Wolves Now Add to the 'Colorado Experience'

A wolf who walked in from Wyoming caught on a scout camera
in North Park in March 2023 (Don Gittleson via AP).

Dad was still alive when the debate on reintroducing wolves to Colorado began, soon after the 1995 reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. His US Forest Service career began and then ended in Colorado, and he had thoughts. 

His days of being a horseback district ranger in the Eastern San Juans were long gone. "Now," he said. "this state is just a big park. There's no place for wolves."

That's setting aside the livestock issues. When Dad was asking herders, "¿Cuántas borregas tiene?" there were no wolves to think about. Those sheep outfits are much diminished, for other economic reasons, but some remain, as do cattle, horses, llamas, alpacas, and other speciality livestock.

The late Ed Quillen, mountain-county newsman and publisher, prided himself on being the only Denver Post editorial columnist who lived outside the Denverplex. He liked to say that Colorado used to be a "colony of Chicago," providing minerals and agricultural products to industrial America. 

But then, he said, we became part of the "Los Angeles economy" — a colony of the entertainment industry. Now Colorado's best-known export is experience. 

If that is so, then think of wolves as just another tourism experience, like ziplines over canyons. 

So maybe Dad had it backwards? Colorado is a "park," so it should have wolves? Wolves that will add spiritual value to the Colorado experience without hurting anyone. 

With some wolves already filtering from Wyoming on their own (and killing livestock and dogs) was it necessary to bring in more? The voters in their wisdom thought so in 2020. Now 30–50 wolves are planned to be released in Colorado over the next three to five years.

Wolf 2302-OR, a 68-lb. female yearling, is released somewhere in Grand County on Dec. 18, 2023.

 

Some  headlines and squabbles:.

• Maybe colorful flagging will keep wolves away from livestock. So says Adam Baca,  Colorado's first "wolf conflict coordinator."

• Some Oregon ranches think flagging ("fladry") and other counter-measures are not enough.

[Tom[ Birkmaier, an Oregon rancher, expressed his concerns about the relocation, telling Oregon Public Broadcasting, "It's just going to bring the problem over to a lot of ranchers and end up killing a lot of livestock in Colorado."

This sentiment is not limited to Oregon ranchers alone. Lawmakers in other wolf states, including Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, have also declined Colorado's request for wolves, despite their own sizable wolf populations.

• Cat Urbigkit, Wyoming sheep rancher, writer, and livestock guardian dog expert, points out misinformation in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife press kit and says some of the released wolves came from livestock-killing packs.

CPW wasn’t up front in telling the public about the depredation history of the packs the newly released wolves originated. It was Rachel Gabel who dug into the details and told the public what she’d found.

Gabel is a rancher and ag-journalist from Wiggins, Colo., who has covered the wolf reintroduction extensively.

She was promptly attacked by the governor's husband, Marlon Reis.

Reis doesn’t just differ with Gabel in a lengthy thread of Facebook comments he posted over Christmas weekend. He repeatedly, personally attacks her abilities and standing as a journalist and urges the public to “never trust anything Rachel Gabel writes." . . .

It also makes us wonder whether our politically astute governor winced while reading Reis peevishly accuse Gabel of seeking, “not to report the truth, but to inspire fear.” Or, where Reis pettily huffed in the same post, “I'll never understand how she got hired as a journalist.”

• Wolves did not just wander into Colorado their own. The first pups were spotted in spring 2021. But that did not count as a "self-sustaining population," Colorado Parks and Wildlife said. It was interesting to the wildlife biologists though.

Stay tuned, there is more to come, for sure.

Life, Death, and Coffee in Clayton, New Mexico

No one is ever on the sidewalks in Clayton, New Mexico. Its population has trended down since 1960, and if you want to visit a store or other business, you can generally park right in front. The longest walk in town is probably from the farthest truckers' diesel pumps to the convenience store entrance at the Love's fuel stop.

I once tried to walk around downtown (was staying at the restored Eklund Hotel) and came the nearest ever to being forcibly disincarnated by a passing pickup truck, even through I was crossing with the light. I felt the backwash of Death's wings, I can tell you that. 

Maybe the driver was so unused to seeing a person on crossing the street that he assumed I was an incorporeal ghost. Or he was drunk.

So when I make my regular US 87 coffee stop at Crossroads Coffee (a.k.a. Mock's Crossroads Coffee Mill) I park in front or in the little gravel lot alongside, or on rare occasions I use the drive-up window.

There's no need to walk.

Give Your Jeep a Prairie Road Advantage!

 

Jeep's "Borrow Ditch Advantage" option is available only from Great Plains dealerships, so it is not well-known to the automotive press.

What the Hunter Said to the Dog, and What the Dog Replied

Long ago in the Ice Age, a rough fluffy Dog lay down on the Hunter's reindeer-skin pack.

When the Hunter returned, he spoke: "Hey, you stinking animal! My quiver is under there! If you broke one of my good arrows, I'm going to shove it into your ribs, you unclean beast!" 

And the Dog spoke with his tail, as Dogs do: "We're going out? I'm ready! Let's go!!"

 

And they lived happily ever after, until Dog did something else that was Wrong.

The "Heart of Wilderness" Lies in the Prairie

If you take your finger and place it on a map marking the geographical center of the nation, somewhere above Kansas and below South Dakota, it won’t simply be resting on a blank spot, it will be touching the beating heart of true American wildness; a place of windswept, impossibly vast tableaus, ancient, grass-covered hills, and fast-flying prairie grouse. 

I am on a Northern Plains journey night now, with a traverse of the Sandhills planned for the return leg of it. Here is one of several links to earlier crossings: "Self-Advertisement in the Nebraska Sandhills."

I never have spent as much time there as I would have liked, but this video helps to make up for that lack. It's scripted by Oklahoma writer Chad Love for the Pheasants Forever conservation group. You can find more still photos here.

There is public land there too.

What Fall Aspen Gold Tells Us about Water

Hiker looks a rain gauge in an aspen grove

.

This year's Colorado aspen leaf-peeping season was a fine one, and the reason is last winter's snowpack, reports the Colorado Sun.

With enough water and nutrients, deciduous trees can produce more leaves, creating denser foliage that offers even more of a spectacle to enthusiastic leaf peepers in the fall. 

This year, winter precipitation blanketed Colorado in a deep snowpack, which acts as a vital natural reservoir for the state’s water supply. By May, most of Colorado mountains had an average to above-average snowpack compared with historical records from 1991 to 2020, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The summer was cooler overall, and some parts of the state even received record rainfall. The state hasn’t seen many of the windy days, cold temperatures and snowfall in aspen stands that all contribute to falling leaves.

“It’s just shaped up to be a fantastic year to get out and see some of the colors in Colorado, and it’s a good year for trees in general in Colorado,” [said  Dan West of the Colorado State Forest Service].

With the wind coming in, the northern Colorado aspen leaf season is ending, but you can still see them in parts of southern Colorado into New Mexico.

The orange, yellow, and red scrub leaves are peaking down  here, but the Denver-centric media like the Colorado Sun don't mention those!

Of Bear Spray, Bears, and a Missouri Hog

Gusse and Inglis canoeing in Canada (NY Post).

I have been reading the sad story of Jenny Gusse and Doug Inglis, experienced Canadian canoeists and backcountry travelers, killed September 29th, together with their dog, by a grizzly bear in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.

A friend who sometimes traveled with them said, “Their skill level was extremely high, they were conservative. They took every precaution they possibly could."

Another of the couple's friends said, "“I remember him telling me about camping and how you got to go so far even to pee from your tent. He would tell me all the safety precautions.” 

An expended can of bear spray was found at the scene.

Naturally the commenters weigh in on how bear spray is useless and ya gotta have a big 'ol gun in a caliber starting with 4 or 5. Except this is a Canadian national park: "The use of firearms (including pellet guns, bear bangers, bows, sling shots etc.) and hunting are not permitted in Banff National Park." So there is that.

I am not a big bear expert, and I have used pepper spray only on angry dogs (where it worked just fine). But I am reminded of my late brother-in-law Stone Curtois and one of his hogs.

He used to raise a small number of hogs at at time, ten or fifteen, on a little farm in southeastern Missouri, supplementing his main source of income, which was a portable sawmill. 

The hog pen was fenced with electric wire, which the animals respected, except for this one. It wanted to break out, he told me, but it knew that the electric fence would "bite." 

So it would charge the fence, screaming in pain before it hit the wire. In other words, its commitment to breaking free overruled the pain that it knew was coming.

I've read of various bear attacks, talked with people who used pepper spray on grizzlies successfully, and interviewed one woman who was shaken like a rag doll by an Alaska brown bear but saved by the person in her BLM survey party who had a rifle.

I have noticed that people living in places like Cooke City, Wyoming (adjacent to Yellowstone NP), mow their yards and walk to the store with bear-spray  cannisters on their hips.

It seems that bears can be like that Missouri hog: once they stop assessing the situation and commit to an attack, pain won't stop them. But if they are still only assessing, bear spray can be effective.

The 2018 attack on Wyoming hunting guide Mark Uptain and his client seems similar to this recent case: bear spray was used, but the bear (or two) involved were not fazed. Like the hog, the bears had already made up their minds.

It's also indicative that both of those attacks occured in September, when bears are "hyperphagic," as the biologists like to say. In other words, eating eating eating.

As for my brother-in-law, he died in a tree-felling accident. Him, a guy who read logging-supply catalogs for recreation. You can know what you are doing and still have something go wrong, or make that one tiny error.

On Seeing Liatris -- Thoughts of Poverty and Summer Sadness

Many people call this late-summer wildlflower "blazing star," but I always call it by the bontanical genus name, Liatris. It is the only wildflower that I call by its Latin name, and the reasons have to do with poverty and sadness.

Liatris blooms in late August. It is a perennial, and its energy-storing coms must have gotten a good soaking in our wet early summer, because I have never seen it thicker on the slope behind the house.

Its message is obvious: this is the last blaze of summer — enjoy it while you can. (Meanwhile, some are impatient for summer to be gone, but that is another story.)

I almost hate to see its blossoms, not only because summer is ending, but because they always take me back to the summer when I turned 36 and the bottom fell out.

M. and I had come to Cañon City, Colo., so that I could work on a friend's start-up magazine, but it failed (as most start-up magazines actually did in the pre-Web era). There we were in our 1910 smelter worker's cottage without enough money to leave town, nor any idea where to go if we did.

The mortgage payment was low, but with her working only part-time and me just selling an occasional freelance article, our finances were tighter than tight.

Our friend Hank stepped in. His family were florists in Pueblo. He had earned a master's in agronomy at Colorado State and worked for a seed company in Idaho breeding peas, but he wanted a change, so he came home and started a wholesale flower business on part of his family's little acreage on St. Charles Mesa (SE side of Pueblo). 

It was pretty much a one-man operation -- including the long drives to deliver flowers down the Arksansas River and over into the San Luis Valley -- and sometimes when he had a lot of harvest and prep to do, he hired us as casual labor.

He grew commercial varieties of Liatris, taller than our wildflowers, because they made good cut flowers, with the blossoms opening over several days. Good "vase life," you might say. He always called it "Liatris," so I did too.

Things changed. I thought I was done with newspapers, but took a job at the Cañon City Daily Record that fall. It paid the bills, and overlapped partly with our seasonal job censusing owls for the Bureau of Land Management. I finished the overdue thesis and started teaching part-time, then full time, finally saying goodbye for  good to journalism. M. did likewise, teaching at a community college and finding she was good at it.

Hank's marriage ended, and so did the flower business, but he too switched to community college teaching, got a doctorate, and ended up on the biology faculty at Merritt College in Oakland, Calif. 

I wonder if he sees any Liatris out there, and if so, what its mental associations are. When I see them, I still get a quick gut-flinch: What am I going to do?

A Dog's Three-Dimensional World of Light, Shapes, and Scent — Mostly Scent?

Is Marco the dog following a visual trail, with the additional visual cues of rocks lined up on the side, or is he following "a rippling, three-dimensional tapestry of light, shapes, and scents, with every object effusing odors that are further revealed upon nose-first investigation"?

According to the researchers interviewed for this article in Popular Science, "Why Your Dog Needs to Smell the World," too many dog owners neglect smelling opportunities in favor of motion. 

Many dogs, however, live in less enriching circumstances. They spend most of their time in relatively scent-impoverished indoor environments and then, when taken outside for a walk, are hurried along at a pace that’s more about their caregiver’s interests than their own. Even just a cracked-open window can make a difference, says Horowitz, though she tries to let her own companions, Quiddity and Tilde, sniff to their hearts’ content while exploring on a stroll.

Dogs change too: Our former collie-mix, Shelby, used to charge forward on walks. She never learned not to pull the leash -- or I was unwilling to correct her again and again times 1,000. 

More often she was off-leash except for the last bit of the walk home, past the other houses.

But as she aged, she more and more prefered to take "sniff walks," going a couple of yards and then pausing to examine some tuft of grass or bush. That is what old dogs often want to do.

Blog Stew with Mountain Lion (Tastes like Pork, They Say)

Just a lion walking past a trail camera two years ago.

•  The culinary side of mountain lions (cougars) is not covered in this Colorado Parks and Wildlife video series, but you get one legally, be my guest. (Or should I be yours?)

Episode 1 - Mountain lion biology and historical perspective
Episode 2 - Mountain lion habitat and human expansion
Episode 3 - Hunting
Episode 4 - What to do if you encounter a mountain lion

• What is chronic wasting disease and why is it a problem for deer, elk, and msein the Rockies? Two more videos here from CPW.

 • Yes, beavers are great! Beavers in every drainage!    

SILVERTON, Colo. — Colorado’s San Juan Mountains are home to about 15,000 abandoned mines, according to Rory Cowie, the president and owner of Alpine Water Resources.

Several hundred of these abandoned mines are in need of a cleanup, which is something multiple federal agencies are working on. Cowie refers to these mines as “legacy mines”— mines that are no longer in use.

“They either have draining water that's of poor quality, or they may have a bunch of mine waste or tailings ... near them,” Cowie said. “And so, for the past 25 or 30 years, there's been efforts to clean up these mines, but there are a lot of them and it takes a lot of funding.”

But Cowie has a low-cost, natural solution in mind: the American beaver.

But be careful. As Ben Goldfarb writes Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, mountain lions look at newly dropped-off beavers the way that you might look at a cheeseburger. There is a video embedded.

Instagram Blamed for "Crystal Mill" Access Closure

The 1892 Crystal "Mill" was actually a powerhouse. (Library of Congress)

 If you live in Colorado, you know this image. As the man quoted says, it's on the wall of every dentist's office. (Except my old dentist, who stuck streamer flies in the ceiling tiles sothat you could contemplate them when the chair reclined.)

What used to be a popular destination is now closed off. It was just too too Instagram-able.  The owner used to charge visitors a $10 fee. Now access is closed, reports the Colorado Sun.

Some of the visitors to the Crystal Mill and Crystal City ghost town area — estimated at thousands a week in the summer season — had started prying off bits of the historic mill. They were carving their names into surrounding trees and spray painting on structures. Some threw a party inside the rickety mill building. One slung a hammock from the side of the mill. Some buzzed drones over the area. One pulled a gun on a Cox employee when asked to pay the $10 access fee.

Marble locals have reported that others went to nearby private historic cabins and walked in on summer residents, thinking the structures were there for more of their backcountry exploration. People relieved themselves outside the cabins after they found they couldn’t wander in and use a toilet.

Marble business owners who run tours to the mill or rent rugged vehicles capable of getting there, blame social media for the influx of ill-intentioned visitors bent on snagging the best selfies with an internationally recognized mining-era structure.

 Find your own damn social media hotspot, OK?

Help! Which Beetle is This?

I was taking Marco to a favorite pond yesterday when I saw this large beetle marching down the dirt road we were on. Overall length was about 2 in./5 cm.

I thought of a pine sawyer, but there are no pine trees in that area, only cottonwoods. There is a cottonwood borer, but it has a distinctive black and white pattern.

One that looks close is the palo verde beetle. No palo verdes grow here in southern Colorado, but I read that their grubs will also bore into cottonwood roots. Maybe someone could save me a hard day's night of reading guidebooks and websites and identify it?

A Kinky Barn Owl

I was going to say "kinky" because p. 236 in my Sibley guide is Amazon parrots, but then I realized that I was using the "Western North America" version.

Restoring Shortgrass Prairie for Native Plants and Carbon

Fendi Despres (right) and a prairie-restoration volunteers.  (Photo: Fendi Despres via 5280).

5280 Magazine describes how the 1,100-acre Plains Conservation Center (owned by the city of Aurora) is a test area for restoration and carbon sequestration.

[It’s] one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet,” [ Fendi Despres, natural resource specialist] says. This includes a surprisingly long list of native animals, ranging from birds to reptiles. The shortgrass prairie also performs critical services for the environment, such as providing clean air and water. But perhaps the prairie’s most intriguing characteristic is a superpower that we can use to combat climate change and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions: carbon sequestration.

Depres says that the prairie ecosystem is particularly effective at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it underground because its root systems run surprisingly deep—as much as 12 to 15 feet. And unlike forests, which can lose sequestered carbon stored in tree trunks during logging and wildfires, when the prairie burns, most of its carbon remains safely stored below ground.

The area is inside the E470 beltway, which means that it is accessible to visitors who want to take wagon rides and learn about regenerative agriculture. No dogs permitted though.

Colorado Is Now Out of Drought, But New Mexico Is Not

Click to embiggen.

This graphic displays moisture changes in Colorado over the last 90 days. As you can see, the Eastern Slope and High Plains have been wet. Nearly 11 inches (28 cm) have fallen at my house, and other places have more. While in some climates that counts as "somewhat damp," for us it is "Oh my gawd when will it stop?"

 The plains in particular have had tons of hail, which threaten the wheat harvest.

"Heavy rains and severe thunderstorms continue in the Southern Plains where producers are watching forquality impacts. In Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota, producers are hoping for dryer and/or warmer weather ahead of harvest." (US Wheat Associates harvest report, July 7, 2023).

On the other hand, it is starting to look like a good summer wildlflower season, although spring was not so good.

A quarter of New Mexico is "abnormally dry," while the southeastern quadrant is in either "moderate" or "severe" drought.

If you find this information endlessly fascinating, visit the .gov "Drought Portal." Your tax dollars at work.

A Summer When Some Signs Fail

Last of the low penstemon.

A now-gone rancher friend used to say, "All signs fail in times of drought." Maybe they fail in times of heavy rains as well.

Spring started dry. I was out on a couple of small fires in April, and we all worried what was coming next. Rain was coming next: from mid-May to mid-June we got more than nine inches (24+ cm). 

All my May outdoor projects — plantings, rail-fence repair, house-painting — were postponed.

The natural world was similar. The usual spring wildflowers were never seen or only rarely. Spring beauties (Claytonia) not at all. Sand lilies — just one or two. Pasque flowers, hardly at all.

Bird life changed too. A flock of evening grosbeaks (as many as eighteen) that had hung around all spring finally dispersed, except for a couple, when M and I went down to Taos for a week in early June, taking away their free food, because we don't leave bird feeders out all night when the bears are about.

Colorado Springs had the wettest June since record-keeping began.

I don't know if it was the cold and rain or what, but the roll call of spring migrants was incomplete.

The broad-tailed hummingbirds arrived in April as usual, and two males are busy disputing rights to the sugarwater feeder. Black-headed grosbeaks are here, although perhaps not as many as I expected.

But spotted towhees, which are usually screeching from every oak thicket as they proclaim their nesting territories, don't seem to be here at all.

I miss Lucinda. There were many Lucindas over the years.  Back in the 2000s, every year a little cordilleran flycatcher would nest in some inconvenient (to us) place, like on the front porch light, and so we named all the mother birds Lucinda.

A few years ago, I built the Official Flycatcher Nesting Shelf high up under the eaves on the quiet back side of the house, and the birds liked it. They would nest mid-June, and the young would be out of the nest by late July. 

In 2023, as I recall, some eggs were laid but never hatched.  Did some predator nab that year's Lucinda? And this year, no flycatchers. The chain seems to be broken, and I am surprised  how sad that makes me feet.

So many things seem to be happening late, and I keep hoping, but I don't think it is likely that they will show up to build a nest two weeks later.

Wildflowers recovered better. June saw a burst of blue-flowered low penstemon in every forest clearing, supported by some vetches, clover,  feral lilacs and others. Wild plums bloomed profusely , but ponderosa pine pollen was scanty.

 In late June, we flipped from rainy to hot with highs hitting 90° F, all of which goes to show that when it comes to weather, "average" is just a number. So M. and I are still setting out plants and even seeds, hoping for a long warm fall, with backup plans of moving some container plants into the unheated greenhouse if need be. 

And mushrooms! Thanks to all the rain, we're picking here around the house, mostly shaggy parasols, but a twenty-minute drive put us into some giant puffballs, sitting in the high grass creekside like skulls on an ancient battlefield. Two of those in a shopping back feel like serious food. Maybe 2023 will go down as a great mushroom year.

I can't tell what it all adds up to though. Some things good, some puzzling.

Shootout at the Watering Hole

Photo: Colorado Sun

 "Pastoral cultures are always violent," I read once in an anthropology book. 

You know the scenario: two herds are convering on a watering hole from different directions, and the respective herdsmen get into a fracas over whose animals will drink first.

I figure it will be the same with electric vehicles, which politicians are pushing with religious fervor. 

They typically take about an hour to charge, and charging stations are still few and far between in most places. Like having a small city of 100,000 people with two filling stations.

Today's headline out of the Denver inner suburb of Edgewater: "Fight between Tesla drivers ends in deadly shooting at Denver-area charging station."

A fight between Tesla drivers at an electric vehicle charging station in suburban Denver escalated into a fatal shooting that killed one driver and left another man in custody, authorities said Wednesday

With all the "plans" and "mandates"out there, and all the glee in the news media, this might be a new part of our future.

No Matter What We Do, They. Keep.Trying.

The National Weather Service office in Pueblo posted these radar images on Facebook today.

See the oval on the left? That is not rain, it's birds.

No matter what we do. No matter who is running for president. No matter whether the stock market is up or down. No matter how wet or dry the winter was (dry here in the Arkansas River drainage),  they keep trying to live their ancient, ancient lives.

You can do them a solid by turning off as many lights as possible. They don't need your lights. They know the way.

Great Information for Colorado Birders, Ecotourists, and Upland Hunters

When I was young and the internet still only dial-up, I had an idea for a Future Farmers of America chapter fundraiser.

A chapter in, say, Wray, Colorado, could poll its members' parents and friends and come up with a list of landowners who allowed hunters on their property (for free or for a small trespass fee). 

This list could be photocopied into a little booklet and sold at the Chamber of Commerce or fundraising events.

Maybe someone did something like that, somewhere. But now Colorado Parks & Wildlife has done something a little bit similar.

I picked up this 6x9-inch spiral bound book last month at the High Plains Snow Goose Festival. It is for southeastern Colorado —  there are similar books for the other three quarters

There is an overall "birding trail" page at the CPW website.

 You can also download the books as PDF files or pick up durable printed copies (if they are in stock) for free at regional offices.

You will find descriptions of accessible sites such as public parks, state wildlife areas (all adults must have a hunting or fishing license or SWA pass), and others, and also farms and ranches that engage in eco-tourism, offering hiking, camping, birding, and in some cases hunting access as well.

Fees are not given, but there is contact information. 

There are also auto-route guides, such as this excerpt for Cordova Pass in southern Colorado.

It's a lot of good information in one place, and you should have it if you live in or travel through Colorado for outdoor recreation.

History Wars II: Where is Your Fine New Signage Now?

In 2008, I described two different narratives about the area south of Florence, Colorado, in the pre-Civil War era of trappers, traders, and would-be ranchers. 

I called it "History Wars in Custer County," which was slightly misleading, because the marker also relates to SE Fremont County. But it was a Custer Co. historical group that — annoyed by the then-Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado) replacing the good ol' historical marker with something more self-consciously multicultural — decided to erect a replica alongside it.

That group is winning the battle of the elements. Their old-style sign, with occcasional repainting, has outlasted the new one, which has been erased by the gentle Colorado sunshine. 

Go to the early post to see how the new sign looked when it was new and to read some of its text. Back then, you could read it. Now, like most derelict structures, it is attracting graffiti. 

This historical-marker database lists the new sign as "marked unreadable," but you can read part of its text.

It's kind of like how well-maintained traditional buildings outlast modernist structures whose concrete splits and spalls and whose cladding falls off.

Are Chickadees Hybridizing and Is That a Bad Thing?

Mountain chickadeee (Poecile gambeli). Cornell University

A recent Audobon Society article spoke to possible hybridization between mountain chickadees and black-capped chickadees (more common at lower elevations) here in Colorado:

Black-capped and Mountain Chickadees mate more often than previously believed, research shows—especially where people disturb their habitat. 

Three chickadees clung to a suet feeder outside Denver, but one of them looked different from the others. Unlike the two Black-capped Chickadees, an eBird user noted in December, this one had a faint white band above its eyes, characteristic of a Mountain Chickadee. In July, at the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe, another birder spotted a chickadee with a Mountain’s white eyebrows and a Black-capped’s buff sides and white-edged wings. Similar birds have popped up in Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, and other Rocky Mountain metros. 

Prior to eBird’s creation in 2002, the scientific literature held only three records of hybridization between Black-capped and Mountain Chickadees, each report more than 25 years old. But in the past few years, Kathryn Grabenstein and Scott Taylor, evolutionary biologists at the University of Colorado Boulder, noticed that eBird users commonly spot hybrids of the two species in the West. The platform includes more than 800 such reports today, many of them from cities and towns. The researchers decided to look further into the phenomenon.

Funny thing, here in the foothills of the Wet Mountains, essentially a young (post-1960s) ponderosa pine forest mixed with a Gambel oak understory, I see both chickadee species about equally in smal numbers, usually no more than two of each at a time. This habitat has evolved and contains houses, but I would not say that there is a large number of introduced deciduous trees.

"Species "is a human concept, and definitions are often changed. There used to be several species of juncos, for example, and then the American Ornithological Society decided that there was only one: the dark-eyed junco. Bye-bye, Oregon junco and the rest.

Nature writer Emma Marris comments in her new book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (the paperback subtitle is What We Owe Animals in a Changing World),

One approach to sorting out whether animal hybrids are "good" or "bad" in terms of biodiversity is to ask whether the resulting organisms will be more resiliant and likely to persist in the face of the ongoing processes of environmental change that we humans have kicked off. Another way is to investigate whether the individual hybrids themseves will be more or less able to be happy and flourish.

So as long as a there is a chickadee out there doing chickadee stuff and living in the trees, it's all right, she would say.

"The Native Three," a Short Video on Some Upper Colorado River Fish

I'm working through a backlog of news-related potential blog posts. Here's a short video about state wildlife biologists working with non-game species — but still important native fish.

Just think, there is no "Roundtail Chub Unlimited" with chapters all over the Colorado River basin. Pity.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife's aquatic research scientists have embarked on multiple projects to protect the three fish species native to the Upper Colorado River Basin (Flannelmouth Sucker, Bluehead Sucker and Roundtail Chub). This video, ‘The Native Three’ helps tell that story.

Poachers Do It Mainly for the Thrills — and the Cash

These mule deer were not killed because someone was hungry, but for money. (Colorado Parks & Wildlife)

I was told once that a certain state game warden in my area used to wink at poaching if it was done by people whom he thought "needed the meat." That would have been in the 1950s–1960s. I met him when he was older and retired—only briefly—so I really do not know.

Also in the 1960s, some Western Slope relatives of mine used to cope with rural low wages by poaching deer around the boundaries of Colorado National Monument, I later learned.

I'm sure they "needed the meat" too, but frankly, the one guy was a major thrill-seeker all his (relatively short) life and getting away with something was fun. If crime was boring, there would be a lot fewer criminals.

When you dig into poaching cases, they are usually about money and thrills. This not Robin Hood poaching "the king's deer," although some people bullshit about doing just that.

Ian Petkash, a Park County [Colorado] district wildlife manager, recently stated,

“This year [2022] was far and away the busiest year I’ve had, especially for egregious cases, felony-level cases. I don’t have an explanation on why this year was so bad. I’ve kind of wracked my brain trying to find a pattern"  . . . .

Petkash discovered one common thread in many of his poaching cases: the willful destruction of big game animals, a felony under Colorado law. It generally occurs in one of two ways: shooting and intentionally leaving the entire animal to waste without harvesting its meat, or just claiming the trophy parts, such as the head and hide, and leaving the rest.

Why is it not a surprise that a guy busted in 2019 for poaching deer and bighorn sheep for money in Teller and Chaffee counties then popped into the news again last year, arrested on multiple felony charges for burglaries and weapons possession? (I suppose after his poaching bust, he was by then a "felon in posession.")  Not exactly Robin Hood.

That some poachers are caught after bragging on social media looks like thrill-seeking too

In my area, during the late 2000s, a poaching ring operated killing big mule deer bucks for sale to the trophy-heads market. Of course there was a crooked taxidermist involved, who went down with the others. One must always cherchez le taxidermiste, as Hercule Poirot might say.

One of the ring managed a local cafe, owned by his father. When the arrests came, the locals just stopped going there. His father sent a form letter to everyone in the area: "I didn't know. It wasn't me. Please don't boycott us!" or words to that effect.

But they did, and the cafe closed its doors.

Hartman, Colorado, and the 'Ecology' of High Plains Hamlets

The last commercial structure on Main Street, Hartman, Colorado.

Some years back my friend Galen and I went to a "hunters' breakfast" in Hartman, a fundraiser for a local service club or something. Bacon, eggs, pancakes for a reasonable price, in a little place in Prowers County, southeastern-most Colorado, where there are more people in the cemetery than on the street.

If we were in the brick 1930s gymnasium — it fits my memories — then it is crumbling now.

Hartman's population in 1920: 175. In 1930: 269. [Insert Dust Bowl here.] In 2020: 56. That's a story of the High Plains right there.

There was still a tiny, moribund Main Street then. Now it's just this brick building (a former bank?) and a modern modular little post office. I hope that they do not lose that.

Hartman clearly is a "hamlet." 

Former Colorado writer Merrill Gilfillan (b. 1945) defined hamlets this way in Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains, which just happens to be my favorite contemporary "travel" book about the High Plains.

Hamlets are utterly disctinct entities. Detached and austere, they occupy an ecological nice between the town and the isolate self-sufficient ranch. Hamlets have negligible commerce and none of the awkward communal success or desperate self-esteem of larger farm towns, yet they are socially more varied than the extended family ranch clusters within their windbreaks.

Hamlets are gratifyingly in-scale and honest. They represent a pure and elemental High Plains culture, as in Petri dish. Hamlets have few visible means of support; no schools; no class plays; no historical museums; little public enterprise save the occasional gas station/grocery combination.

There is more. It's worth a read. 

When I first read Magpie Rising, I got the same chills that I did when I found Barry Lopez' Winter Count in the old Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs. Just sucked me right in. 

I have often thought of taking certain essays from his newer Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains and just writing a couple of my own with his as a template. Steal from the best, I always say.

If you like interviews with authors, here is one with Gilfillan.

Now I have done it — started out with a lonely hamlet, ended up with "the prose of a lifelong poet." That's what happens when you spend a lot of time observing.

Tootsie the Coyote, a Black Hills Mascot

Fred Borsch holds Tootsie during Deadwood's 1950 "Days of '76" Parade (South Dakota Public Broadcasting).

 

My boyhood in the Black Hills slightly overlapped the life of Tootsie, a famous South Dakota coyote. I must have gone past The Spot liquor store on visits to Deadwood, but I don't remember it. Dad probably never took me inside. (But can I time-travel back and make an offer on the Willys "woody" station wagon in the photograph?)

I could not find any of Tootsie and Fred's vocal duets (see article) on YouTube, but there was a bit of silent home movie from the late 1950s showing Tootsie and, apparently, Fred's tame deer at Galena, S.D.  (The Sheridan Lake footage is from elsewhere in the Black Hills.)

I wonder if she made any parade appearances in Rapid City.

The bounty on coyotes was real. "In 1947 and other years, there was a bounty on coyotes. The State of South Dakota considered them to be a predatory animal and a threat to livestock." 

Dad used to buy eggs from an old trapper named Frank Schmidt, who lived in the northern Hills.  It was not so much about getting organic free-range eggs as it was that Frank was a "character," and Dad collected "characters." 

There were usually skinned coyotes hanging up, because Frank eked out his modest living partly off those bounties. And he must have had a buyer for the pelts.

Sometimes he stopped by our house in Rapid to drop off eggs. His rattly pickup truck apparently stank of predator, because our dogs would bark at it like they barked at no other vehicle.

The Backyard Chicken Craze Is Going Mass-Market

I stopped at the Big R store in Pueblo last week — my first visit in some time — and wow, that chicken thing.

Big R seems to cater mainly to hobby ranchers and rural homeowners. (Now I'll from someone: "I farm 600 acres, and I shop there!") You can get your Carhart and Wrangler jeans, your muck boots, animal feed by the sack, gopher poison, guns and ammo, tools, horse tack, all sorts of stuff.

And chicken coops. Out front where there used to be kit-built storage sheds are now displayed kit-built chicken coops. I will leave it to you to decide whether where these come down on the cute/utilitarian spectrum and whether you could build you own for less. But who can wait? There's a crisis!

In the parking lot, two middle-aged women of SE Asian looks were loading big sacks of chicken feed into a car. Somehow I felt that they might have been in the chicken business for some time.

In Colorado, we have not just avian flu hitting large-scale chicken operations, but a new law just went into effect setting "cage free" space requirements for laying hens. Some people want to blame both for the shortage of eggs in stores. Others insist that only the avian flu is to blame:

“The data that we're seeing coming out of the USDA is really indicating that what they're seeing...this impact on prices that we're experiencing, is really a direct input of the impact of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza,” said Hollis Glenn, deputy commissioner of operations for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “It's a fatal disease for poultry, the laying hens, and the flocks of our producers have been tremendously diminished. So, their ability to produce eggs has been a challenge and when they have an outbreak in their facility, the data that shows that.”

Meanwhile, social media is on it! Two samples for yesterday:

And if you made it this far, you need to be thinking about the legalities.

Additional permits might be required for the coops the chicken will live in. 

“Call [your local zoning department] and figure out if you're going to need a permit for your coop,” [Chicken owner Bekah] Russell said. “Because, you'll definitely need one for your chickens, but you might require an additional building permit.”

[Chicken owner Kia[ Ruiz also advised owners to prepare for chicken deaths. The birds are not particularly hardy creatures and predators common in the state will hunt them if their enclosures aren’t secure. And sometimes, the hens might even fight members of their own flock. 

“I had been in that situation when we first got them. They were pecking each other, they were younger.” Ruiz said. “Chickens are dinosaurs. When they see red and they see blood, they will just keep attacking.”

 

Mountain Lions, Dogs, and Lethal Force

This mountain lion was captured and tagged in Boulder in October 2021.
Relocated to the mountains, it was killed in December 2022 after attacking dogs.
(Photo: Boulder Police Dept, via the Colorado Sun)

In 2003, Colorado journalist David Baron published The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America.

Its topic was human-lion relations on the northern Front Range of Colorado, where cities bump into the mountains, with a focus on Boulder County. (A National Public Radio reporter, Barron wrote that book while on a fellowship in environmental journalism at CU-Boulder.)

As Colorado moved away from treating lions as "varmints" with a bounty on their heads to game animals with a limited "take" allowed, populations had rebounded. Boulder, like many other places, had a thriving herd of in-town mule deer, especially on its western edge, and lions had followed the deer — as they do. (The usual figure you hear is that an adult mountain lion will kill a deer every seven to ten days, feeding on the carcass while it is still relatively fresh.)

The death of Idaho Springs high-school athlete Scott Lancaster, ambushed by a lion in 1991 while training for the cross-country running team, was the first recorded human kill in Colorado.

(Here is a list of post-1890 fatal lion attacks in North America, which is undoubtedly incomplete, especially as regards the US-Mexico border region.)

The attack on the young runner is key to Baron's book, as his website explains:

Here, in a spellbinding tale of man and beast that recalls, only in nonfiction form, Peter Benchley’s thriller Jaws, award-winning journalist David Baron chronicles Boulder’s struggles to coexist with its wild neighbors and reconstructs the paved-with-good-intentions path that led to Colorado’s first recorded fatal mountain lion attack. The book reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which human actions are altering wildlife behavior.

My takeaway from Baron's book was that the Colorado Division of Wildlife (as it was then called) was willing to try some active "management" of suburban and exurban mountain lions, but the feedback that they got from public meetings leaned toward "Please don't kill them. We can learn to co-exist."

Have things changed? A headline in the online Colorado Sun reads, "Mountain lions killed 15 dogs in 30 days near a Colorado town. Attacks continued and now a lion is dead."

Subhead: "People living in neighborhoods around Nederland wonder why Colorado Parks and Wildlife can’t do more to stop attacks on their pets".

In response, Sam Peterson, CPW’s Area 2 Boulder South District wildlife manager, held a meeting at the Nederland community center. Most of it focused on how to peacefully coexist with lions, but that’s not what the 140 people who attended were after. They wanted to know why lions were hiding out under porches, grabbing 100-pound Dobermans and 70-pound Labs and stalking dogs on leashes held by humans.

So the debate continues: Active measures versus careful co-existence, with residents coming down on both side and CPW reluctant — for both philosophical and budgetary reasons — to commit to sending marksmen and hounds after every mountain lion seen eyeing a dog.

Some Nederland-area residents now do their outdoor chores with firearms handy. But there's a catch. Under Colorado's "nuisance wildlife" laws (link is a PDF file),  a dog is not worth as much as a goat, for example, if the goat is classified as "livestock" and not a "pet."

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN NOT be destroyed when they are causing damage to personal property, including pets. 

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN be killed when it is NECESSARY to prevent them from inflicting death, damage or injury to livestock, human life, real property, or a motor vehicle. Any wildlife killed shall remain the property of the state, and such killing shall be reported to the division within five days. “Real property” means land and generally whatever is erected or growing upon or affixed to land. (Note: “Personal Property” means everything that is subject to ownership, other than real estate. Personal property includes moveable and tangible things such as pets, furniture and merchandise.)

In the Colorado Sun article, we see what happens when someone uses lethal force — sometimes:

After being driven away from one dog attack, a lion moved on to the next house:

The large, reddish cat walked up a neighbor’s driveway. . .  Several minutes later [the residents] heard several gunshots. CPW’s deputy regional manager Kristin Cannon filled in the rest of the story. 

Cannon says the lion attacked a dog at a home 400 yards from [the first attack]  and that during the attack, the dog’s owner killed the lion. She reiterated what Peterson had said, that it’s illegal to kill a lion to protect a pet but that in this instance CPW won’t be pressing charges due to “the totality of the circumstances.” 

Which is to say that the law is black-and-white but the wildlfe officers have a lot of discretion based on circumstances and the shooter's attitude. In my small experience, I have seen them usually avoid charging a shooter, which might put them in court being cross-examined over whether the bear was in the "personal property" garbage can or trying to break into the "real property" house. And there are the public-relations aspects.

But the option to charge someone is always there, beloved dog or not.