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.