Lewis Returns to Alabama as Director of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries

By DAVID RAINER, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

After several years away, Chris Lewis has returned to Sweet Home Alabama to become the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ (ADCNR) Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries (WFF) Director, who will supervise the division’s 315 employees.

“I am glad to have Director Lewis onboard,” ADCNR Commissioner Chris Blankenship said. “I am sure he will do a great job building on the changes and initiatives that previous Director Chuck Sykes led during his tenure. WFF is a large and diverse division. It is important to a strong and progressive leader to work with our passionate and dedicated staff. I look forward to the new ideas and positive demeanor that Chris will bring to ADCNR.”

Lewis is very familiar with the Alabama hunting, fishing and conservation landscape, having joined the WFF in 1998 as a Conservation Enforcement Officer then moving up the ranks to Sergeant, Lieutenant, District Captain and then Assistant Chief of Enforcement before being lured away by the State of Connecticut, where he served as the Director of the Environmental Conservation Police Division.

“There are only so many opportunities to lead a state conservation law enforcement division because there’s only 50 states,” said Lewis, who rejoined WFF on Monday. “That opportunity came up, and I applied. Much to my surprise, I was offered the job.”

During his tenure in Connecticut, his Division became an accredited law enforcement agency through Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Accreditation Program, and he worked with senior leadership to add more positions to his staff.

“That’s a feat I’m proud of,” Lewis said. “We ended up with 62 sworn officers, plus a dispatch center and an administration staff.”

Comparing areas of enforcement, Connecticut covers a little more than 5,540 square miles, while Alabama covers almost 10 times that at 52,419 square miles.

Although he realizes his WFF responsibilities will encompass overseeing the Enforcement, Wildlife and Fisheries sections, 51-year-old Lewis feels confident he’s up to the task. Meanwhile, the reasons for his move were relatively simple.

“There was a big appeal to get back to Alabama,” Lewis said. “I spent most of my career in Alabama, and I’ve got family in Tennessee and Florida. That’s important to be closer to family.

“I spent almost 22 years at ADCNR. I had a lot of fun working in different areas of the state and enjoyed everybody I worked with. I’m looking forward to being back. I’ll be able to reconnect with a lot of people. I know there will be new faces, but it will be good to reconnect with the familiar faces as well as meet new ones.”

What was the other motivation to return to Alabama: to make a difference.

“This is also a position that, at the end of the day, you can say you had an impact,” Lewis said. “There’s nothing better than working in wildlife and freshwater fisheries and natural resources protection. That is something just about everybody agrees with, so that’s the enjoyable part of it.”

Lewis realizes significant challenges are ahead as the nation drifts away from its roots, including the everyday interaction with nature.

“We see this around the country,” he said. “It’s the shift from rural to urban and the changing values that society has. There’s less connection with the outdoors, so there’s less knowledge of it, and it’s not as important.

“In states like Alabama, hunting and fishing license dollars fund our agencies. If we have fewer people hunting and fishing, it impacts what we can do. I think that’s a major challenge: How do you battle that culture shift? We have to keep people engaged and engage the new generation. They’re growing up with parents who don’t hunt, so how do we grab those? We’ve done the youth dove hunts and fishing rodeos for decades in Alabama, and we did them in Connecticut.  But there is more needed to introduce everyone to the outdoors. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge.”

Lewis joined WFF after he received a degree from Auburn University, but his field of study was not included in his first job.

“I graduated from Auburn with a degree in Wildlife Sciences in 1997,” he said. “I thought I would be a wildlife biologist. When I applied at Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, Enforcement was hiring. I got that job, and I really got into it. It was something different just about every day. It was the freedom of setting my own schedule, and my office was in the woods. It’s hard to beat that when you’re young.

“I think the rewarding part is working with the public, sometimes one-on-one, to look at a problem and oftentimes solve it. It gave me great satisfaction. I think as Director, it will be the same only on a bigger scale. I’m looking forward to it.”

Lewis thanked his predecessor, Chuck Sykes, for his leadership of almost 13 years. Sykes is now Executive Director of the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports.

“Chuck did a great job,” Lewis said. “When you look around the nation, most directors only work a couple of years. Chuck was there for quite a while and left his fingerprints on everything. I look back at my time here and improvements he lead, through gathering more data through Game Check to modernizing the way we interact with the public with apps and technology. When I started, we used paper and mail. Now we have tools like social media to quickly engage with the public.

“You see how the mentored hunts work and the impact those have. There’s a value in that. It goes back to the question of how do you get someone to reengage in hunting. I think the mentored hunts program is fixing that by taking them out in a non-threatening environment with a mentor and teaching them the skills. They have a desire or they wouldn’t have signed up for the hunts. Once they have a taste of it, I think you see these people returning and inviting friends. You have to start turning the tide somewhere, and I think that’s working. Of course we’ve got the rest of the R3 (Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation) program to increase participation in hunting and fishing. I hold Alabama’s program as a model for all, ‘This is what we have to do.’”

During his tenure in Connecticut, Lewis didn’t have to deal with chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, New York being the closest state with any CWD positives. Now that he’s back in Alabama, he will continue the efforts to contain the disease to northwest Alabama.

“This popped up before I left, and I’m familiar with the CWD Response Plan,” he said. “It’s just something we have to manage. We want to encourage people to still hunt, which is a big driver up there (northwest Alabama). We’re managing it with the different zones and working together to control the spread of it.”

The CWD mandatory sampling weekends in the High-Risk and Buffer Zones of the CMZ are November 22-23, 2025; December 6-7, 2025; and January 17-18, 2026. The mandatory sampling weekends in the Buffer Zone of the CMZ are November 22-23, 2025, and January 17-18, 2026. The mandatory CWD sampling weekends apply to all of Lauderdale and Colbert counties and part of Franklin County in northwest Alabama. Visit www.outdooralabama.com/cwd-chronic-wasting-disease/cwd-sampling for sampling sites and more information.

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