Even in the rural West, it is common for humans to enjoy living in town amid wildlife. This phenomenon hasn’t played out in a historic context. Yet. Is it possible for places to tip the scales to make it possible? Many communities think so, with “bear-proof” garbage, containers, preservation of key properties, especially riparian corridors and other tools. From a Google Earth view, most of the West I love from the plains to the West Coast is still rural by most definitions, in places radically so. By the numbers, though, our cumulative human impacts on wildlife appear like an unforgiving trend.
I’ve lived in Eagle, Colorado for a quarter-century now. In the past 12 months, I’ve seen or seen signs in our yard of elk, deer, raccoon, badger, pine martin, myriad birds of prey, including my dearest favorite, great horned owl fledgling. Eagle is a town that planned for this while I’ve been involved with municipal and county decisions. Winter habitat brings the matter into sharpest focus.
As if nature were making a point about the Booth Heights housing proposal in Vail and other projects facing fierce public opposition based on wildlife impacts, December 1st a Bighorn ram was hit by a car and killed on the frontage road near the proposed development. As one wildlife biologist opined in the Vail Daily, the wildlife/development conflict isn’t specific to this project so much as it is cumulative.
I commute regularly between Silverthorne and Eagle these days, 60 mile, each way, mostly through a wildlife fenced corridor which has radically reduced the number of I-70 accidents related to wildlife. I don’t obsess about wildlife encounters after dark as I used to, and as I still do when traveling from Eagle to Steamboat Springs, Craig, Grand County or many other corridors without fencing. While the roads are less bloody for humans and animals, what has this done overall?
I think regionally in my work, and the question for wildlife which knows no Zip code, how do we address cumulative impacts? With data and a plan. Biologists in recent aerial surveys have documented the elk population around Vail in Unit 45 which was reduced from 1,000 to just 53 elk in one year. Take that in for a moment.
Last April as the snows lingered late keeping the elk herds in Eagle in town later than usual, one a magical evening I walked my customary 3.7-mile paved path loop from home and counted well over 1,000 head of elk near and across the valley, heard coyotes. Around every corner, I saw an elk up close enough to smell it. In the lingering golden light, I felt deeply thankful to share this habitat.
It’s December 15th now as I wake at our home in Eagle where we have lived since building it. After a day of snowstorms creaking our rafters, closing Vail Pass, torturing travel, the temperatures dropped. For those who live outside, this is a turning point.
The next morning after the storm, I expect to wake to untrammeled snow. Instead, opening my front door, from my flower beds to the horizon just about every inch of snow is pockmarked with hoof prints. Trails of elk turds crisscross the driveway. Patches of lawn are rooted out with fall leaves and tall grasses strewn across the snow. The elk herd grazed through in the night right through our yard. In spite of a window I always keep cracked or open to preserve my connection to the wild, we did not hear them pass through. Some nights, the movements of elk make for restless sleep, which I only understand in the morning. Other nights, the elk call each other with high pitched trumpet/squeals. We have peered out to watch the beasts move through our yard in the moonlight like shadows, experiencing a wild wonder that few neighborhoods enjoy.
In the Town of Eagle and specifically in Eagle Ranch, this proximity to wildlife is by design. Eagle is one of the few towns I know in the high country which has planned comprehensively to be wildlife-friendly. I probably helped that we had a DOW officer, Bill Heicher on the Town Board during our growing years. This was not without debate. Some said that any development at all would decimate the animal population. Others pointed to the hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands surrounding the town. When we first arrived, most of the surrounding public lands were much less traveled. Separated from the public by vast private ranches with minimal access near town, the few of us who explored on bike, motorbike or foot went miles out of way to circle back near town did not feel that our “driveway was a trailhead” as some town marketing has espoused in recent years. It wasn’t. Except for the winter closures, that has changed. The sense of being a visiting human in these places was clear 20 years ago; now with so many trailheads surrounding town, that dynamic has flipped.
Historic ranches reluctantly provided winter habitat. They were not the culinary attractions of today’s residential landscaping. Evenings before Eagle Ranch developed, we watched the elk herd in the thousands descend into West-Eagle Ranch from our townhome across the valley in the Terrace. Back then, as they do now, deer lounge around the old town for most of the year. In the spring, reports of the presence of a mountain lion or bear within town limits remain common. These days, recreationists (which seem to be most of us) push harder to walk, bike, drive, motorbike, and snowmobile into these surrounding lands. Many of these rural-wildlife-interfacing developments attract NIMBYs who often use the wildlife argument against further development while also complaining about the dangerous presence of predators. For the most part, the trend is that residents, recreationists and developers “win” over wildlife since for all the hubbub, whatever their position people are less shy about showing up to public meetings than animals.
Am I kidding myself? I like to think that planning ahead for wildlife in Eagle when it only had 2,000 residents will relate to different outcomes as the population approaches 10,000 residents in upcoming years. Approved in 1999 with over 1000 acres of open space adjacent to and winding along Brush Creek, and corridors that utilize the golf course fairways, dedicated funding to wildlife habitat projects, the Eagle Ranch PUD has strategic undeveloped plots to create wildlife corridors and many other tools for it to continue to be what we have experienced so far.
As the 1996 Eagle Area Plan envisioned, the less dense portions of the 1,200-unit project may look like typical sprawl to some. These represent a chain of un-development that has been placed consciously. Fenced yard areas are limited, most yards must have unmanicured tall grass areas. Today, there are enough unbuilt lots that there appear many more corridors than planned. It is a subdivision intended to allow the wildlife to “breathe” in and “breathe” out safely. Though entire herds of elk sometimes will spend winter days on the fairways, only rarely during the winter is a group of Elk that wanted to escape back above town “trapped” by the morning activity of humans. All corridors have road crossings.
When we first moved in during the winter of 2001, many evenings we paused our vehicle as well over 2000 head of elk rushed out of the dark across the beams of our headlights. At times they passed, rushing like a frenzy of animals. Friends visiting marveled that we lived on a set of Wild Kingdom. It was breathtaking, the energy of so many beasts, running, their vapors trailing in the night air. This still happens, if less frequently or dramatically. These days, 10 to 50 elk meandering in front of waiting vehicles are common on winter nights in Eagle Ranch.
Many communities, including Vail, have volunteers who enforce trail closures for wildlife. In Eagle, December 15th also marks the first day of winter closure of all trailheads each year by the wildlife standards written into the Eagle Ranch PUD guide. These were adopted back when I was a new Trustee at the town in deference to the Department of Wildlife officials. They requested winter closures, and corridors so that elk could find rest during the day undisturbed without losing precious calories, getting up to move away from dogs recreating people during the day. I didn’t believe at the time they would descend into the neighborhoods after dark as they do all through the winter. In early years I observed them sleeping on south-facing slopes from my bedroom where houses are now. This trail closure protocol continues until April 15th which is supposed to be the end of the calving season. Most years, they are far upslope by that time. At melt off, the heard can safely move up to graze in the high country. Recreators then have their way with the trail system from April to December while the herd is up having its’ way with the tender new shoots in the high country. It is a nifty arrangement made well before the development started and Eagle Ranch filled with residents who surely would have opposed such a limitation on their freedoms. This is one point about negotiating wildlife and people that now seems to me to be absolute– such decisions must be made by town elders before residents move in.
In addition to the Eagle Ranch PUD, the Town adopted an Eagle Area Open Lands Conservation Plan. Each of those policies will be tested as the Haymeadow project across Brush Creek is developed, and in the coming years and as Eagle Ranch approaches build-out. It will help that over 3,500 acres of the upper reaches of Brush Creek were protected in 2000 when Adam’s Rib sold out to state agencies and when the remainder of Adam’s Rib lands in the mid-valley sold as Brush Creek Open Space to Eagle County in 2017. Most of the valley is protected in ways that adopted comp plans, and wildlife citing NIMBYs when I first arrived here could only have imagined. These were monumental wins for wildlife over development. I fear it may still have not been enough. Time will tell.
Just as affordable housing requires advocates who will advocate across neighborhoods, so do our wild values. We need to be encouraging of very dense growth in our municipal core areas where wildlife are to be less expected. These towns with a rural heart need to get comfortable with a dense footprint where it makes sense in the urban core. More people are not directly a problem for wildlife. Where they live and what carve outs we make for wildlife will matter. This pro-growth from the center-out has not entirely been embraced by Eagle residents, though it is well written into mulitiple plans since 1996. This gradation of land planning should be the flip side of the wildlife NIMBY advocacy—bring-it-on where development belongs and be deliberate about it as development expands from the core into the margins. Eagle has been considerably more deliberate about wildlife than most towns. I’m proud of that legacy. It is one I enjoy even as I sleep. Even where it has so carefully considered and for all of our comprehensive planning, I fear the elk which wake me in the night only have a fighting chance because of what we dreamed back then.
