea of becoming a game warden still interested me. Dad was a homicide detective for a while. I liked the idea of trying to solve things, but I wanted to mesh that with my degree in biology. So I studied really hard, took a couple of classes, including a hunter education class, to learn more about some of the things I wasn’t really familiar with. And I took the test again and basically got lucky and passed. I was hired in 2004, and that first year was awesome. I just learned a heck of a lot.
I was Fish & Game’s first fulltime female conservation officer, and right now there are no other women on patrol for Fish and Game. In 2005 I was assigned to 32 patrol, which covers northern Merrimack County. When you get your own patrol, you’re it. You’re the person that decides which activity is most important to go out to, the person that prosecutes your own cases, follows things through. It’s pretty fun. I patrolled for eight years and then got promoted to administrative lieutenant. So, I’ve been working at headquarters for a while now.
When I was on patrol, my favorite season was bear season, because I got to talk with the hunters and go to bear kill sites and see the bear and be out in the woods. But I also liked search and rescue, because that was instant gratification. Generally speaking, people would be like, ‘Thank you so much for coming.’ And I would think, ‘OK, I did something good today.’ For the most part, it was just being able to be your own boss and decide where to go. And every day was different. Even though you might have a plan, the plan might change depending on what comes up. And the seasons change, so my job specs would change every couple of months. Once you started getting tired of snow machines, then you move on to stocking fish and going back out in the woods.
I teach in the Becoming an Outdoors Woman program, which Fish & Game offers in collaboration with the New Hampshire Wildlife Federation. I teach winter survival and a regular outdoor survival class. We go over shelter building, layering, fire building. When I first started doing the program, it was mostly retired women who would attend the classes, now I’m starting to see more women in their 30s and 40s attending our classes. A lot of them are people who hike alone, or they’re moms in charge of a scout troop, and they just want to know more about fire building and shelter building. They want to feel that sense of confidence when they go out in the woods.
Education is a big component of the work we do. Educating the public about wildlife and their struggles helps to gain empathy for other species which hopefully, in turn, helps maintain their habitat. I think one of the biggest challenges right now is figuring out the balance of different uses of the forest. Just yesterday a guy called. He thinks there’s a wildlife corridor behind his house, because he sees wildlife out there. And there’s a group that wants to set up a mountain bike trail through that area. So it’s understanding our role in that situation and letting people somehow come up with a compromise that fits everybody’s desires. You still want to conserve. You still want to make sure that there’s proper habitat. But you also want people to go out and enjoy it as well. So, kind of getting everybody on the same page. And maybe you can’t get them on the same page, but at least you can get them closer to a compromise.
The woods is a resource. In New Hampshire, a lot of land is still owned by private people that thankfully keep their land open. I hope that we don’t go in the opposite direction, where that access is cut off. It’s good to be able to offer opportunities for people to get out into the woods, and I’m glad people are doing that. But it does have to be managed in a way that other species will have a chance to maintain their habitat and make sure that their needs are met as well.
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