ESTESBOG

(National Park Service photograph)

by Peter Walker

There is great irony in wildlife damage to Division of Wildlife property.  But it happens.

I arrived in Colorado from Maine the end of March, 1984 on the tail end of one of the snowiest winters in modern history. The agency I joined was near the end of a major operation to feed big game through the long months of deep snows that had driven stressed and starving deer and elk into mountain valleys in their desperate search for something to eat.

One of my first assignments as the new State Fish Pathologist was to conduct disease screening on the wild rainbow trout run in the Colorado River below Byer’s Canyon in Grand County. Coming from Maine, I had never been in the Rocky Mountains and had never seen an elk. My first trip over Berthoud Pass left me both literally and figuratively breathless.

I met Area Fishery Biologist Jake Bennett in Granby that evening. The next morning I was to meet Jake and other CDOW biologists and personnel at the Paul Gilbert Ranch, a Division property on the downstream side of Byer’s Canyon where we would launch the electrofishing raft and begin collecting the large spawning trout.

Driving through the narrow, vertically-walled canyon early the next morning, I had to slalom around the jagged rocks and boulders falling from high above as the accumulated snow and ice melted from the cliffs. Another new experience.

I pulled into the yard at the Gilbert Ranch just as the sun cleared the mountain to the east and lit up the landscape. Huge piles of snow, built up from a winter of plowing by a wildlife technician, restricted traffic in the yard. A long, mostly open, multi-compartmented pole shed rimmed one side while a sturdy barn and the large, two-story, original ranch house (now a CDOW Area Office) defined the other limits of the yard. The open bays of the pole shed were filled with stacked bags of grain and bales of hay, still being distributed to elk, deer, and antelope concentrations around North Park.

The yard was so crowded with free-ranging mule deer and elk that I had a hard time driving my truck between the unimpressed critters who were much more interested in mooching breakfast than getting out of the way. So these were the famous Rocky Mountain elk!

In the center of the yard was a stack of broken down hay bales on top of which stood a giant bull elk, still holding the previous year’s antlers. All of the lesser animals encircled the same hay pile. The old boy stood with his legs splayed and challenged every critter that dared step close. None of the animals showed the slightest fear or interest in me. I wondered if the old boy would charge me as well if I tried to drive him off the hay.

I was the first of the fishery crew to arrive that morning. Jake Bennett showed up a few minutes later; but it would be another half hour before the others were due to show up. Jake told me he had a large work boat stored in the one fully enclosed bay at the end of the pole shed and it had been months since he’d been able to check on it because of the snow drifts. We found a couple of shovels and began to dig out the door.

When the door was cleared, Jake found his key to the padlock and opened the swinging doors. A very large packrat – the most beautiful rodent I’d ever seen – was perched on the outboard on the back of the boat and quickly slipped off and out through a hole in the thin board wall in the back of the bay.

Then Jake let out a yell. “My boat! Look what he did!”

Over the course of the winter the packrat, properly called a brush-tailed woodrat, had laboriously toted corn and other grains from the storage piles in adjacent stalls through a hole in the wall and stashed the loot in Jake’s 18-foot fiberglass boat. By early April the industrious animal had filled the boat level to the gunwales. The enormous weight of several cubic yards of grain had bowed out the sides of the boat to the breaking point. The steel trailer was squashed down such that the axle gave in and was bowed to the ground with the two wheels splayed outward at the bottom at an angle of about 45 degrees. Imagine the labor that rat put into that project!

I went back to Fort Morgan that week as much charmed by one of Colorado’s native rodents as I had been by my first encounter with a bull elk.