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.”