Every Tuesday, KUNC's Samantha Coetzee speaks with our colleagues over at the Colorado Sun about the local stories they're following.
Today she spoke with environment writer Michael Booth about wolf reintroduction, drying golf courses and the yellow rail.
Interview Highlights:
These interview highlights have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Samantha Coetzee: So, to start, conservation groups aren't happy with how Colorado Parks and Wildlife is proposing wolf reintroduction. Can you talk about what specifically they're worried about?
Michael Booth: Let's remember, the voters narrowly decided in favor of reintroducing gray wolves back in about 2020. A lot of people saw these kinds of conflicts coming back then. Many ranchers and farmers don't want wolves at all.
Even before the state government could start carrying out voter desires, the wolves decided to come back on their own. KUNC and the Colorado Sun have done a lot of reporting about a pack of wolves that reintroduced themselves to northern Colorado. They went after some livestock there, and it's received a huge amount of publicity. But the state is still supposed to move forward with the reintroduction plan voters told them to try.
Jason Blevins reports that a big coalition of conservation groups say Colorado is ignoring that law. They're saying, "the state has uplifted the voices of ranchers, outfitters, trappers and hunters over others." The route to a plan is likely to limit the possibilities of wolves on the Colorado landscape.
They're adamant that state officials are taking too much time talking about livestock deaths and even encouraging discussion on how to kill wolves. They want the state to move faster, and they're offering 12 suitable zones for the wolves to start in. They want to see a breeding pair of wolves brought into each of those zones with 48 to 120 wolves roaming the state in the first two years. They believe the state could eventually support up to 750 wolves total. And they're not leaving out the front range.
They think what's fair for the Western Slope should also bring wolf and wildlife mixing along the front range, too. Finally, they want to also reintroduce Mexican wolves to southern Colorado.
Coetzee: And moving on to a different topic. Golf is a pastime that a lot of people enjoy. But dry weather is threatening some courses in Colorado. Can you tell us more about that?
Booth: Kevin Simpson did a great job driving the golf cart on this one. It's a different culture of golf that's on the Eastern Plains. There are a handful of public courses struggling to survive in towns like Limon. Golf has all kinds of challenges everywhere, with the Tiger Woods boom now fading and younger players not replacing baby boomer golf fans at the same rate.
So you get some brutal grass courses and communities constantly losing their people and their golfers to bigger front-range cities. Add to that a big round of climate change, with a hotter sun beating down on parched fairways and constant wind stripping away any moisture that's there.
There's so many things to learn in a story. Many of us at the Sun had no idea what a sand green course even is. When you watch a TV golf tournament, players pitch their approach shots onto this luscious green surface so bright that actually hurts the eyes. The sand green is literally that — sand. To keep that sand from blowing out to Kansas, they used to spray motor oil onto the surface to keep the sand sticking together.
The younger generation is just not proving to be big fans of these courses. They try to bring in irrigation systems, real grass, or dig a new well or lower prices to get new members. It all sounds really tough, but it's also fascinating. And we wish them luck.
Coetzee: And finally, birdwatchers in Colorado were in for a treat last week. Can you tell us about the yellow rail that was spotted?
Booth: There's got to be a ton of great birders in this audience. We are enthused to find a new hero for them and a new hero for the rest of us. Eric DeFonso was taking a break from his day job, which includes counting birds for a conservancy group. He pulled up to the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge in the San Luis Valley, and he immediately heard this tick, tick, ticking noise underneath the brilliant sounds of the loud birds like redwing blackbirds.
Eric happily admits he hadn't heard it out his whole life for just this moment. He's got birdsong CDs sliding around the floor of his car for his long car trips, so he knew immediately it was a secretive yellow rail, which really has no business being in Colorado at all. And nobody has heard one here since 1906. He immediately sent a recording to his friend who wrote the book on bird songs and confirmed it.
Within a day, dozens of excited Bird fans toured across the San Luis Valley to hear that this yellow rail. And here it is. Hardly anyone ever sees a yellow rail, so that's how elusive they are. But in the birding world, there are species where hearing it is perfectly good to put them on your life list. Now we're seeing reports from people every day who've made their pilgrimage to Monte Vista and came back very happy. There are great pictures of people hanging around the parking lot, making recordings of the yellow rail, chatting about their bird lists. It's a great culture and it was fun to have Eric let us in on it.
