FIELD NOTES
Land and life at the confluence of Earth and Sky
Furbearers and human-bear coexistence at the Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting
The July Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting, involving contentious debates leading up to votes on furbearer management, was the first ever held on one of the two Indian reservations in the state. I made a comment about human-bear conflict reduction.
I’ve attended numerous Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission meetings over the last half-dozen years, and this was one of the more acrimonious ones. And wolves weren’t even on the agenda. This time it was furbearers, a category of 17 species, most of which are mesocarnivores, and one of which, our largest rodent, the beaver, is a keystone species or “ecosystem engineer.”
The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission unanimously adopted the resolution supporting federal public lands
Today, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission unanimously passed a resolution “Concerning the Protection of National Public Lands In Colorado” (Resolution 2025-02), which are essential for wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation including hunting and fishing, and many other uses. And by extension, the resolution supports the federal employees in the agencies that manage those lands in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture. This is especially pertinent to the most threatened public lands, which are the multiple-use lands held by the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service.