One day last summer Ouray noticed the family pack of weiner dogs were excited about something on the back lawn. Going to investigate, he spotted a gray and black object in the grass and it was moving. It was a baby bat. Assuming it had lost its mother, and knowing enough about bats to realize he probably shouldn’t handle it directly, the boy put on some heavy work gloves to capture the little bat and put him in a terrarium. He figured that the baby bat’s mother could access the baby through the open top and the little animal might be at least somewhat protected from cats and other small terrestrial predators.

The mother bat came close, but apparently was unable to maneuver into the terrarium. She got as close as she could and wouldn’t leave the tree branch above her baby.

So the next morning Ouray Ocanas Ouray placed the baby bat on a low branch. The mother bat went to it immediately. The first order of business was to feed the little one who had not eaten for almost 24 hours. The mother bat embraced her offspring affectionately as it suckled and seemed not to mind the proximity of the two humans. Once the babe was satisfied, the adult bat took it up into the foliage and disappeared.

The bats that Ouray Ocanas assisted were hoary bats, a large but little known species widely distributed in the New World, even in Hawaii. Full grown hoary bats are about 5½ inches long and beautifully marked with warm, reddish-brown faces outlined in black and silver-tipped body hair. Their wing membranes are black against flesh-colored limbs.

Hoary bats are migratory. They mate in fall, but females are able to delay implantation of their (usually two) eggs in the womb so as to time birth for mid-summer when large insects (moths, grasshoppers, and beetles) are most abundant. Females usually travel up into mid-latitudes to bear and rear their young while the males travel much further north and segregate from females through the summer.

Only a few hoary bats live in caves alongside other bat species. The majority live solitary lives in trees, either deciduous or coniferous. Daytime roosts are well concealed from above but open beneath to facilitate quick escape.

In Mammals of Colorado (1994. Denver Museum of Natural History), authors James P. Fitzgerald, Carron A. Meaney, and David M. Armstrong state that, until a female hoary bat with young was observed in Greeley, it was thought that this species only migrated through eastern Colorado and did not reside or raise young here.

Ouray Ocanas’ findings and Mandy Colburn’s photography are additional proof that hoary bats are part of the fauna of Colorado’s eastern plains.

Thanks, Mandy and Ouray, for sharing your experience with estesbog.com.

(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.

 A couple of years ago my grandson, Jason, introduced me to the recent hit animated movie “Over the Hedge.” One of the funniest scenes takes place in a tract home when the invading small animals are confronted by the woman of the house, armed with a broom.

In the confusion the skunk turns to one of her compatriots and says, “I’m sorry you have to see this.” Then she yells out, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

The view pans back away from the house as, “POOM!” a green cloud simultaneously blows out from the windows and doors.

That incident reminds me of a tale often told in the Walker family. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Walker, was a big man for his generation. At 6’ 3” he had a deep booming voice to match his stature.

My grandparents lived in a huge farmhouse in southern Maine that had been in our family since 1840. Typical of the homes of that era, the barn and house were attached by an enclosed shed to make chores possible without going out into the snow.

In more recent times the shed was finished off into a 2-story apartment. That apartment once served as a doctor’s office and at other times was rented to various people, including Nancy and me early in our marriage.

The particular incident occurred in summer in the early 1950s. At that time my Uncle Gerry and Aunt Claire were living in the apartment and saving to buy a house of their own.

Grampa owned a plumbing company. One of the responsibilities of the trade is making house calls at all hours of the night.

On that particular night, Grampa had been out fixing a water pump or unplugging a drain until after midnight. He returned dirty, tired and hungry to a darkened house and yard. The door to the main part of the house was on a low, open porch.

My grandmother had forgotten to leave the porch light on. Without a light Grampa fumbled through his ring of keys without success. As his frustration grew, the cat – or so he thought – squeezed between his ankles and the door.

At that point my temperamental grandfather took out his frustrations on the bothersome animal straddling his feet. Uttering, “Get out of here, cat!” he cuffed the critter off to one side with the side of his work boot.

FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Grampa caught the full retaliation of an offended skunk dead center in the sternum.

Those who have never experienced the wrath of a skunk at close range cannot appreciate how it overwhelms all the senses. Every nerve in one’s body fires off in panic. Your hearing; your eyesight; everything is temporarily paralyzed.

In that state of impaired thinking, Grampa headed for safety – sort of. Somewhere in his brain the urge to get inside took over. Since he couldn’t find his key, he headed for the barn.

In the back of the barn, a hallway led to an unlocked door through my aunt and uncle’s apartment and on into the main part of the house. Aunt Claire said she and Gerry were awakened to the bellowing of a wounded beast at the foot of the stairs, preceeding an odor most foul.

By now my grandmother had been awakened. She met her howling husband at the door into the kitchen and blocked his way. Instead she herded him back through the apartment towards the barn from which he came, once again fumigating the already reeking quarters of my aunt and uncle.

Once out in the yard, my 95-pound grandmother took control of the situation. She ordered the big man to strip off his ruined clothing while she connected the garden hose. The bellowing changed pitch but never let up as she directed a hard stream of ice-cold well water onto his naked frame and gradually washed the edge off the skunk smell.

This was followed by several scrubbings with her homemade lye soap and still more icy rinses.

Needless to say no one in the house got a full night’s sleep and the after-effects of the event lingered on for weeks to come.