Colorado Wildlife Science is privileged to be participating in the Hunter Creek-Smuggler Mountain Cooperative Plan (Hunter-Smuggler Plan), under the direction of the U.S. Forest Service and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. This exciting project is a new way of planning Forest Service lands that have high recreational use, wildlife and ecosystem values, and are adjacent to mountain and resort communities. The community-based plan involves participation from a wide range of stakeholders from local recreation, conservation, and environmental groups, as well as agencies and jurisdictions, and covers over 5,000 acres on the White River National Forest just outside of Aspen, CO.

The Hunter-Smuggler Plan included an extensive visioning process, which resulted in the completion of a Vision Document. The Vision Document represents common values shared amongst most stakeholders, and provides a foundation for identifying opportunities, or actions, to meet that vision within the planning area.

The Hunter-Smuggler Plan is currently in the Opportunities Phase of the process, in which the plan document will be drafted, and include recommendations for forest health, wildlife habitat, recreation, and education projects within the planning area. Following the completion of that document, the projects will be evaluated through a public National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process.

The Vision Document, a process overview, and other planning materials are available on the project website: www.hunter-smugglerplan.com.

Please contact Jonathan Lowsky (jonathan@coloradowildlifescience.com) for more information.

OST has developed management plans for some of its larger properties under fee ownership. Targeted monitoring of plants and animals is crucial to the iterative process of adaptive management. Monitoring is used to resolve critical questions ecological function or desired management outcomes. The results from monitoring and targeted studies are evaluated and used to update goals and conceptual models, revise OST management protocols and implementation, as well as the monitoring methodology. Changes in bird species composition and density can be used to assess wildlife habitat quality based on the assumptions that the population density or relative abundance of a single species or suite of species can serve as an index of habitat quality for that species, may indicate habitat suitability for other species, and that species-habitat relationships can be adequately understood. These data are intended to provide information to managers helping to assure proper documentation of the potential effects of management actions on species of conservation concern. Within the adaptive management framework, the monitoring data helps identify or confirm selected MIS.

CWS analyzed the multi-year data for species density estimates (Program DISTANCE), modeled species richness, recommended MIS for each major habitat type of each open space property, and made management recommendations for each of those habitat types to benefit each MIS and the suite of associated species that use the habitat in a similar way.

EMMA — If the pair of ospreys nesting in Emma have noticed their change of address, they don’t seem to mind.

The birds showed up in Emma, just downvalley from Basalt, last spring and began work on a nest atop a utility pole, but did not actually raise any young there. In December, a Holy Cross crew plucked the nest — a large, interwoven mass of sticks — off the pole and placed it on another one nearby that doesn’t carry live electrical lines.

In the nest’s new location, the impressive birds aren’t in danger of electrocution.

It’s possible the pair will produce young this year, as an osprey can often be seen sitting on the nest of late.

“She sure appears to be incubating,” said Jonathan Lowsky, a wildlife biologist/consultant with Basalt-based Colorado Wildlife Science.

There are also returning pairs of nesting ospreys at Rock Bottom Ranch, between Basalt and El Jebel, and in the Cattle Creek area, between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs.

The Cattle Creek pair lost their young last year when the cottonwood in which they were nesting was blown into the river. They had taken over an old heron nest in the tree, according to Lowsky, who keeps tabs on the local osprey population. This spring, they’re back, using a nest they’d built previously, he said.

A fourth pair has been spied again this year at Ruedi Reservoir, east of Basalt, but Lowsky wasn’t sure whether the birds are nesting.

Young birds should appear sometime in late May or early June, he said.

Ospreys feed exclusively on fish, and their presence is considered a sign of a healthy river.

Among the birds that are nesting locally, most are perched above the Roaring Fork River. The Emma nest is easy to spot from Highway 82, just upvalley from the historic Emma Store. It’s also located right above the Rio Grande Trail. The ospreys are also visible from lower Two Rivers Road, on the opposite side of the river. When a bird isn’t in the nest, it can frequently be spotted from the Two Rivers Road vantage point, in one of the dead cottonwoods above the river.

janet@aspentimes.com

June, 4 2010
SCOTT CONDON
THE ASPEN TIMES
ASPEN, CO COLORADO

BASALT — For the second year in a row, all of the great blue heron eggs in a collection of nests near Rock Bottom Ranch near Basalt have been devoured by a hungry predator.
A golden eagle raided 11 nests on May 14, according to witnesses Shep and Mary Harris, wildlife watchers who live across the Roaring Fork River from the heronry.
Shep Harris said he was outside when he heard the screech of herons. He looked up and saw about 15 adult herons circling in the sky above the nests. He knew what it meant.
“I saw it last year, too, unfortunately,” he said.
Mary Harris said some of the herons settled in towering spruce trees alongside the cottonwoods that hold their nests. They just watched as the golden eagle feasted on the eggs.
“Herons are totally capable of defending themselves,” she said, noting their large size and the sharp beaks that they can move with lightning speed. The fact that they didn’t try to fend off the eagle indicates they are young, inexperienced breeders, she said. If all herons reacted to predators like those at the Rock Bottom area this year,
there wouldn’t be any herons left, she said.
The Harrises only witnessed the raid on one day. They don’t believe any of the eggs had hatched, but it was difficult to tell. The herons left the area a couple of days after the eagle had landed. A few herons returned to the nests a few days later but didn’t stay.
The heronry is abandoned, said Jonathan Lowsky, a wildlife biologist in the midvalley. His firm, Colorado Wildlife Sciences, monitors wildlife issues along the Rio Grande Trail corridor for the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority.
The heronry is off the corridor but nearby.

Lowsky’s research showed that breeding pairs of herons usually have between three and five eggs, so there were probably between 33 and 55 eggs in the 11 nests. “They’re all dead,” Lowsky said.

Last year, a golden eagle raided six nests later in the spring — between May 28 and June 6 — and gobbled both eggs and chicks. It is likely that the same eagle returned to the buffet this spring. “Once they find a source of food,
they’ll come back,” he said.

Lowsky said it isn’t unusual for predators like the golden eagles to eat heron eggs and chicks. “These are natural events that have happened for millennia,” he said.
- Shep Harris / Special to the Aspen Times
6/15/2011 Printable
aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?… 1/2
And while the raid was unfortunate for the Rock Bottom heronry, he sees no evidence that great blue herons are in
decline in the Roaring Fork watershed.
“The good thing is that down at Cattle Creek, there are more than 50 nests,” Lowsky said. That’s as many nests as
he has witnessed there. Numbers have dwindled to as low as 15 in that site.
Other heron colonies are established at North Star Nature Preserve east of Aspen and in Woody Creek. Lowsky said
he hasn’t monitored those sites yet this spring. Heronries are “dynamic entities” that change size and location with
regularity, he said, further showing the incident at Rock Bottom isn’t necessarily cause for concern.
“You know what — herons are doing all right in Colorado,” Lowsky said.
scondon@aspentimes.com

http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100603/NEWS/100609967/0/FRONTPAGE&template=printart

6/15/2011 Printable
aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?… 2/2

viagra