Metro

‘Game’ time in B’klyn

It’s a little slice of Alabama in the middle of Brooklyn.

A pack of vagrants was found living in a makeshift camp alongside the Prospect Park lake, where they poached the local wildlife using cruel hunting methods, officials said yesterday.

The dirty-dozen men and women have spent the last two months on the lake’s southern shore near a construction site for a $70 million ice-skating complex.

They have littered the area with beer cans, poaching nets and other trash, with much of the refuse winding up in the lake.

“It’s disgusting,” said wildlife advocate Johanna Clearfield. “The city doesn’t care, because it’s the poor side of the park. This wouldn’t happen on the Park Slope side or by Grand Army Plaza.

“The most they’ve done is issue fines to homeless people who can’t pay.”

The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.

They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling’s beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.

A park ranger slapped two of the homeless hunters with four summonses totaling $2,100 on July 17 and 18 for killing the wildlife and illegally fishing at Brooklyn’s biggest park.

Homeless camps and poachers have long been a problem at a few other city parks, including Riverside Park in Manhattan and Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn, park advocates say.

But a Parks Department spokesman said the “isolated incidents of ‘poaching’ are not a widespread problem in Prospect Park, nor in the city as a whole.”

Geoffrey Croft, of New York City Park Advocates, and members of the city parks union said the problem is that the city has no dedicated park or police officers in Prospect Park as does Central Park, which has its own precinct.

“It’s like the Wild, Wild West in Prospect Park,” Croft said.

rich.calder@nypost.com