Moose a flash point in Boulder County
On a recent morning carrying the promise of cool fall air into western Boulder County’s high country, a small squadron of photographers was snapping away at a bull moose, a cow and two yearlings browsing just south of Brainard Lake Road.
Roughly a half-dozen shutterbugs approached the moose, some creeping within 40 feet of the adults, even placing themselves at times right in the midst of the bull, the cow and the yearlings. Some captured photos of the bull nuzzling the cow — a mating season “kiss,” one delighted observer said.
Allenspark resident Barb Kostohryz watched the scene near Red Rock Lake unfold from about 150 feet away, along with a couple visiting from Ohio. One of them, Kevin Buckland, also was avidly clicking away on his camera, albeit from a much safer distance than the group they were watching — admiring the animals, aghast at the humans.
“It’s really sad. It makes me mad,” Kostohryz lamented, as she studied the photographers intermingling with the animals.
“It bothers me that they’re disrupting them,” she said, as she watched the most brazen photographers, three of them from Texas, drawing increasingly close to several of Colorado’s largest mammals — animals considered the most dangerous in the state to humans. “I can’t believe that they got in the middle of that group.”
Kostohryz, who routinely sees moose in her backyard, eventually moved on with her friends for their planned morning of landscape painting. The four moose,
appearing agitated by all the attention from Homo sapiens wielding long lenses, tramped west into heavier undergrowth. But a few of their bold admirers, lugging cameras and tripods, followed the majestic animals.
Ten minutes later, as a reporter visited roadside with two photographers, a single shot rang out through the nearby woods, echoing across the landscape.
“Oh, no,” said Spencer Moore, a retired optometrist and avid photographer from Waco, Texas, who just a few minutes before had been adding the moose to his photo portfolio.
Looking off in the direction of the rifle’s report, he said, “That makes me sick.”
It also stirred outrage from the trio of non-hunters who emerged from the forest after a few more minutes, badly shaken and complaining that the cow had been harvested in their proximity.
“It really bugs a photographer to see a hunter shoot an animal that has no fear whatsoever,” said Layne Gregory, also of Waco. “It’s not hunting. That cow was grazing, eating breakfast, knowing we were there.”
An Estes Park woman who declined to give her name, visibly upset, said: “That hunter should have known better. He put us in danger, because he had to shoot a cow moose.”
The Sept. 17 drama played out in the Brainard Lake Recreation Area on a day that Colorado Parks and Wildlife personnel, as well as U.S. Forest Service staff, were coincidentally in the immediate vicinity to produce a video promoting safe conduct around another inhabitant of the Front Range wilds, the black bear. They got an earful from those who were closest to the hunter when made his kill, reviving one of the most familiar topics to stewards of recreational gems such as Brainard Lake, where competing interests and conflicting values can produce disturbing tableau such as the one that played out that late summer morning.
CPW spokesman Jason Clay, one of those who heard out the group’s impassioned complaints, told them, ”No one’s recreation trumps another’s.” He also assured them that wildlife officers “preach” to hunters their need to follow “ethical, safe practices.”
Ethical, safe practices were not on display that day at the Brainard Lake Recreation Area. It’s something on which wildlife experts are working to gain more cooperation from the public.
“It could have been very bad,” Clay said in the wake of that episode. “We see more moose attacks (on people) than any other species of wildlife.”
Parks and Wildlife would go on to post photos submitted to them from that incident to social media as an example of improper conduct around moose.
“I feel like this is becoming the new normal in Colorado with multi-use recreation areas, with wildlife photography overlapping with areas where hunting is legal,” Lori Morgan, volunteer coordinator for CPW’S northeast region, said of the episode near Red Rock Lake.
Shane Allen, who owns the Granby-based Arapaho Wilderness Outfitters, guides moose and elk hunters in the Monarch Lake, Grand Lake and Indian Peaks Wilderness areas. The recent Brainard episode was sadly familiar to him.
“In my area, I’ll ride by people on the trail, and tell them, particularly during rutting season, ‘There’s a moose up ahead, be careful. You don’t want to mess with him.’ But then there will be people in there, mothers with children and babies, taking pictures. And then the hunter comes in and does what they’re supposed to do. And, voila, you have the interaction that everybody hates.”
Morgan supervises a program in which trained volunteers are dispatched to the Brainard Lake area on busy days to help educate people on how to coexist with one another, with the largest members of the ungulate family, and with other area wildlife. On the busiest days, as many as seven volunteers have been deployed there.
“I’m a little disappointed that we still have these issues,” Morgan said. “It’s not an easy fix. And it goes back to the fact of the growing population of people and the increased population of moose.”
As for good numbers for the moose population in Colorado, Eric Bergman, a wildlife research scientist for the state, said: “We try, but we don’t do a superawesome job of it.”
While moose were historically spotted in the state, dating to the 1800s, there was for many years no established moose population in Colorado, with the exception of some in Brown’s Park in Colorado’s far northwest.
That changed significantly after 1979, when about a dozen were introduced at North Park. They have since expanded their range, somewhat prodigiously. As recently as 2013, their number was estimated at about 2,300. Bergman, who is wrapping up a five-year study evaluating what he called “nontraditional metrics” for monitoring moose populations, now puts the number at about 2,800, “plus or minus two to three hundred.”
As those numbers have grown, along with a state in which human population continues to spiral upward with in-migration, many of those new arrivals are eager to get out and explore the outback. With that has come some ugly episodes.
Still talked about in Boulder County is the Sept. 6, 2014, incident in which a licensed bow and arrow hunter killed a bull moose at Brainard Lake, then dressed his kill in front of horrified visitors who were there to see wildlife and didn’t know the area was open for its regular, limited hunting season.
That led to a change in rules for hunting at Brainard Lake — enacted before the 2015 season — preventing hunters from operating within a quarter mile of that lake’s high-water mark.
Even without actual kills, there have been problems.
A woman in 2016 contacted the media, even before calling authorities, after witnessing what she thought was another bow and arrow bull moose kill at Brainard Lake. What she had actually seen was a bull moose, which briefly had pinned down a hunter whose tag was for a cow, and then simply disappeared into the undergrowth of a hidden ravine beyond her line of sight.
The witness “called you guys, and everybody but us,” said Kristin Cannon, now CPW’S area wildlife manager for the area including Brainard Lake. “She jumped to conclusions.” The moose was actually unharmed.
Not only is it legal to hunt moose in the Brainard Lake with a bull or cow tag during the limited season, it also is illegal to harass those who are exercising that right.
Wildlife officials investigated an episode in September 2016 in which a licensed bow hunter, who had taken a bull moose at the Caribou townsite near Nederland, reported to CPW that he had been harassed the previous day by a woman who chased off a bull moose he was targeting near Long Lake, just southwest of Brainard Lake. By his account, the woman, a native of France now living in New Jersey, interfered with his hunting. She scolded him, saying “hunting there was like hunting in a zoo,” according to an incident report. The experience left him not interested in hunting there anymore.
That woman was contacted by Cannon the next day in Estes Park, where she was staying, and she did not deny any of it. She recounted to Cannon that she told the bow hunter “You’re going to have to shoot me, first,” and had run ahead of him to scare any moose away.
Cannon informed the woman, who believed there should be no hunting where there’s a chance people could be put in danger — but who also acknowledged that she’d seen posted advisories that moose hunting was currently in season at the Brainard area — that hunter harassment is a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance and punishable by a fine of $500 to $1,000 upon conviction.
The woman was not cited, however, and was instead let off with a written warning. In the Sept. 17 episode near Brainard’s Red Rock Lake, the hunter was properly licensed and equipped with a cow tag for the muzzle-loading moose season, which ended five days later, on Sept. 22. The rifle season runs Oct. 1-14.
“He didn’t do anything illegal, as best we can tell,” Cannon said. “According to him, he made an effort to wait. He knew people were photographing the moose and he made an effort to wait until they left.”
She said the hunter told a wildlife manager that he could not see any of the photographers when he killed the cow, and did not believe they could see him.
“It could have been a mistake on his part” to pull the trigger when he did, Cannon said. “Anyone who hunts moose in that meadow in that Brainard Lake area, it can be kind of problematic with other folks who are up there. As long as he is not endangering anyone, he is under no obligation not to hunt in front of people. But I think most people would consider it unethical to shoot an animal in front of people who were photographing it.”
She added: “We aren’t taking any action as of right now. But if the witnesses contact us and tell us what they witnessed, especially if they feel the hunter’s actions were unsafe, we will investigate it,” Cannon said. “We would contact them, but we don’t know their identity.”
Allen, the Granby-based outfitter, is not licensed to take clients into the Brainard Lake area. But he is well aware of the conflicts that have occurred there.
“Here’s what most people do not seem to understand,” Allen said. “In the state of Colorado, moose tags are very hard to get. Most hunters will spend 20 years or more, putting in each year (by lottery) … to draw a Shiras moose tag,” referring to the moose subspecies now populating Colorado.
Clay, with CPW, said that’s correct, especially for a bull. The lifetime bag limit for bull moose is one, making it in Colorado literally a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Clay said, one denied to some despite their 20, 30, or even 40 years of trying.
This year, in the unit regulated by CPW that is north of Brainard Lake Road, the state issued just two cow licenses, one for archery and one for muzzle-loading rifle. In the unit south of Brainard Lake Road, there are 10 cow licenses — two for archery, two for muzzleloader, and six for rifles. Additionally, four bull licenses were issued that are good in both of those units; three of them are for archery, and one is for rifle.
With no wolves in Colorado, there’s no other natural predator the moose has to fear.
“The only control you have on the moose population are the hunters. That’s it,” Allen said.
“You get a mixture of the naturalists,the people who get used to watching the moose, and then you have the hunter, who has been waiting maybe 20 years. Absolutely, he’s going to go in there and do what he has been waiting 20 years to do. And then the has to contend with people who don’t understand hunting at all.”
But for the most part, Cannon said, she believes conflicts around moose between the different constituencies at the Brainard Lake area are “pretty rare.”
“I talk to a lot of hunters, and they say over the last few years a majority of them have had a fine experience. Other people have been curious, or left them alone. It’s a much different scenario than when that bull was killed a few years ago,” Cannon said.
However, she conceded, with some of those who venture into Colorado’s wilderness areas, wildlife officers’ messaging has the impact of the tree falling in the proverbial uninhabited forest.
“Some people just think they are tame and pets, and they should be protected,” Cannon said of moose in Colorado. “They either choose not to understand, or just don’t quite get that this is just how, if we want to harvest and stay on top of that population, we need hunting.
“And we need hunting in the Brainard Lake Recreation Area. There are people who are not on board with that, no matter what we say.”