Dying Dams and Plundering Pigs

With the creation of national parks and wildlife preserves, we hope to cling to the nature of yesteryear. Perhaps if we section off this area, we say, we can save it from ecological change. Pffft. I think it is going to change, no matter what... and lines drawn on a map won't block all the effects of humanity. Here in Colorado, with parks and preserves all around, it shows... and everyone has an opinion on what should be done.

First, take, for example, Rocky Mountain National Park. A sad chain of events may leave parts of the park high and dry and endanger its wetland inhabitants. More or less, this is what happened: Wolves were a nuisance to ranchers, and were chased out of the state. (That's putting it nicely.) With no natural predators, the resident elk population exploded. The elk eat the willows, which grow at the stream sides, providing food and home for the local beavers. Some elk eating willow is no problem--they've been doing it since long before we arrived--but too many elk eating willow will wear on the beavers. (Whew, try to say that three times fast.) And that's what happened... the beaver population of Rocky Mountain National Park jumped from 600 in the 1940s, to 30 today. (To put this in perspective...that would be like reducing the human population of the United States to the Pacific Northwest.)

The trouble is, the beavers have been in charge of irrigation throughout the park, and their loss is beginning to hurt:

in the absence of nature's corps of engineers, "the valley's a lot drier," said Cherie Westbrook, lead author of a beaver study by the team. "You have water tables in the valley that drop 3 or 4 feet in the summer."

In a national park created to protect its natural treasures, the beaver's disappearance is creating grasslands where willow-dominated wetlands were once thronged with beaver, waterfowl, other birds and frogs, Westbrook said. "What we think is going on is that there's this competition among elk, moose and beaver all for the same food source. (From the Denver Post.)

In some remote areas, the reemerging wolf population is solving the problem:

In the Canadian Rockies, she said, beavers seem to be benefiting from the reappearance of wolves preying on elk herds.

"What they're actually seeing is a recovery of the beaver population with the wolf."

But in Rocky Mountain National Park, where the reintroduction of wolves would not be as effective, more drastic measures need to be taken. The park plans to gun down the excess elk..

The report coincides with a park plan to use rangers or a contractor to reduce the elk herd by shooting the animals at night with silencer-equipped rifles.

...while local hunters want the job.

Meanwhile, down on the plains, one hunter is happy going after a band of wild pigs. These pigs have appeared in Kiowa County recently, wrecking havoc on crops and gardens. They are the offspring of escaped feral pigs, adapted completely to living the wild life on the range. Although this threat isn't unusual--ranchers in Texas and the south, as well as conservationists in the Channel Islands in California--have been dealing with wild hogs for years--it is new for Colorado. Opinion on the presence of the pigs vary, depending on who you talk to.

On one side, folks are growing wary:

Here, they survive on massive swaths of private land, off-limits to wildlife managers, wallowing in the muddy trickles of Big Sandy Creek by day and venturing into farm fields, quail nests and ranch land by night, wreaking their own kind of environmental havoc along the way.

"They knock the crops down, eat them, roll around in them," gripes [Farmer Burl] Scherler, who saw a sow mow down her own alienlike crop circle in his cornfield to build a nest for her babies.

"Oh, it wasn't real serious. But you can tell, it's going to be if they get thicker. The more of them you get, the more of a problem it will be. They're vicious. They're big rodents." (From the Rocky Mountain News.)

On the other, some folks are having fun:

A few county roads west, rancher Art Fox loves 'em. Likes to watch them sneak through the brush. Sets out grain so they don't go hungry. Hunts them. Eats them. Roasts them on holidays and serves them up to eager neighbors.

"When you're hunting them, you try to sneak up on them. You get to where they're supposed to be, and they're gone," said Fox, a rancher and horse trainer whose battered Ford truck has a dashboard lined with bullet boxes and a cab littered with guns.

Yey. At least they've got something to talk about.

For more of the dispute, check out the article at the Rocky Mountain News.

Note: Map image created by the author, using images from the National Park Service (the Beaver) and by George Kochaniec Jr. for the Rocky Mountain News. 6/27/2006-Updated for clarification.