"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.

Deer or Dogs: Mountain Lions Like Them Both

A lion who did not understand the concept of "focal length" on an inexpensive trail cam.

The Vail Daily reminds ski-country residents and visitors that mountain lions can be just about anywhere in winter time. Two big attractors are "town deer" and loose dogs.

“In Eagle, Vail and Edwards, deer live in everybody’s backyards,” said Colorado Parks and Wildlife District Wildlife Manager Matt Yamashita. “That’s a major contribution to human and lion conflict. Mountain lions don’t discriminate between food sources. If there’s a deer there one day and a dog the other, it’s all the same to them.”

* * * 

“When people call about mountain lions, their biggest concern is how to keep themselves, their families, their pets safe,” Yamashita said. “Most activity we see in Eagle County is tied to dogs, specifically, dogs off leash. They’ll stalk dogs. When dogs are in danger, they’ll instinctively retreat to their owners. Dogs are the No. 1 instigator for human-lion interactions. If people could be cognizant of that, we’d have fewer conflicts.”

You always hear that a lion's territory is 70–100 square miles (18,000–25,900 ha). But territories do overlap.

Buffalo Herds Spread, Sometimes on Their Own

Buffalo at the Navajo-owe Wolf Springs Ranch. (Photo: Ranch Marketing Assn.)

Look at the banner photo on this blog, and you will see at lower right a bull buffalo (bison, if you prefer).

That pasture is part of a big ranch purchased in 2017 by the Navajo Nation. (Technically, Colorado Ranch Enterprise, Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, PO Box 1480, Window Rock). Think of it as the Kaliningrad of Dinétah. 

Its previous owner, Tom Redmond of Aussie and Onesta hair-care products, started raising buffalo, and thus far, the Navajo Nation has continued on that path.

Last month, a friend was visiting from Australia, so I took her up to the upper Huerfano River drainage to see the ranch, hoping we would see some buffalo. You never know where they might be, but luck was with us, and half a dozen individuals were in that pasture, within passable binocular and camera range.

It's in our gene: we enjoy just watching large grazing animals. To borrow a phrase, they are "good to think about."

Meanwhile, up north, buffalo politics are "messy." 

On the other side of Montana, at the Blackfeet Reservation, Joe Kipp, chairperson of the Blackfeet Nation Stock Growers Association, also has a longstanding connection to the reintroduction effort. In the 1980s, he’d been involved with bringing the first wild buffalo — surplus animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota — to the Blackfeet Reservation. These days, he and his wife make the drive south to Yellowstone every winter to hunt the animals; Kipp’s wife is diabetic, and the only meat she eats is bison. (Compared to beef, bison has more protein and minerals, and much less fat and cholesterol.) 

Still, Kipp is unhappy with how the tribe has managed its herd in an austere landscape where many make their living raising cattle. Ranchers deal with ferocious wind storms, bitter winters, crippling droughts: Business margins are tight. He’s heard from plenty of disgruntled ranchers like Danny Barcus, who rent grazing lands for their livestock — the current rate for a cow-calf pair is around $40 a month — only to have the tribe’s buffalo break in and eat the grass intended for their cattle. “It gets to be a sore point pretty fast,” Kipp said.

Kipp worries what will happen now that bison are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, a move he fears would undermine his treaty hunting rights. He’s also content with Yellowstone’s current management and doesn’t see the need to expand the park’s herd. “People envision, ‘Oh, we want bison that are running across the landscape like before,’” he said. “But we didn’t have 50,000-pound trucks and trains running and cars and all these things. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t think it’s based upon reality.” 

This spring, Kipp, Barcus, and other Blackfeet cattle ranchers met with their tribal council and asked them to make changes to the herd’s management. After years of frustration, they felt the council had been receptive to their concerns, and this summer, the tribe began a new culling program to manage its herd.

 The whole article is "Bison’s Complicated Return: Growing herds in the Yellowstone area are adopting ancient migratory behavior causing logistical issues for ranchers and Montana state officials."

Worth a read. Good to think about.

How Do You Open This Thing?

The wildlife rehabilitation center where I help out sometimes as a taxi driver for orphaned critters has had a quiet year so far — a few mule deer fawns but no bears, no cats, no beavers or badgers. 

The fawns have all been "soft-released," in other words, let wander off into the foothills.

But the raccoons. There is a whole little nest of them, and they are still a bit small to be released this season. So much attention goes into keeping their busy little brains stimulated. Puzzles are good, especially if they can be "solved" by tearing something apart.

That "salmon" will be a bit of a disappointment though.

Photo credit: Tom Sanders

This Bear Was Here

Next time, please face the camera

Beside the photo from the 18th, I had been seeing other signs of a hungy bear in the neighborhood: another dumped garbage can (not photographed) and a couple of big fresh bear turds with green apple skins in them. 

So maybe this individual, who ambled past a camera set about a quarter-mile from my house, is the one? Good luck finding those daily 20,000 calories, Bear!

The Eternal Verities of Tarantulas

Yesterday at the grocery store in Pueblo, the conversation was about tarantulas — one of the employees explaining how he tries to usher the huge spiders out of the house before his wife sees and kills them.

It's that season:

Every year, 10,000s of male tarantulas start marching around the southern part of Colorado, typically from late August through October as summer nighttime temperatures cool.

The eternal verities: we Homo saps might all vanish, but giant hairy spiders will still march across the land.

Generally, the first tarantulas to appear will show up in southeastern Colorado around the end of August, roaming throughout the month of September. A second, southwestern wave will appear a bit later in the year, with their presence peaking in October. These fuzzy fist-sized arachnids creep around on a quest to find a mate and after mating, they'll die — typically at the hands of their mate or due to cold weather.

They really should be the mascot for Colorado State University-Pueblo, not the made up-by-a-committee "thunderwolf":

Lira is a student ambassador at CSU-Pueblo, and she often leads campus tours for prospective students and their parents. During these outings, Lira touts the tarantula as a captivating aspect of the campus that sits on a bluff above the Arkansas River several miles from downtown Pueblo. It’s not uncommon to see a tarantula skirting an open expanse as summer cedes to fall. But don’t worry, Lira assures visitors, sightings are intermittent, and the spiders are not harmful to people.

“It’s one of my engagement points when I talk to students because it’s one of the unique things they might experience here,” said Lira, a junior on a pre-veterinary track. “Not having a city impede on you allows you to see the wildlife around us, and tarantulas are part of what you might see. It’s cool being on the outside of the city because you get to experience the prairie. It’s an opportunity for discovery.”

Let the rhythms of nature sooth you.

A Bear Was Here

Put your garbage out the night before pickup, and a bear will find it.

Some years back, a Colorado Division of Wildlife (as it was then called) public relations job opened up in Montrose, and I seriously considered applying for it. M. was not keen on the moving there though — later she changed her mind about Montrose County — but I had already moved on.

I had done institutional public relations before — in higher ed — so I did not have too many illusions about my role in a bureacracy. And yet that was a reason for my ambivalence — I have always done best in jobs with a fair amount of autonomy, and that probably was not one of those jobs.

The other thing about institutional p.r. is that you put out the same news releases at the same time every year — and that has to be done, I understand. Like every year about now you have to tell people that bears are trying to bulk up before hibernation and so will be aggressively checking out food sources, "legitimate" or not.

Bear doing what they do (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

Here is this year's CPW news release: "As fall approaches hyperphagia begins, bear activity increases in preparation for winter."

 Black bears in Colorado are entering hyperphagia and will spend up to 20 hours a day trying to eat more than 20,000 calories to fatten up for winter. As bears start to prepare for hibernation and hunt for food, Coloradans may see more bear activity in urban areas.

I am not sure I could visualize 20,000 calories. 

This year, at least along my creek, there are almost no acorns ("mast") on the Gambel (scrub) oaks. An unexpected snowstorm last May 22 hit the oaks when they were flowering, and many never set fruit. Lots of leaves, but no acorns.

Those acorns are a high-calorie food for bears, deer, turkeys, and other animals. So I don't know what they will do. Pulling potato chip packaging out of the garbage won't make up for no acorns.

Serious money is spent on bear-human relations. Here is one example:

Bear Smart Durango - Greater Durango Human-Bear Challenge: $206,539 awarded

Partners Bear Smart Durango and the Community Foundation Serving Southwest Colorado applied for funding on behalf of the Bear Working Group with a partner match and in-kind contribution of $297,135 for a total estimated project cost of $503,932. Their project is aimed at infrastructure and personnel. The infrastructure side will provide all-metal bear-resistant trash containers, food storage lockers, and conflict mitigation materials. The personnel aspect will create a Bear Enforcement Officer and a Fruit Gleaning Coordinator. The grant will cover the first two years for the Bear Enforcement Officer, with La Plata County and other partners assuming expenses by year three. The Fruit Gleaning Coordinator will expand the capacity of this existing position to develop and implement an on-demand, bear mitigation gleaning strategy

Fruit-gleaning? I will admit that I went out today and picked all the apples off this little Haralson apple tree that is just starting to bear. It is surrounded by hog wire to keep the deer from browsing it, but a bear would plow right through that.

It produces tart little green apples. Sometimes I harvest some, but it would not bother me if an athletic bear went after them.

 How many apples make 20,000 calories?

Where in the Riparian is the Redtail?

Another patient in the Raptor Center "ICU."

The injured red-tailed hawk, the game warden said, was somewhere in the riparian cottonwood grove near where the power line crosses the little gravel road to the fishing pond.

What color is a red-tailed hawk sitting on the ground? Streaky brown and creamy white. What color(s) is the landscape? Shades of tan and brown.

He couldn't help because he was two counties away at some other activity. Luckily, he did have the phone number of the man who found the hawk,  and luckily that man answered and agreed to meet me at the site. 

The finder led me to a spot near the bird, which was impersonating a small stump in the tall grass beside the winter-clear water of the Arkansas River.

I laid my cotton flannel capture net on it, and it rolled into claws-up defensive position, which actually makes a hawk easy to pick up if you have your heavy gloves on. It footed me, but not very strongly. 

Into the bright blue carrier it went — I like this model because you can lift the top and set birds into it, instead of having to stuff them into a smaller end opening. 

Off to the Raptor Center we drove, where the hawk was pronounced dangerously underweight. 

"He's been on the ground [not hunting] a few days," the director said. Hydration, rest, and food come next. 

The hawk probably collided with the aformentioned power line, maybe burning a wing tip and injuring a foot. Human infrastructure strikes again.

Wolverines! They Might Be Coming Back to Colorado

Wolverine in Glacier Nat. Park (NPS)

Fictional southern Colorado high schools may no longer be accused of using an almost non-existent animal (in this state) as their mascot.

The last confirmed wolverine sighting — and it was a rare one—  was in 2009. A tagged male wolverine left northwestern Wyoming, wandered intp Colordo, and then headed for North Dakota.

Indeed, from his starting point near Jackson Hole, M56 took less than a month to arrive in the Centennial State, where his kind was last reported in 1919.

The venture confirmed what was believed of wolverines’ tendency to cover vast ground. Still, researchers were astonished by the speed. And more than that, they marveled at watching in real time the animal of mythological lore that had always evaded their view. (Recent estimates suggest low densities, small numbers in big places — between 250 and 350 moving across rugged, remote fringes of the Lower 48 states.)

Colorado Parks & Wildlife (back then the Colorado Division of Wildlife) formulated some reintroduction plans, but did not carry through. Now, wolverines are back on the table, so to speak. (You would not want a live one on your table.)

Wolverine reintroduction has not come up in Colorado Wildlife Commission meetings for more than a decade. The agency began a wolverine reintroduction process in 2010 and created “an extensive plan for how reintroduction could be accomplished,” said CPW spokesman Travis Duncan. 

Recently, the agency has been reviewing that plan and process to find possible update and what remains workable, Duncan said. 

“We will be working with a wolverine expert who is going to take on updating and providing greater detail on a wolverine restoration and management plan,” he said. “The contract isn’t in place yet, but we hope to be able to say more on this soon.”

Meanwhile, in Lewistown, Montana, urban wolverines? We're not there yet. 

UPDATE: And in Utah this month, a wolverine killed or wounded 18 sheep in one morning before being captured, radio-collared, and released.

Blog Stew with Lynx*

 • Here is a short video about lynx in Colorado.**

• Is your toothache really Lyme disease?

• The history of outdoor life in the Nordics is long and really incorporated with the culture, since we have a lot of land and a small population." Emphasis addded. Anyhow, they have a word for it. We don't, but we have the concept.

-------------------------

* If I remember right, the first text-only hyperlink browser I ever used was called Lynx (get it?).  Wikipedia says it was launched in 1992 and is still being maintained.

** I think that biologist at the beginning is married to my cousin. I have a lot of cousins — can't keep track.

Making Legal Use of Fresh Colorado Roadkill

(Photo from Utah state government)

An article in the Sopris Sun (Pitkin County) quotes a man who moved there from Alaska a few years back: 

“After I relocated to the Roaring Fork Valley, it was curious to me that the animals [along the side of the road] were left to scavengers, given my prior experience in Alaska,” says Missouri Heights resident Mike Fleagle, who moved here in 2018.

Fleagle is an Alaska Native (Iñupiaq tribe), former chair of the Alaska Board of Game and has hunted and lived off wild foods his entire life. 

In November 2018, Fleagle recalls spotting a just-hit buck in the center median on Highway 82, which was the first time he used the salvage permit dispensed by Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW) and local law enforcement agencies for harvesting roadkill. 

With his roadkill buck, Fleagle cut and packaged roasts, stew meat and steak, made burger with purchased beef suet (raw, hard fat ideal for frying) and Italian sausage with purchased pork suet and then jerked some “for a special treat.”

He just called the sheriff's dispatcher to start the process. (In most places, the sheriff dispatch also talks to game wardens, although technically they are dispatched after-hours by Colorado State Patrol, since they are state agencies.)

There is a process for doing this legally, but if you visit the Colorado Parks and Wildlife and put "road kill" or "roadkill" into the search box, you get nothing. Likewise on the FAQ page — at least that was my experience.   

Compare Alaska's online information! 

Meanwhile, Cornell University's Waste Management Institute (now there is a college major that will get you hired) will give you a video on composting roadkill. Read more here. 

This method is intended for road departments and municipalities, but if you have a large back yard, plentiful wood chips, and a front loader, you are all set.

Composting provides an inexpensive alternative for disposal of dead animals in many cases. Composting animal carcasses is not new; chickens, pigs, calves, cows and even whales have been composted.

Passively aerated static pile composting in which piles are not turned and natural processes result in high temperatures is proving to be a viable method of managing carcasses. It is quick and simple, uses equipment and materials used in daily road maintenance operations and is cost effective. 

 

This method helps protect ground and surface water by keeping the carcasses out of contact with water. Composting also reduces pathogens, nuisance to neighbors and odors in properly managed piles.

The Feral Volunteers: Thoughts on Wildlife Transport

Pueblo Raptor Center director Diana Miller and her new intern, Aaron,
examine a goshawk that collided with a window in Nathrop, Colorado. The prognosis was good.

 

Looking at the Facebook page for Colorado Parks & Wildlife Volunteers — which I admit that I don't read every week — I saw there was a volunteer-recognition picnic last month for my region. 

The person posting commmented, "small group this year." Well, yeah, M. and I did not even know that it was happening, for one thing. But that's OK. We are the feral volunteers.

Most volunteers, God bless them, have regular assignments. I have been at state parks where the volunteers — staffing entrance booths, working at visitor centers, serving as campground hosts, etc. — outnumber the paid staff.  The whole system would break down without them. They get paid in free parks passes, hats and jackets and water bottles and other such plunder*, and words of thanks. (If you live in your RV all summer while serving as a campground host, is there a tax write-off? I don't know.)

Other volunteers work more on the wildlife side, doing habitat-improvement projects, monitoring wildlife (such as osprey nests or bighorn sheep), assisting fisheries biologists, and so on. All good.  In my region, SE Colorado, volunteers contributed more than 45,000 hours in 2020, valued (somehow) at more than $1.3 million.

I like the unscheduled weirdness of wildlife transport though.

We transporters don't go to State Park X and do Assignment Y. We go up some raggedy road to where it's all cactus, guns, and pit bulls but someone says he has captured a hawk that might be hurt. Or — this was M.'s and my first assignment — we drive to Exit ••• off Interstate 25 north of Pueblo, cross the railroad tracks, and wait . . . until an unmarked box truck pulls up and the driver, having ascertained who we are, hands over a cardboard carton holding a racoon. A racoon that was caught tearing up a liquor store in La Junta, Colorado.

We took it to a rehab center. Night had fallen when we finished. "It's like being in the Resistance," M. said. It was a feral evening.

We wildlife transporters don't have hours. We don't wear uniforms — well, there is a basebal lcap and a name tag, useful if you are going to someone's remote home, and you want them to chain the pit bulls.

We almost never go to an office or deal with "management," just with local game wardens — officially "district wildlife managers" —  who themselves have a lot of disgression in how they do their jobs. 

(Does that orphan bear cub live or die? Does the DWM call a rehabber — or pull their state-issued .308 rifle from the truck? It's up to them. Having a volunteer transporter to call on might make the difference.)

Wildlife rehabilitators are a pretty feisty bunch too. The best ones work in a "no-show" mode. They are rehabilitation facilities, not petting zoos! And if people show up hoping to let their grandkids meet the bear cubs, the only thing they will see is the exit. 

The Pueblo Raptor Center, I should say, is an exception, because it is part of a larger facility and because it has "education birds," those who cannot survive in the wild but are taken around to schools, etc. You can go during visitor hours and take a tour. The birds who might make it in the wild are kept out of sight. Volunteers do a lot there too.

Wildlife transport is like being on the volunteer fire department only without the radio tones and the dinging cell phone, and the chatter, "You want me to bring the other brush truck? Copy that!"

In our case, it's asking if the critter is already caught or needs to be caught (Thick gloves! Cotton-flannel capture net! Carrier! Flea powder!) or if maybe it just needs to be moved from one carrier to another so that the original person can take theirs home. And where are we going? Do we have the reporting person's phone number, the DWM's phone number, and has someone notified the facility that animal or bird is coming? And much of the time we are in places with no cell-phone service.

What is the pay-off? Sometimes we are given a bird or animal to release. Whether it was an evening grosbeak rocketing out of the carrier to join a flock of its fellows near my house, a turkey vulture soaring over the Royal Gorge, or raccoons scooting off into the brush, it's a good feeling.

* "merch," if you prefer.

Some of the Fawns Survived

That weird-looking eye is just a reflecton from the cat's tapetum lucidum.

Mule deer does here drop their fawns in June. Last winter, we had a little group of three does and two yearlings that hung around in the forest near the house. 

On July 8th, one of my trail cameras up behind the house picked up this mountain lion right in the area that the mulie does favored. 

A neighbor mentioned that so-and-so had a seen a lion (that person being a sort of inept but trigger-happy back-to-the-lander whose animals escape, are killed by his own dogs, or whatever), while someone else had a seen a lion quite near our house in a different direction.

I said "Hmm" and did not mention my photograph. No point in advertising. But I wondered if she (?) had nabbled any fawns.

We kept seeing the two yearlings — now approaching sexual maturity — off and on, but not the three does. Presumably they were hiding their fawns in high grass or brush, and feeding warily.

Finally on September 10th my wife and I were eating supper outdoors on the porch — a prime deer-spotting time — when we saw two fawns grazing on what we call "the old road," which is an 1870s stage road-turned-pre-1960s ranch road turned grassy strip in the oak brush.

So two made it. There could have been as many as six fawns, since mulie does often drop twins. But I wonder how many that lion got. They have to eat too.

UPDATE: I checked a different camera today (15 Sept.), about four hundred yards from the house. It looks like our female (?) lion is still hanging around — she was there on the 10th even as M. and I were observing the fawns.

Cussed Out by a Gray Fox

Adult gray fox two days ago. Dad?

I went up to "Ringtail Rocks" late Sunday morning to swap the SD cards in the trail cameras up there. Despite the name, I have not had a single ringtail image this year, but I did not start until August. 

Since there were a small bear and a big dog in the last photo set, M. felt she come and carry the bear spray. Plus she is always up for a woods walk.

I had just opened the upper camera when a fox barked from about eight years away and startled me. The oak brush was too thick to let us see it, but barking continued untl we left, the fox circling around to one side but staying concealed. 

It was the middle of a hot day, when you don't expect foxes to be active, but maybe he (?) had a reason, like the kits being nearby. They had appeared on the camera too.

This one definitely lookd young.

This one seems youthful too.

A sort of puppy-like quality.

Mom? Or one of last year's female offspring?

I've been reading more on gray fox famliy dynamics. Males and females do form permanent bonds and raise the young together, sometime accompanied by yearling females. (Young males, I suspect, are strongly discouraged from sticking around.) I have had a number of photos at two locations that involve one adult and two young, but given that the distance apart is only a quarter mile, I might be seeing the same family in two places. I have also located a probable den site that deserves watching next April-May.

Range of the gray fox (Wildlife Science Center).

All My Flycatchers, Season 17: The "Spare Tire" Strategy

 Season 17. There is nothing like monitoring a bird's nest to collapse time — it is like there is only one spring and one summer, constantly cycling, and in the end — some day — I will be this grumpy old man who cares about nothing except whether a pair of Cordilleran flycatchers have returned in June.

This year's "Lucinda" built a nest on the Official Flycatcher Nesting Shelf, sheltered under the eave on the back of the house, above human head height, and protected (I would like to think) from most predators.

She laid three eggs, pictured. And then a few days later, a fourth, which never hatched. This seems to be a pattern — a late fourth egg, maybe intended as a sort of "spare tire." Sometimes there is fourth chick, but they never seem to live. Several times, when cleaning out the nest (flycatchers do not re-use nests), I have found the desicated featherless body of the fourth chick.

"Trying their wings" is not a metaphor

Meanwhile, eating breakfast and supper on the front porch this past week, I was watching a flycatcher making its short hunting flights from a dead limb on a ponderosa pine tree. It seemed like a good hunting spot, since it overlooked a small open area.

Then I saw the bird land on another larger limb and watched it with binoculars. Wow! another nest, with three little heads poking out. I got my spotting scope and a small tripod that fit on the table top. I know, very Ranger Rick, birding between bites of breakfast.

Two days ago, one chick was stretching out a wing that looked fully fledged. Yesterday morning, it was out of the nest, sitting on the branch beside it, but still being fed by one of the parents. 

This morning, all three were out of the nest. If they were raptors, I would call them "branchers," but do you use that word with passerine birds too? Anyway, there they were, outside the nest but sticking close, occasionally beating their wings without taking off. (We could hear the soft thumps from twenty yards away.) 

The adults, meanwhile, kept up a steady cycle of fly in, land, feed one or two young, fly away, perch, hunt, and repeat.

By late afternoon, the nest and the branch that it sits on were empty of flycatchers. Maybe the lease ran out on July 30th.

I wonder if there is a forgotten fourth egg up there.

Black Bear Bolts in Rocky Mountain National Park (Updated with Video)

Young black bear boar runs for freedom (National Park Service)

At six a.m. last Thursday (the 20th) this young male black bear and his "cellmate" had some visitors: three National Park Service employees and two Colorado game wardens. The last were there to instruct the former in the fine points (heh) of darting and tranquilizing bears.

The two "boys" (subadults) came down from Rocky Mountain National Park to a rehabilitation center in southern Colorado after the East Troublesome Fire last year. They spent the winter getting fat — and somewhat bored — until finally it was time to release them in a area not so much frequented by park visitors.

One of the NPS staffers reported, "The boys were very well-behaved and calm on the trip. The release went really well — away from visitors."

The GPS-tracking collar shown is designed to come off after a time.

I would probably enjoy traveling up I-25 through Denver more if I could be tranquilized in a windowless trailer too.*

The rehabbers were curious if the two bears would pal around together for a time, but the GPS evidence said they did not.

"The bears stuck together for less than two minutes before going in separate directions. They're sub adults and their genetics are telling them to go off and find their own territories," one of the NPS stafers reported.

* Actually, bears in transit are usually recovering from the anesthesia with the aid of another drug. For one thing, it means one will not end up lying on top of the other and possibly smothering it. An exception might be if they have to be moved from the transport trailer on a sled or something, where they need to be kept quiet longer.

Death of a Wildlife Protector

 

I started donating at the "get a logo ball cap" level.

In 2018 I went with some other Backcountry Hunters & Anglers volunteers to clean up a cartel-run marijuana grow on national forest land in southern Colorado.

Although the growing crew had been arrested and the plants pulled up and piled. there was a lot of non-biodegradable trash to be collected for later helicopter pickup: a mile of plastic irrigating pipe, soggy sleeping bags, wire, chemical containers, food trash, etc.

We hiked in escorted by two Forest Service law-enforcement rangers armed with pistols and a AR-15 rifle. They scouted ahead to see if anyone had snuck back in (nope), and then we went to work. I thought at the time that with all the public-lands volunteer work I have done since Boy Scout days, this was first time that I had had an armed escort.

Central Africa, of course, is a different story. Armed escorts are a fact of life.

Rory Young (Chengeta Wildlife)

I learned about Chengeta Wildlife from Alan Bunn of African Expeditions magazine, which tracks a lot of poaching issues.

Unlike some well-known groups fighting poaching (mainly for the rapacious Chinese market) in East Afica, Cengeta works in central and western Africa — in nations such as the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Mali, and Burkina Faso.

Chengeta trains and equips anti-poaching rangers while also conducting "Education and outreach to ensure that the current generation and the next are aware of the need to conserve wildlife and protected areas" and attempting to create "Social pressure to deter and prevent wildlife crime: Working through traditional and religious leaders to positively influence local behavior.."

Its co-founder, Rory Young, was born in Zambia to Irish parents. 

On April 26th, Young was with two Spanish documentary filmmakers, Roberto Fraile and David Beriain, working on a film about anti-poaching efforts in Burkina Faso, when they and their escort were attacked by fighters from Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, yet another Muslim jihadi group. All three were killed.

According to Chengeta' Wildlife's statement,

Rory was leading a wildlife protection patrol in Arly National Park, Burkina Faso on 26th April 2021 when they were attacked by terrorists, which resulted in his death and that of two Spanish journalists who were capturing his efforts to protect precious wildlife. 

The Spanish government flew their bodies back to Madrid. Here is video of their arrival at the Torrejón  Air Base. The cooperante irlandés would be Young.

The work will go on. Meanwhile, you can donate to a separate fund for help Young's wife and children. I did. I wouldn't feel right about wearing the cap unless I had.

3 Nature Writers Lost in 2020: Barry Lopez

This is the first of three linked entries. First, Barry Lopez, 1945–2020. Second, Pentti Linkola. Third, Richard Nelson.

One day in the early Eighties I was browsing in the Chinook Bookshop (1959–2004) in downtown Colorado Spriings and picked up what I thought was a work of creative nonfiction, perhaps a memoir.  I read a chapter titled "Buffalo." The last paragraph convinced me I was wrong. 

I wasn't in the habit of buying new hardback books back then, but I took this one back to the sales counter.

The book was Barry Lopez' Winter Count (1981). If I had looked at the back cover, I would have read Bill Kittredge's blurb: 

Through these elegant stories, Barry Lopez gives us over to a concrete and particular landscape which is luminously inhabited by mystery, radiant with possibilities which transcend the defeats we find for ourselves.

Wikipedia: "In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited over 80 countries, and wrote extensively about distant and exotic landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature."

Of Wolves and Men (1978) made Lopez's reputation, but Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) was even finer.  Reading it one warm early spring day, where I could bask in a folding chair next to a melting snowbank, I thought that I would have given my hand to have written anything so intriguing and well-constructed. To quote Wikipedia again,

Arctic Dreams describes five years in the Canadian Arctic, where Lopez worked as a biologist. Robert Macfarlane, reviewing the book in The Guardian, describes him as "the most important living writer about wilderness". In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani argued that Arctic Dreams "is a book about the Arctic North in the way that Moby-Dick is a novel about whales."

He also wrote what would be a graphic novel if it were fiction, but maybe it's "graphic creative nonfiction" — Apologia (1997), which is about roadkill. From the dust jacket:

"It has long been a habit of writer Barry Lopez to remove dead animals from the road. At the conclusion of a journey from Oregon to Indiana in 1989, he wrote Apologia to explore the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced dealing with the dead every day."

It's no surprise that as a young man he considered the Catholic priesthood or even monastic life. But then we would not have his books like these.

I do that too when I can safely pull off. I keep an old Army entrenching tool behind the the driver's seat. Even with that and gloves though, sometimes I have resumed my trip while realizing that my fingers smell like death.

The links in this post go to Amazon. I keep this blog ad-free, but I do have hosting bills, so any purchase from a blog link is a help. Thanks.