Did Mister Cooper's Hawk Kill Gospodin Steller's Jay? On the Politicization of Bird (and Mountain) Names

Walking up the dirt road in back of the house on December day, I saw these feathers. Obviously a Steller's jay had met a recent and violent end. But whodunnit? A Cooper's hawk? 

Just thinking about that leads to another thought: Who was Steller and how does he "own" these jays? And who was Cooper likewise?

He was Georg Wilhelm Stöller, russianized to "Steller,"  who lived a short (1709–1746) but productive life as a natural scientist including participation in "the Second Kamchatka Expedition [1741]of Captain Vitus Bering, the legendary Russian explorer whose name wound up on the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and Bering land bridge."

He gathered lots of specimens but was also shipwrecked with others of the crew on what was named Bering Island, for Capt. Bering would die there. In Steller's memory, four birds and the Steller's sea lion, plus the doomed Steller's sea cow, were given his name, because he was the first to publish scientific descriptions.

Cooper's hawk? Named by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) for his friend Wlliam Cooper, another early 19th-century naturalist.

These names might be going away though. In 2023 the American Ornithological Society announced that all English bird names named after people within the geographic jurisdiction it manages will be changed, with the initial effort set to tackle 70 to 80 bird species present in the United States and Canada, starting in 2024.

These names are, allegedly, "racist and misogynist." So this is all bad stuff from the past that we are getting rid of. It's "racist" when an 18th-century German naturalist works for the Russian government in the Bering Sea? Maybe we should get rid of "Bering" too! There is a certain amount of guilt-by-association here. 

In Colorado, we have purified the past, even when it meant favoring one Indian tribe over another. In November 2022 the Colorado  Geographic Naming Advisory Board recommended changing the name of Mount Evans, the state's highest peak, to Mount Blue Sky, "a name supported by the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma."

There was history here: John Evans served as territorial governor from 1862–1865. That was a period of renewed conflict between settlers and some Natives. In late 1864 a force of Colorado volunteer cavalry attacked a peaceful Arapaho camp on Sand Creek in eastern Colorado and massacred many people, driving some of the survivors to align with the Cheyenne, who were more hostile. Evans did not "authorize" the attack -- he was not there -- but he did authorize formation of the volunteer unit that committed it, so in that sense he was "linked" to the Sand Creek Massacre.

But when the proposal went up to the US Board of Geographic Names, other Cheyennes objected: 

The vote has been held up for the past six months because of objections from the Northern Cheyenne of Lame Deer, Montana, the only original Colorado tribe, which is vehemently against the Mount Blue Sky name. The phrase "blue sky" is part of the sacred Tribal Arrow Ceremony and, thus, the Northern Cheyenne believe it would be "sacrilegious" for it to be spoken in common language, the tribe argued.  

Northern Cheyenne tribal leaders have, instead, long advocated to rename Colorado's most famous peak to "Mount Cheyenne-Arapaho."

The Northern Cheyenne tribe lost, because the board wanted to settle the issue. It's Mount Blue Sky, signed and delivered.

But let me speculate: Will a generation of young social-media users now think that the mountain was named for Bluesky, a social media platform that is trying to compete with X (formerly Twitter)? Will they look around to see if there is a Mount TikTok or Facebook Peak somewhere too?

As for the birds, in a year or two, will I be saying that a "stripey forest hawk" maybe killed a "Western crested jay"? Or maybe the Cooper's hawk should be the "mall hawk." On a 2020 visit I saw more of them around a California strip mall parking lot than I ever see at one time here at home in the woods.

(In pre-Communist Russia, "Gospodin" was the term of respect equivalent to Monsieur or Herr.)

Did Wolf Reintroduction Doom Colorado's Big Cat-Hunting Ban?

Someone in my area left their anti-Prop. 127 sign up well past Election Day.

First, let me say that I am still in the blogging game. There were deadlines, then there was business travel, not to mention travel to aid a sick friend, and then the business travel gave me some kind of case of the nasties that I am still sleeping off now. 

November was sort of a total loss, but on the electoral side there was one stunning surprise. Not Donald Trump — I mean the defeat of Colorado Proposition 127, which set out to ban the hunting of bobcats and mountain lions — and lynx, but there is no season on them anyway.

The proposition's text began, "The voters of Colorado find and declare that any trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats, or lynx is inhumane, serves no socially acceptable or ecologically beneficial purpose, and fails to further public safety." (Cats Aren't Trophies website.)

Of course, it was written so that "trophy hunting" meant "any hunting," just in case anyone claimed to be a subsistence mountain-lion hunter. Some people do eat them and find the meat tasty, but I have no personal experience there. One neighbor is a houndsman, and I have been outdoors working to be suddenly swarmed by four or five dogs with GPS collars, who give a quick hello and then tear off into the forest. (They don't know where the public land boundary is, being dogs.) I know that group has occasional success, but they've never offered me any lion chops.

Anti-127 signs were all over my county and the next one, but I figured it was a lost cause. The big urban counties would go "Aw, kitties!" and vote Yes. 

The momentum was there. Several ballot measures restricting types of hunting have passed in the last thirty years:

• 1992: A 70–30 percent vote ended the spring bear season, which usually meant hunting over bait. (I had worked briefly for an outfitter in the 1980s, making me the guy pouring Karo syrup over a pile of day-old doughnuts in front of a tree stand). Some hunters supported that one. It also outlawed hunting bears with dogs at any time, although that was never a big thing.
• 1996 A state constitutional amendment, not merely a regulatory change, prohibited "the use of leghold traps, instant-kill body-gripping design traps, poisons, or snares; providing an exception for the use of such methods by certain governmental entities for the purpose of protecting human health or safety or managing fish or other nonmammalian wildlife; providing an exception for the use of such methods to control birds or to control rodents other than beaver and muskrat, as otherwise authorized by law." It passed 52–47 percent.
  
• 2020 While not directly about hunting, Prop. 114, demanding reintroduction of gray wolves, squeaked through 51–49 percent, with urban counties leading the charge.  

So when Prop. 127 went down with 56 percent "no" votes, I was astonished. Colorado Public Radio offered an answer: Blame the wolves. 

Dan Gates, who led the opposition campaign against Proposition 127, had predicted in the run-up to the vote that the controversial wolf reintroduction effort would convince voters to reject the hunting measure — and said the results bear that out. 

He thinks watching Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists struggle with livestock attacks from wolves soured voters on removing their full control of other predators.

After all the "wolves won't attack cattle" — wolves attack cattle — "Those are BAD wolves; we will re-trap them and replace them with GOOD wolves," who wouldn't be a little cynical. Even Cats Aren't Trophies is negative:

The team behind Proposition 127 agrees that wolf reintroduction worked against the proposed ban on big cat hunting. Samantha Miller, campaign manager for Cats Aren’t Trophies, said the management of wolf reintroduction has been a “tragedy,” and said she would have voted against that measure if she had been a Colorado resident at the time. 

Miller, who now lives in Grand County, said wolf reintroduction and the resulting backlash “has really caused a lot of distrust and a lot of really negative stories around carnivores that has bled out into this campaign.”

Surely it's no coincidence that two weeks after the election, CPW released a report on Western Slope mountain lion density.   Biologists used GPS tracking and scout cameras in several areas:

Results of the camera-based mark-resight estimates in Middle Park averaged 2.5 independent lions per 39 square miles during the winters of 2021-22 and 2022-23.

In the Gunnison Basin, CPW observed an average density of 4.2 independent lions per 39 square miles in the winters of 2022-23 and 2023-24.

[Mark Vieira, CPW’s Carnivore and Furbearer Program Manager] said, "This combination of GPS collars and ear tags on lions paired with trail cameras across large representative study areas is showing us that parts of Colorado appear to have high lion numbers compared to studies of lions in other states.”

Every time that I think I should do a big round-up post on the wolves, some new development pops up, and I don't get it done. One of these days! But meanwhile, this wolf-mountain lion interaction was a surprise at the ballot box.