Young black bear boar runs for freedom (National Park Service)
At six a.m. last Thursday (the 20th) this young male black bear and his "cellmate" had some visitors: three National Park Service employees and two Colorado game wardens. The last were there to instruct the former in the fine points (heh) of darting and tranquilizing bears.
The two "boys" (subadults) came down from Rocky Mountain National Park to a rehabilitation center in southern Colorado after the East Troublesome Fire last year. They spent the winter getting fat — and somewhat bored — until finally it was time to release them in a area not so much frequented by park visitors.
One of the NPS staffers reported, "The boys were very well-behaved and calm on the trip. The release went really well — away from visitors."
The GPS-tracking collar shown is designed to come off after a time.
I would probably enjoy traveling up I-25 through Denver more if I could be tranquilized in a windowless trailer too.*
The rehabbers were curious if the two bears would pal around together for a time, but the GPS evidence said they did not.
"The bears stuck together for less than two minutes before going in separate directions. They're sub adults and their genetics are telling them to go off and find their own territories," one of the NPS stafers reported.
* Actually, bears in transit are usually recovering from the anesthesia with the aid of another drug. For one thing, it means one will not end up lying on top of the other and possibly smothering it. An exception might be if they have to be moved from the transport trailer on a sled or something, where they need to be kept quiet longer.
A century ago, our national forests had a problem. Behind the wheels of their Ford Model T's and other cars, Americans re-discovered camping. Soon over-used favorite camping areas were littered with trash, human waste, multple firepits, unauthorized roads, and all the other bad effects.
The US Forest Service was fifteen years old and trying to get a handle on "scientific" forest management, firefighting, and grazing management. It was part of the Department of Agriculture. ("We're tree-farmers," an old-school district ranger once told me.)
Recreation management was not on their to-do list. That was the National Park Service's job—different agency, different department—the Interior Department.
Davenport Campground, 1920s, San Isabel National Forest, southern Colorado, designed by Arthur Carhart as one of the first automobile campgrounds.
The Model-T generation changed all that, driving and camping everyplace instead of taking the train and shuttling to a big resort hotel like the Old Faithful Inn.
By the early 1920s the Forest Service hired landscape architect (and wilderness advocate) Arthur Carhart to figure how to manage these automobile recreationists.
The Forest Service built campgrounds up through the 1960s and 1970s, but the 1980s — the Reagan years — saw the pendulum swing the other. A couple of Carhart's recreational areas near me were closed in the early 1980s "due to lack of funding for maintenance." In the 1980s and 1990s, local Forest Service managers sang the praises of "dispersed camping."
(But Daveport Campground, pictured above, was re-built in the early 2000s to re-create its 1920s appearance. Retro-camping with federal dollars — who knew?)
Everything Old Is New Again, Including Turds and Trash
Some people blame the COVID pandemic. I don't know, but suddenly car-camping (and hiking) is really popular. Some headlines:
More than 40% of people say nature, wildlife and visiting local green
spaces have been even more important to their wellbeing since the
coronavirus restrictions began.
Closing heavily used campsites is public lands “triage” as Forest
Service and local officials struggle to protect natural resources from a
growing wave of backcountry campers and explorers this summer.
As events were canceled last summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic, other
activities — like hiking Quandary Peak, McCullough Gulch and Blue Lakes
trails — skyrocketed in popularity. The influx of visitors to these
areas last summer caused a barrage of issues like speeding, congestion,
lack of parking and safety concerns
Your bucket list should go beyond national parks. This decision tree will help you find lesser known locations with half the crowds. [Also more Instagrammable.—CSC]
Rocky Mountain Recreation will begin managing 99 designated dispersed
camp sites on the South Platte Ranger District portion of Rampart Range
Road starting Friday, May 21. Each campsite is numbered, and designated parking areas are marked.
Thirty of the campsites are available for reservation through
recreation.gov and 69 sites are first come, first serve. Campers will be
issued a tag to hang in their vehicle. Reserved sites will have a
“Reservation” card posted at the campsite with the name of the visitor.
On the Pike and San Isabel National Forests, the popular Rampart Range dispersed camping area near Woodland Park now has a complicated map. (Facebook link here.)
In the long run, maybe the USFS just needs more developed campsites, with regular maintenance, campground hosts, the whole business — or else a concessionaire to run them.
I started donating at the "get a logo ball cap" level.
In 2018 I went with some other Backcountry Hunters & Anglers volunteers to clean up a cartel-run marijuana grow on national forest land in southern Colorado.
Although the growing crew had been arrested and the plants pulled up and piled. there was a lot of non-biodegradable trash to be collected for later helicopter pickup: a mile of plastic irrigating pipe, soggy sleeping bags, wire, chemical containers, food trash, etc.
We hiked in escorted by two Forest Service law-enforcement rangers armed with pistols and a AR-15 rifle. They scouted ahead to see if anyone had snuck back in (nope), and then we went to work. I thought at the time that with all the public-lands volunteer work I have done since Boy Scout days, this was first time that I had had an armed escort.
Central Africa, of course, is a different story. Armed escorts are a fact of life.
Unlike some well-known groups fighting poaching (mainly for the rapacious Chinese market) in East Afica, Cengeta works in central and western Africa — in nations such as the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
On April 26th, Young was with two Spanish documentary filmmakers, Roberto Fraile and David Beriain, working on a film about anti-poaching efforts in Burkina Faso, when they and their escort were attacked by fighters from Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, yet another Muslim jihadi group. All three were killed.
Rory
was leading a wildlife protection patrol in Arly National Park, Burkina
Faso on 26th April 2021 when they were attacked by terrorists, which
resulted in his death and that of two Spanish journalists who were
capturing his efforts to protect precious wildlife.
Born in southern Colorado, I spent much of my childhood in South Dakota, living where the Black Hills met the prairie. When it came to trees, the ethos was Trees Are Good — Absence of Trees is Bad.
One Arbor Day we pupils at Canyon Lake Elementary School in Rapid City were herded out on the front lawn to watch a tree-planting. As best I can tell from Google Maps, that tree is still there, although its top looks a little drought-damaged.
Chris Helzer, who is the Nature Conservancy’s director of science in Nebraska, speaks out against the Trees Are Good attitude beyond Arbor Day, when it affects prairie ecologies, in a blog post titled "The Darker Side of Tree Planting in the Great Plains."
Euro-American cultural attitudes, once again, collided with ecological realities, he writes,
In 1907, a combination of those [western Nebraska] tree plantations was designated as the
Nebraska National Forest, something many Nebraskans were and are proud
of. I’ve always seen that whole process as a kind of sad appeal for
respect (‘See, we DO have forests in Nebraska!’) It’s like an
accomplished and popular actor, musician, and philanthropist feeling
inferior their whole life because they’re not good at basketball – and
repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) trying out for teams. . . .
We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to get the public to
support prairie conservation. Tree planting isn’t the problem, and
neither are the people and organizations who advocate for it. Trees are
very nice. Some of my best friends have trees.
The problem is that tree planting is linked to an unsavory and
unfortunate legacy in the Great Plains that still colors perceptions
today. We need to separate the reasonable practice of planting a tree
for shade, shelter, or fruit from the concept that white Europeans have a
God-given right and duty to convert barren prairie wastelands into neat
rows of corn and trees. I’m sure most people aren’t consciously making
that connection as they dig a hole for their new apple tree seedling,
but that doesn’t mean the cultural influence isn’t lurking in the
background.
He makes a good argument: healthy prairie ecosystems are wonderfully complex, and yes, they do store CO2, if that is on your mind. We could let prairie be prairie without "improving" it — although even Helzer admits that shelterbelts are OK around farmsteads.
I am fudging this one just a little. The anthropologist Richard Nelson (b. 1941) actually died in November 2019, but I did not hear about it until January 2020, when an archaeologist friend sent me a link to a number of news items in his field.
That was the book that pulled me in, with bits such as the Koyukon people telling him that it was impolite to point at a mountain. (The Koyukon speak a related language to Navajo and Apache; evidently they are the ones who said, "Fine, you go south. We like it here.")
He also wrote Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, among others, with its often-quoted statements that ""When it comes to deer, wildness is the greatest truth. And tameness is a tender, innocent lie."
A reviewer on Goodreads wrote, "It's a really interesting look at people's relationships with deer from
all angles (our spiritual and ecological connections with wildlife, the
dilemma of controlling overabundant deer, trophy hunting, hunting deer
for venison, the anti-hunting movement, etc.)."
I remember the passage about hunting blacktail deer in the coastal Alaska forest with his Border collie Keta:
Now . . . rather than staying close, Keta sidles off and lifts her
nose as if there's a faint musk drifting in the breeze. She comes
reluctantly when I gesture toward my heel. Taking her cue, I pause and
watch ahead, then move when a
sigh of wind in the trees covers the sound of our
footsteps. Luckily, the ridge is well drained and densely carpeted in
sphagnum moss, so it's fairly quiet going.
Keta's behavior telegraphs the scent's increasing
strength: she moves forward, catches herself and looks back, falls in
beside me, then shunts away to my left or right like someone pacing at a
line she's been warned not to cross.
She probes her nose into the breeze, occasionally
reaching to the side for a stronger ribbon of scent. She hesitates and
stares intently, aware that something is nearby but unable to pick it
out. And most telling of all: she leans back
and anxiously lifts a forepaw, possessed by her desire
to charge off but yielding to the discipline she's learned, as if an
inner voice were ordering her to wait.
By this time I'm convinced it must be a deer. If it were a
bear, Keta would refuse to keep still and she'd woof suspiciously, deep
in her throat. I edge along, furtive and stalking, as if I'd already
seen the animal. At one
point I even try sniffing the air, but for me there's
not a hint of smell. It's strange, being completely numb to a signal
that's as obvious to Keta as walking into a cloud of smoke. I stop for
several minutes to study the
ravel of shrubs and trees and openings ahead. But
despite Keta's certainty, the place looks vacant to me.
And that passage concludes,
No scientist, no shaman, no stalker, no sentimentalist will ever
understand the deer . . . and for this I am truly grateful. I am
possessed by a powerful curiosity about this animal, but what I desire
most is to experience and acclaim its
mysteries. In our explorations of scientific and
practical information about deer, we should always keep in mind what the
elders and philosophers teach: that while knowledge dispels some
mysteries, it deepens others.
I just wish someone had kidnapped him from the hospital to let him spend his last days with friends on that island, beneath the open sky, hearing real ravens, letting his spirit float free.
