Hungry Bears and Fawns

The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance.

 

My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor, but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars.

Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over wheelie bins (that should have been indoors), got into some smelly fertilizer, and committed other mischief.

We are in a drought. Spring fruit like wild plums and chokecherries basically did not happen.  The days are hot with a series of Red Flag fire warnings. (My volunteer department rolled out on one small wildlife fire on the 17th.) 

No doubt the little bear is hungry. 

He appeared behind our house during when I was away on the fire. His scent must have drifted in, because M. said that Marco the Chesapeake Bay retriever jumped up barking and ran for the back door, where she looked out and saw the bear up on the trees.

Another neighbor posted said the bear checked out his propane grill. Elsewhere, the yearling broke into a shed where some livestock feed was stored. The shed's owner has now added an electric fence and placed an elected "unwelcome mat" at the door. 

I  got up  Friday to find that someone had dug up up soil in an outdoor planter, knocking two tomato cages and the Walls o' Water that they support onto the ground. Luckily the plants survived. 

The local game warden came around and gave another neighbor a bag of the non-lethal rubber-ball 12 gauge shotgun shells. They pass those out like candy.

The recipient rode around on his side-by-side distributing them, so I have a couple placed at hand. It's never come to that in the past, probably won't this time either, but there they are.

All this past winter, a mule deer doe (last seen visibly pregnant) and her yearling offspring hung out in the oak brush close to our house. 

All around, fawns should be dropping now.  And although black bears do not hunt prey the way that mountain lions do, they like fresh fawn.

There used to be a buffalo ranch about ten miles from here, and the owner once told me that during calving, black bears would come off the mountain to hunt the calves. You would think that Mama Buffalo would be a formidable opponent but apparently the bears get though some times.

(In Yellowstone, a grizzly bear recently nabbed an elk calf in front of an assembly of tourists. 

[Wildlife researcher John Winnie, Jr.] wasn’t there when the grizzly first found that calf, but said one of his students witnessed the moment. The bear’s head suddenly snapped in the calf’s direction right before she moved in and found the helpless young elk.

That probably means Storm [the grizzly] heard the calf rustling in the grass, or caught a glimpse of it moving, Winnie said.

Once Storm started eating, it was hard to watch, he said.

The calf cried out as it was being devoured, but no other elk heard it.

“The nearest cow elk we saw were probably out of earshot, 400 to 500 yards away,” Winnie said.

In Yellowstone, spring calving produces about 80 calves per 100 cow elk, he said. but “by the time the first of the next year rolls around in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we’re down to around 20 to 25 calves per 100 cows. And most of the calves that were lost were lost to predation."

 Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, which is devoted to whitetail deer-hunting, posted on X (formerly Twitter) a scout camera video from John Lockburner Jr. (Sussex County, N.J.) of a black bear taking a whitetail fawn. The post said, " According to scientific research by John J. Ozoga in Michigan, yearling black bears can reduce fawn survival by as much as 22% annually."

You can hear the fawn bawling. 

 So in this drought year, will this yearling bear get a taste for fawn?

Antero Reservoir Closing; Fish Salvage Underway

Antero Reservoir (Colorado Parks & Wildlife

Antero Reservoir, one of the two "saucer" reservoirs in South Park, as I like to think of them, is being drained to save water in the current drought. (The other is Spinney Mountain Res.)

Denver Water announced Monday it will drain and close South Park’s Antero Reservoir fishing and camping spot to avoid critical evaporation losses in a tinder-dry season. 

The agency serving 1.5 million Front Range customers will send Antero’s reserve down the South Platte River to Cheesman Reservoir and close the recreation area to the public for the first time since the severe 2002 drought.

The move will keep 5,000 acre-feet of water from evaporating in summer heat about one-quarter of the reservoir’s capacity. In a normal runoff year, that 5,000 acre-feet would easily be made up by snowmelt, but Denver has declared this year’s snowpack the lowest in recorded history in its resource areas. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced a "no limits" fish-salvage operation.

All . . . regulations, including a valid Colorado fishing license and legal methods of take, will be enforced. Motorized boating and commercialized fishing will not be allowed. Hand-launched vessels and shoreline angling are permitted.  

After May 13, no public access for camping or anything.

Two Buttes Res. in SE Colorado was recently drained too. Maybe the El Niño winter that is supposed to be coming will refill it.  

The Last Bobcat

The last bobcat, ready to be sent to his new temporary home.

 

The half-grown bobcat hissed and snarled as Tom Sanders of Wet Mountain Wildlife grabbed him with a noose pole and lowered him into the carrier that I held open. Unlike the other bobcats we had released last July, he was bound for another facility. Wet Mountain is winding down, and today's wildife transport might have been the last I will do there, unless something major changes.

Back on Friday, October 3, M. and I were riding Amtrak's Floridian through the forested valley of the Youghiogheny River in western Pennsylvania, the most scenic stretch of railroad between Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. My volunteer fire department iPhone app started its high-low beeping. Someone was needed at the fire house to help the ambulance crew load a patient into a Flight for Life helicopter at our helipad.

I marked myself as Unavailable. Then I looked at the incident address, where a 78-year-old woman had suffered "a fall." Oh shit. Oh no.

Cec (short for Cecilia) and Tom Sanders began working as wildlife rehabilitators at their home in Pueblo, where they both taught in D-60 schools. In the 1980s they bought a house on a small acreage farther west, still in commuting distance, later adding more land that they put under a conservation easement. Every year they cared for multiple orphaned deer (mule deer, whitetails, and even elk). Fawns eventually wandered from their enclosure into the hills.

Sitting by a tranquilized bear, Cec Sanders chats with district wildlife managers
Kim Woodruff and Justin Krall, who will be releasing it into the mountains. (June 2018)

Other enclosures and structures held bear cubs, plus beavers, mountain lions, bobcats, porcupines,  raccoons, and one time a Sulcata tortoise, which eventually went to the Denver Zoo Cec and Tom also for years housed cockatoos and other tropical birds seized from illegal traders, birds that could not legally be sold. (Those went to a bird sanctuary a couple of years ago.) And I am probably forgetting other species.

That day, Oct. 3, Cec awoke feeling dizzy and "off." Tom was preparing to drive her to a hospital when she collapsed, so he called for an ambulance. Seeing that she had suffered a major stroke, the paramedics summoned a helicopter, but it was all too late. She never regained full consciousness and died two days later. 

While Tom worked in the background, hauling, building, fixing, photographing, Cec was the chief animal-attendant, publicist, and fundraiser. Her book about their first years, If You Talk to Animals: The Life of a Wildlife Rehabilitator, is available on Amazon.

Without her, there is no facility, and no one is waiting in the wings. And what happens to the orphan bear cub in southeast Colorado? A much longer drive— or else a bullet.

Luckily, there were no young bears over-wintering. The district wildlife manager (game warden) took a porcupine and a raccoon to some state land in the Wet Mountains. That left the bobcat — the fawns would hang out with other deer and fend for themselves. Another rehabber up in Douglas County had two cubs and agreed to take this one too. Then they could all be hateful together, which is good preparation for adult life as a bobcat.

I slid the carrier into my Jeep, covered it with a sheet to reduce outside stimuli, and started home to pick up M. for the trip. It's a good thing that I know that road well, because I was not paying much attention to it.

I Was Raised to Hate Porcupines

Young porcupine at a rehabilitation center in Colorado.

 

When I was a boy, my dad was a US Forest Service district ranger. That meant he was in charge of a "district" within a national forest, a forest having usually four to six (or more) districts, depending on geography. He had a crew chief and a crew whose size varied seasonally, a half-time secretary, and a full-time assistant ranger (also with a college forestry degree). 

This is not my father, but it could be.

He was an old-school forester. Recreation, etc., was all very fine, and grazing was OK if regulated, but his job first and foremost was to grow trees, to mark timber sales, and to see that the loggers cut only what they were supposed to cut. 

At least once I heard him say, "I'm a tree farmer," probably while comparing his job to those "pressed pants" park rangers at the nearby national monuments.

And if he was a tree farmer, then porcupines were agricultural pests. As the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website says, "Several evenings of eating bark can severely damage a tree."

They damaged "the crop" by nibbling all around a pine tree, cutting the flow of nutrients.

When he saw a porcupine up in a tree, out came the .22 rifle or whatever he had. When I got to be old enough, he would pass the .22 rifle to me. Since I believed that "Dad knows best," I would sight in and start shooting until, eventually, whomp!

Not was 15 or 16 did I start to rethink porcupines' place in forest ecology. Maybe they did not all have to die, even if they "girdled" a pine tree, ate wires on a camper's car, or left their quills in a inquisitive dog's nose.

One time we were backpacking in the Lost Creek Wilderness (Pike National Forest) when he spotted an unusual light-phase porkie across a pond, fired a .22 revolver at it, and missed. I did not ask for a chance to shoot or volunteer to go after it. Maybe he felt my silent disapproval. That was the porcupine encounter that I had with him.

But when my dog Jack was "quilled" one time, he did share with me a useful trick. Don't just grasp the quills with pliers and pull them out. When you do that, the pliers squeeze the air inside the quill, forcing the barbs out and deeper into the dog's flesh. Instead, cut the quills' ends off with scissors, wire cutters, whatever and then pull. It's kinder to the dog.

Likewise, if he saw this "porcupette," he might even be moved by its juvenile cuteness. Porkies have only one offspring at a time, so they reproduce quite slowly. This one was seized this summer from a wildlife "hoarder" in Colorado Springs and brought to a rehabilitation center where it will spend the winter. 

Next spring, just to be on the safe side, I'll suggest releasing it in an area where no logging is going on. 

It's Spring, When Large Animals Stomp You

On May 4, 2025, a  47-year-old Florida man was gored by a bison in Yellowstone National Park. He survived. 

“We see about two or three (bison attack victims) a year,” Dr. Kirk Bollinger with the Emergency Medicine department at Cody Regional Health told Cowboy State Daily in May. “I haven’t seen a lot of goring injuries where the victim’s guts are coming out. The big thing is the internal bleeding.” 

Then on Tuesday, June 10, a New Jersey man got the treatment at Upper Geyser Basin:  

Park officials said in a statement that the man was in a group of visitors that “approached (the bison) too closely” when it turned and charged.Emergency medical personnel treated the victim for minor injuries.

 The Buffs aren't much of a threat in Colorado (Joke intended), but I've seen equal risks run in Custer State Park-Wind Cave National Monument in South Dakota, which I think of as a sort of mini-Yellowstone, less geysers and grizz. 

 But we now have moose: 

 

Cow moose give birth to calves in late spring and early summer. During this time, they can become more aggressive toward perceived threats to their young. Cows will hide their calves to protect them from predators but will stay nearby. Turn around or leave an area if a calf is spotted. If a moose begins to charge, get behind objects like trees or boulders to put obstacles in its path. Respect posted signs warning of aggressive moose behavior or calf activity on trails. Choose a trail with good visibility and make noise when recreating through thick vegetation.

Most moose conflicts involve dogs. When recreating near riparian or willow habitats, keep dogs on-leash to avoid startling moose near a trail. Off-leash dogs can venture off-trail, surprising hidden moose calves or cows. Cows will, in turn, chase retreating dogs, which can bring the moose in contact with humans. 

A moose sees your happy, bouncy dog and thinks "Wolf! Danger! Attack!" You can read about some specific attacks at the link, but here is one:

On Fri., May 30, two women walking four dogs off-leash encountered a cow moose along Fourmile Creek Road in Fairplay. The moose charged and trampled the women multiple times. Eventually, they  were able to climb onto a nearby roof to escape. A neighbor hazed the moose away with a fire extinguisher. Neither woman sought medical treatment. CPW officers responded to the scene and found two cow moose. Unable to definitively identify which moose was involved in the attack, no further action was taken. 

One moose was shot recently in Grand Lake, Colo., as an act of what was judged to be self-defense. Again, a dog was involved.

 And then there are cow elk. This from exactly a year ago in Estes Park: 

“While newborn calves are immobile, cow elk can become aggressive towards perceived threats,” CPW said. “People are encouraged to be aware while recreating outdoors that calves could be hidden nearby. Cow elk can charge from many yards away.”

Mule deer does are hiding in the oak brush right now, waiting for fawns to drop, if they have not already. Not as threatening as cow elk though!

Wolfage: New Maps of Wolf Travels, Sort of

 Previous: CPW Tries Again with British Columbian Wolves.

Watersheds visited by wolves from late December 2024–late January 2025.
Click to enlarge.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has released new maps of transplanted-wolf activity, BUT you have to be careful how you read them.The maps show the watersheds where wolves have been tracked, They do not show where wolves have been recently — that is kept secret, sort of. To quote a CPW news release from March 2024,

This map depicts watersheds where collared wolves in Colorado have been for the last 30 days. A watershed is a geographic unit that drains water into a specific water body. These are also known as Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC). Information is shared at the HUC 10 level. Watersheds are the appropriate mapping unit to display wolf activity information because wolves are far more likely to use geographic features to affect their distribution than they are political boundaries. The HUC 10 scale provides detailed information that can help agricultural producers be informed of the general areas where wolf activity is known to exist without being too general (i.e., as a county-level map would be) and also is not so specific to risk the protection of individual wolves (as a finer scale HUC12 map would be). Learn more about HUCs at https://water.usgs.gov/GIS/huc.html.

For a watershed to indicate wolf activity, at least one GPS point from the wolf collars was recorded within the watershed's boundaries. Because a watershed indicates wolf activity, it does not mean that a wolf or wolves are present throughout the entire watershed or that they are currently in it.  

But I have already seen at least one journalist treat the map as showing where a certain lone wolf was traveling, which it does not do. The most recent CPW release says, "The watersheds in the southeast region that are lit up in this map represent the movement of one animal."

There was a credible recent account of wolf tracks found near Guffey in southeastern Park County, roughly north of Cañon City, which fits with the map. It was posted on Colorado Wolf Tracker, a private Facebook group.

Wolfage: CPW Tries Again with British Columbian Wolves

"Fladry" deters wolves, they say. (USA Today).

Previous wolfage: "Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves"

With the bad wolves, the re-captured "Copper Creek Pack," now detained in an undisclosed location, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is releasing good wolves on the Western Slope.  (See UPDATE below, however.)

Captured somewhere in British Columbia somewhere, they never eat beef or mutton and reliably vote for the Liberals. 

On dit.*

According to CPW's  Instagram feed,

"The wolves will be captured and transported in crates to Colorado, collared, and released as soon as possible once they arrive at select sites in Garfield, Eagle and/or Pitkin counties. We plan to release 10-15 wolves on the Western Slope per year, for 3-5 years, as outlined in our Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan."https://www.instagram.com/coparkswildlife/

An apparently erroneous report on the Colorado Politics website led to one Pitkin County landowner being visited by camo'd up armed "sightseeers," reports the Aspen Times.   

When asked to leave, they parked on a county road behind a bush just off the property, where they remained for part of the afternoon, according to the owner. 

“This is putting the safety of my family, the livestock, the wolves, all in jeopardy, and all of the allegations were false,” the owner said of the Colorado Politics article published on Tuesday. Two of the ranch owners asked the publication to redact the article when they read it on Thursday morning, which the publication did.

Social media played its part, the article said.

But rumors continued after the new year. Apart from [Facebook group] Colorado Wolf Tracker, the Roaring Fork Swap Facebook page circulated information about the ranch family members, putting their names to the public, “adding fuel to the fire,” the owner said.

And an anonymous source claimed they witnessed Colorado Parks and Wildlife trucks and trailers driving toward the ranch, further strengthening the rumors.

 Colorado Public News rounded up the political side on Jan. 14:

Political tensions have started to boil over amid the lack of official details. The state wildlife commission denied a petition from agriculture organizations last week seeking to pause the reintroduction program. Meanwhile, another livestock group submitted a draft ballot measure to repeal the program, and state and federal elected officials have flexed their political muscles and threatened to take action to protect rural communities.

Colorado Politics did publish another piece on wolf reintroduction on January 8, written by members of the "wolf-livestock coexistence working group," which stated,

Important signs of progress in achieving coexistence are emerging. To date, 50 ranch vulnerability assessments have been completed or are in the process of being completed. Sixty-eight people have expressed interest in becoming range riders. Dozens of guard dogs have been placed on ranches. Turbo fladry and electric fencing have been deployed successfully on numerous ranches. CDA is providing grants for range riding and carcass management. And CPW and CDA are holding coexistence and stockmanship workshops in potentially affected counties. The ad hoc group is still divided as to whether the landscape will have enough coverage with site assessments before the release of wolves from British Columbia.

 "Fladry" are flapping plastic ribbons placed along pasture boundaries. How they deter long-legged hard-running carnivores, I do not yet understand.

UPDATE: On Jan 19, CPW said the 2025 wolf release was completed. Fifteen wolves from BC plus the five survivors of the Copper Creek Pack were released in Eagle and Pitkin counties. They think the Copper Creek wolves can somehow stop "depredating" livestock:

This agency decision to re-release the Copper Creek animals considered multiple factors, including the health of the animals, the timing of the B.C. releases this year and the potential proximity to new wolves on the landscape. This strategy gives the animals the best chance for survival, advancing Colorado’s gray wolf restoration efforts. 

"As I said at the time, options in the case of the Copper Creek Pack were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward. The male adult wolf was involved in multiple depredations. Removing the male at that time, while he was the sole source of food and the female was denning, would likely have been fatal to the pups and counter to the restoration mandate,” said [CPW director Jeff] Davis.

The capture of the pack was a management action that was taken to change the behavior of the animals to reduce depredations and could further impact the adult female's behavior moving forward.

* Since the wolves are Canadian, I am required to sprinkle in some French. Translation: "They say."

Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves

A suitably logo'd Governor Polis releases a wolf in December 2023.

An odd news release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife popped up in my inbox last week. Having worked as a newspaper reporter, I am pretty good at translating Bureaucratese into English, so I will give this one a try. It involves a "memorandum of understanding" between CPW and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which is headquartered in Ignacio, La Plata County.

Headline: Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Southern Ute Indian Tribe Announce MOU on Gray Wolf Restoration

Original: CPW and the Tribe are committed to operating on a basis of a government-to-government relationship that simultaneously recognizes and respects Tribal sovereignty. The MOU also states that CPW and the Tribe will work together to provide a process to minimize conflicts, memorialize a process for information sharing on gray wolf reintroductions throughout the State and confirm the Tribe’s intent to participate in the State’s program to provide fair and timely compensation to the Tribe or Tribal Members for any losses of livestock proven to be caused by gray wolves.

Translation: We, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, do not want any wolves near our livestock operations, and if you release them here, we will pull out the  "sovereignty card" and see you in court.

Wasn't that easy?

They cannot play the sovereignty card, but two Western Slope counties, Rio Blanco (2021) and Montrose (2021), had previously passed "no wolf reintroduction" resolutions. In November 2024, CPW said that Rio Blanco Co. had been removed from the list "due to the limited number of state-owned sites that adhered to the criteria in the plan and their proximity to livestock, elevating the risk of conflict, as well as the potential impact to elk and deer herds recovering from the severe winter of 2022-23."

In the memorandum, CPW agreed not to release wolves within 60 miles of tribal land boundaries nor within the "Brunot area," 3.7 million acres of the San Juan Mountains of SW Colorado where the Utes retain hunting rights. So they probably won't be trotting through downtown Ignacio.

In other news, someone had shot and wounded one of the original ten wolves released in Grand County.  This was one of the "bad wolves" that were released and then re-captured in August 2024

At the time, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the wolf died four days after its capture and had “deep puncture wounds” on its hind leg that were unrelated to the capture.  The wolf’s body weight was almost 30% lower than it was when it was released in December 2023, when it weighed 104 pounds, CPW said, and it died despite receiving antibiotics for an infection. 

Now, a necropsy has determined the wolf died as a result of a gunshot wound, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday [Dec. 26, 2024]. The federal agency said it was seeking information “regarding the illegal killing of a gray wolf in Grand County” and offering a reward. . . .

The Copper Creek wolf was one of three of the 10 reintroduced wolves that have died. Another died in Grand County in September [2024] and was discovered by wildlife officials after its collar sent a “mortality signal.” A necropsy later determined that the wolf likely died from a fight with another wolf, and that it had a healed gunshot wound on its leg, according to federal officials. 

The first of the reintroduced wolves to die, also a male, was likely killed by a mountain lion, CPW said. It was found dead in Larimer County in April [2024] and had puncture wounds to its skull.

And to end the year, Governor Polis said that the whole wolf-reintroduction program would have been a lot cheaper if it had not been for those damn ranchers. Misinformation!

What Polis said at a political meeting on Dec. 3, 2024, "was Colorado will continue gray wolf restoration because it is the will of the voters, and that CPW wouldn’t have had to to go Canada for the next round of wolves 'if ranchers wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, don’t get them from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho.’"

Actually, as the Colorado Sun there reported, it was the state agencies in Wyoming and Idaho that refused to supply Colorado with wolves. Sadly, "Polis hates rural Colorado" has become a journalistic trope in the past couple of years.

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.

How Moose Came to Colorado and How They Expanded

A bull moose in Colorado (Photo: Backcountry Hunters and Anglers)

I personally never saw a Colorado moose until 2019 -- in North Park, of course -- although I had looked for them before, both there and around Lake City in southwestern Colorado.

Since their introduction in the late 1970s, they have spread out from North Park both on their own and with human help. 

Here is an interesting long read about that process, "Of Moose and Men."  I had not idea that Marlin Perkins' Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was still being broadcast in 1978 and that the old nature-faker managed to insert himself into the moose transfers.

Wolverines to be Reintroduced to Colorado

Colorado is looking to bring back the wolverine, thus successfully "retconning" that Cold War movie hit Red Dawn. (Supposedly set in Colorado, it was actually filmed in and around Las Vegas, New Mexico,  just like the Longmire TV series decades later.)

This, not C. Thomas Howell, is a wolverine. (Photo by Chris Stermer/
California Department of Fish and Wildlife.)

_
According to Colorado Public Radio,

Colorado’s wildlife specialists are nearly finished with updates to a plan that could return a carnivorous mammal to the Centennial State. 

Aside from the first five letters of their name, wolverines have little in common with wolves, the species that draws the majority of headlines for wildlife management. One thing they do have in common is that they were once prolific in the West. 

“Wolverine was largely extirpated from the Western United States by about the 1930s,” Jeff Copeland, director at the Wolverine Foundation in Idaho said. “We don't know, necessarily, exactly why. It probably had to do with at the turn of the century there was heavy livestock grazing in the Western United States — heavy enough that it tended to displace other large ungulates — deer, elk, moose, sheep — animals that are very important to the wolverines, particularly as winter diet. Plus, there was widespread, wholesale poisoning campaigns going to keep predators away from livestock.” 

At least wolverines won't be as "sexy" as wolves. There probably will not be any wolverine-viewing bus tours. You won't hear people bragging on their wolverine X dogs, since they are mustelids (like weasels), not canids.

Probably won't see Governor Polis holding a photo op either.

"After the movie was released in 1984, The National Coalition on Television Violence deemed Red Dawn 'the most violent movie ever made.'" The NCTV obviously never met a real wolverine.

Pygmy Owl, Long-Distance Lizard

Pygmy Owl, abducted by aliens and examined.

A game warden called from up in the county seat. Someone had brought him a Northern Pygmy-Owl (correct ID on his part) that was "in danger" on a highway. 

We met on a side street, and he transferred the owl to my carrier. And there was a second passenger, a small lizard. Apparently the owl was about to eat dinner when the well-meaning two-legged came long. 

It was kind of astonishing that a lizard would be out and about. The sun was shining, but air temps were only in the mid-40s F at best. (Did the owl find it on warm asphalt?) The reptile seemed moribund, but then the light was fading at 7800 feet, and the air was cooling fast.

The Raptor Center in Pueblo was closed, of course. I called the director's cell phone. She said to keep the bird over night, give it a shallow dish of water, bring it down in the morning.

This morning I checked on the owl, which seemed alert and on its feet, poured a cup of coffee, and hit the road. 

On arrival, the owl checked out as healthy and unharmed.  "Take him home," the director said. I decided to take her literally.

But the lizard lived! I had not seen the lizard this morning and assumed that the owl had eaten it. But when I straightened out the towels in the carrier, there it was, barely moving one leg. Too cold, I am sure. A volunteer lifted it into a small box and went to place it somewhere warm.

After putting 116 miles on the Jeep, I had these results.

1. One [sagebrush?] lizard was relocated to the outskirts of Pueblo, into what should be a compatible habitat. Reptile brain says, "Umm warm." Missing tail tip probably not noticed.

2.  One Pygmy-Owl had a missing time/abduction experience but ended up about two miles away from where it had been. Its new location, however, features four birdfeeders, consequently, a prey-rich environment. Maybe we'll see it again.

What sets Pygmy Owls apart is that they are daytime hunters. Kind of like sharp-shinned hawks, they have short wings, long tails, and will try to snatch passerine birds off the feeder tray.  

Most owls have asymmetrically placed ears as well as flattened facial discs around the eyes. Both of these features are adaptations that give them better hearing. Interestingly, Northern Pygmy-Owls lack these features, and this may be an outcome of their diurnal habits and greater reliance on vision. All About Birds.

So releasing it in the day time was easy to do. Once it saw blue, it flew.

So Who Will Hack the Wolf GPS Data?

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has now published a GPS map for Colorado wolves.

Understand that while every wolf wears a GPS collar, including the ones that wandered in to North Park and were darted, collared, and released -- and including the 15 new ones coming in -- the magic map does now show where they are right now.

It shows what drainage they have been in lately. The website says,

• Currently, the collars are programmed to record a position every four hours. 

• Once four locations have been recorded, the packet of four locations is then transmitted via satellite to CPW biologists. 

• The frequency of both position recording and transmission of the data can be delayed by a number of factors such as dense cloud cover, closed terrain, etc. 

• By looking at the data, CPW staff can learn where wolves have been, but they cannot tell where wolves are at a current point in time, nor can they predict where the wolves will go. 

• To protect the wolves, specific GPS data will not be shared.

"Specific GPS data will not be shared. "

Um, yeah.  Governments are so good at keeping data secure. Now who would want up-to-the-minute data? 

Most people's thoughts will probably go straight to some clandestine wolf-killer, some figure straight out of a Charlie Box wilderness-thriller novel.  

But follow the money. I remember how in the 1980s, as commercial rafting developed on the Arkansas River and the state took over recreational management, there were all these contentious meetings over regulation, which boiled down to

    a) Early arrivals in commercial rafting wanted to keep out the competition.

    b) Private rafters and kayakers did not want to be forced into the eddies by the commercial outfits.

    c) Anglers wanted to be left alone at dawn and dusk, at the very least.

You will make money if you
know where I am (CPW photo).

In 1989, the year after the big fires, M. and I passed through Yellowstone NP. We casually parked our van at the Slough Creek Campground. I fished a bit in Slough Creek (saw an otter!) and the Lamar River, where I could step from elk skeleton to elk skelton, after the big die-off in the 1988–89 winter.

We came back in the 2000s after wolf reintroduction. Slough Creek campsites had to be reserved months in advance. Every highway pull-out in the Lamar Valley was full of surly shoulder-to-shoulder observers with expensive optics: spotting scopes and telephone lenses. Tour busses with wolves painted on them lumbered up and down the road — like this one.

If the wolves reproduce — and if they move east into Rocky Mountain National Park — that will be Colorado's future too. Wolves as spectacle. 

As with rafting on the Arkansas, there will be a struggle for regulations that give some operators an advantage over their competitors.

And speaking of "advantage," if you were a "wolf-tour guide," what could you do with GPS coordinates as to just where the wolves were that day?

Colorado Wolves: Faux "Paws" on the Ground

Gov. Jared Polis was on hand Dec, 18, 20203 to release Oregon wolves in Colorado,
but some Coloradans deeply involved with the project never were invited.

Some officials and Western Slope residents are annoyed that Colorado Parks and Wildlife seemed eager to please Governor Polis (if not Marlon Reis, his animal-rightist husband) while forgetting promises to them. They were never on the guest list or even informed about last month's wolf release.

According to the Sky-Hi News in Grand County,

Two [CPW] commissioners in particular, Marie Haskett from Meeker, who represents sportspersons and outfitters, and Duke Phillip IV, who represents agriculture and is from Colorado Springs, both believe a lack of communication and transparency has led to distrust of the agency in rural communities. And they both think the wolf reintroduction created animosity between rural and urban areas. While dismayed at the way the wolf releases were rolled out, the commissioners both expressed gratitude for the hard work CPW staff put into making the historic, voter-mandated reintroduction possible.

Haskett was the first to speak about wolves at the Jan. 10 meeting. She called Dec. 18 – the day the first five wolves were released – a “sad day” because comissioners were not notified. She claims that many of the CPW staff who worked tirelessly on the reintroduction were also not made aware. To her knowledge other members of the legislature and local counties were not alerted about the releases either.

“Even the Grand County commissioner (Merrit Linke) who was on the TWG (Technical Working Group) was not invited to the release, and yet other specific members of the working group were,” Haskett said. “The people who politically drove this issue were present. The divide between rural and urban populations was blown up with this ballot initiative. Now CPW has taken a huge political hit with the public because of these political actions.”

Philip in particular was angry because he had worked on the reintroduction but found that it had occured a day afterwards — by watching TV news.

Haskett said that poor communications with local people puts CPW's work at risk, since it must manage wildlife on both public and private land. I would add that it also feeds the conspiratorial narrative that the wolf introduction was "punishment" to an area that did not vote for Gov. Polis and other Democrats.

For official wolf news, check CPW's "Wolf Management" page.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.