Karval is for plovers: Bird festival hits 10 years
The Colorado town puts itself on the map with a fowl-focused event that draws big birders.
Betty Snow, an avid birder, has checked out almost every bird festival in Colorado. Her favorite is the Mountain Plover Festival in the tiny town of Karval, out on the Eastern Plains where some of the state’s oldest ranches are located.
“People come from everywhere to go to this,” said Snow, explaining how birders pile aboard yellow school buses that bounce over ranch lands, seeking a buff-colored bird that almost ended up on the endangered species lists.
“There are a rancher or two on the bus, and (conservationists), and everyone’s telling you about the birds and the land. It’s marvelous. I’m in awe about what they’ve done.”
She has already signed up for the 10th annual Mountain Plover Festival, which starts Friday.
The idea for Karval’s festival goes back more than a decade, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to put the mountain plover on the endangered species list, which meant ranchers would need to navigate a complex web of federal regulations.
The Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory (which later changed its name to Bird Conservancy of the Rockies) held
a workshop in Karval to discuss the bird with landowners.
And most ranchers in Karval knew nothing about the mountain plover, a grassland bird native to the western Great Plains that prefers to nest in sparse vegetation or bare patches such as prairie dog towns.
“I couldn’t have told you what it was,” said Carl Stogsdill, a rancher whose grandparents came from Kansas to Karval in 1912 to homestead.
They’ve come a long way since then, building a reputation among conservationists for stewardship of agricultural land. Currently, they’re trying to raise funds for a research-and-education center focused on the preservation and scientific study of the shortgrass prairie system.
“Karval has been a leader in this area,” said Chris Pague, senior conservationist at The Nature Conservancy in Colorado who specializes in grasslands on the Eastern Plains.
“(Bird festivals) are all over the country and this is a really small one, but the message they’re giving out is phenomenal. They’re a really great example of the new relationship between the land, the rancher and the general public.”
But back then, Stogsdill had to work hard persuading reluctant ranchers like Russell Davis to attend that first meeting between conservationists and ranchers.
Davis was a third-generation rancher whose grandparents bought the first few acres of their land in the 1930s.
He and his family worked long hours — through years of drought — to keep it profitable. Wildlife conservation seemed a luxury he couldn’t afford.
Today, he’s one of the nation’s leading private landowner conservationists and will be speaking in August at a national symposium, “Innovations on the Land: Managing for Change.”
The agreement to work with biologists — letting them flag nests so farmers and ranchers wouldn’t run over them while cultivating fields — changed everything.
Stogsdill still remembers the moment a biologist showed him what a mountain plover looked like.
“I said, ‘I’ve seen them all my life, I just didn’t know what they were,’ ” he recalled on a recent afternoon, talking on a cellphone during a break from fixing some fences.
After scientists determined that the mountain plover population had stabilized, and the government decided not to list it as an endangered species, people in the Karval community realized that this bird could be an economic opportunity they’d been seeking.
Karval is such a small town that there’s no gas station, no Walmart and no convenience store. Wanting to keep the younger generation from moving away, they’d dreamed of building Karval into a destination town out on the plains.
They came up with the idea for the Mountain Plover Festival — a three-day event with prices that range from $50 for a single event to $200 for the complete package. Visitors spend time with ranchers and farmers, learning about their lives while touring private ranch land and eating home-cooked meals, including a Saturday night chuck wagon dinner.
“I’ve got friends in Europe who would kill to be here, cooking beans over open fires with Conestoga wagons,” said Snow. “It’s as picturesque as can be.”
The closest hotels are in Hugo and Limon, so ranchers and farmers open their homes for visitors to stay — families like the Merewethers, who own the Prairie Lane Ranch that’s been in their family for three generations.
They raise grass-fed cattle using a system of electric fences that direct where cattle graze in order to improve the quality of the soil and the sod.
Ranchers know where to find the mountain plover — their nests are so hard to spot that bird watchers call them “the ghost of the prairie” — but the festival isn’t just about that bird. Over the years, visitors have spotted nearly 90 different kinds of birds, from redwinged blackbirds to the snowy egret and the great horned owl.
Louis Martin and his wife, Cathy, manage the Brett Gray Ranch and often take birders onto the land, showing how they handle livestock operations in a way that supports prairie wildlife that ranges from pronghorn to plovers.
“As we tour, they can see what’s going on at different ranches and see how involved we all are,” said Martin. “Because if you’re improving the habitat, making it a better place for wildlife, you’re also improving the habitat and rangeland for the livestock as well.”