Raptors: a love story
Seasonal closures give birds the space they need to mate and raise their young
By Pamela White (editorial@boulderweekly.com)

We hear her before we see her — a high-pitched call emanating from the rock ahead of us. White splashes of guano mark the roosting sites she shares with her mate. Nearly the color of the rock herself and some 400 feet from the trail, she is almost impossible to see where she sits, watching over her brood of four-day-old chicks.

She calls out again, and from the blue sky high overhead comes an answering cry — her mate letting her know that he's on his way back with prey. She calls back, hops forward on the sheltered rock ledge that serves as her nest, and looks expectantly skyward. Out of nowhere, he lands beside her, some unlucky rodent in his talons. She accepts his offering and disappears inside a little nook in the rock to feed her hungry chicks. In a flash of sandy-brown feathers, the male takes to the air again.

It's the image of domestic bliss — if you're a prairie falcon.

Prairie falcons are one of three protected species that make their nests in the crags and spires of Boulder's foothills. Together with peregrine falcons and golden eagles, they return late each winter to stake out nesting places and breed. Although these raptors face a host of survival challenges, interference from pesky human beings is rarely one of them.

Since 1986, the city of Boulder has imposed a series of regulatory closures intended to give raptors the space they need to breed and successfully fledge their young. Though initially controversial, these closures have gained wide acceptance and support not only among the general public, but also with rock climbers, who sacrifice the most during closure periods.

And the good news is the closures seem to be doing what they were intended to do. Nesting sites are being occupied consistently from year to year, and the number of breeding pairs has increased slightly. Most importantly, the nests are productive, with most pairs successfully fledging offspring each summer. Thanks to their own grit and a bit of human cooperation, these beautiful birds are now thriving in Boulder's backyard.

This land is our land

Rick Hatfield, a ranger with Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, has spent much of his adult life with his eyes on the sky. His love of raptors began with a love of verticality. A native of Maine and a climber, he was a few hundred feet off the ground, knuckle-deep in rock, when he saw a bird soaring at what was roughly eye level.

"I'd never seen a bird fly like that before," he says. "I wanted to learn what the bird was called and what it did and how it lived."

The bird turned out to be a rare peregrine falcon that was nesting in a nearby closure area. And just like that Hatfield found himself passionately interested in something he'd never cared about before — the lives of raptors.

In 1992, Hatfield paid a visit to Boulder, arriving at night. He awoke to a view of the Flatirons.

"My eyes got about as wide as they've ever gotten," he says. "It just inspired what continues today to be an absolute awe and amazement of the place. My first walks in the Flatirons were just walking around, exploring, loving them, seeing how the sun changes the color of the rock, how the seasons change the colors."

Soon 303 became his area code. He quickly volunteered to work as a raptor monitor in what was a decade-old program that provided Boulder Mountain Parks with data on cliff-nesting raptors, like peregrines. It was a life-altering decision that by 1998 had earned him a coveted job as a park ranger.

Today, he's leading me and a photographer up the trail to one of many raptor observation sites used by volunteers to monitor nest activity. If we're lucky, he tells us, we'll be able to watch a nesting pair of prairie falcons. It's an hour-long hike, and the conversation turns to the history of the parks.

I tell him of my family's annual autumn forays into Mountain Parks to harvest chokecherries, rose hips and prickly pear fruit for jelly. Though the very idea of traipsing off-trail and making off with gallons of wild fruit offends modern "leave no trace" sensibilities, it wasn't unusual in the early 1970s. No one worried about going off-trail, depriving the bears of sustenance or frightening wildlife in those days. Our mountain parks represented nature, and everyone in Boulder wanted to "get back to nature" — as if the human race had gone someplace else and now desired to return.

But people's notions about the natural world have always depended on their physical and emotional needs, and those needs have changed dramatically since whites first settled Boulder Valley.

Photographs from the 19th century show the foothills near Boulder almost entirely bare of trees, the forest having been cut down and used to build and heat homes. Green Mountain naked? It's hard to imagine. In those days, however, the wood helped ensure survival.

When the University of Colorado was built, pink sandstone was quarried from land near Skunk Canyon, leaving a scar that is visible today. To most of us, the quarry is just another feature of the landscape. We're used to it. But imagine if someone proposed doing the same thing today.

Chautauqua Meadow, now protected grassland, has been used as a cow pasture, a golf course, the site of a Civilian Conservation Corps barracks and a ski area complete with a towrope lift. A privately owned zoo once housed North American fauna at what is now the head of the McClintock Trail. When the zoo closed, the city reportedly held a citywide picnic and ate the zoo's resident elk. (Don't even ask what they did to prairie dogs.)

Changing times, changing attitudes.

By the 1970s, city regulations no longer tolerated the felling of trees. The ponderosa pine forest grew so thickly — thanks largely to land-management practices that focused heavily on fire suppression — that pine beetles were able to spread quickly from tree to tree, killing off entire stands of ponderosa pine.

It was during the late 1960s and early 1970s that rock climbing exploded in Boulder, with the Third Flatiron becoming the local trophy climb. In a scene that would be familiar to Boulderites today, weekends meant hundreds of cars parked on Flagstaff and climbers dangling from every available hand hold. The idea of user fees, parking fees and closures were anathema to most people. After all, the public owned Boulder Mountain Parks; the land was supposed to be open to all.

But there were no peregrine falcons.

Peregrines had last been seen above Boulder in 1958, their population devastated by the pesticide DDT and human pressures. There were rumors of nesting golden eagles and prairie falcons, as well, but information about them was sketchy and the numbers uncertain. By the 1980s, it dawned on some locals that loving nature might mean doing more than being in it. Those who cherished the foothills realized they needed to do something to protect the ecosystem, or Boulder's growing population would soon love it to death.

The Boulder County Nature Association (BCNA) was founded as a private nonprofit in 1982 to study and preserve the cultural and natural history of the county. The organization's mission included protecting the natural beauty of the area and its natural resources. So BCNA volunteers mapped raptor nesting sites in the cliffs and crags and urged city officials to protect them.

"Prior to that it had been just anecdotal surveys and collections of stories," Hatfield says. "We knew that there was probably a time when peregrine falcons actively nested up there. We knew about the golden eagles. We knew we had an unknown quantity of prairie falcons that were nesting up there."

In 1984, the city responded to BCNA's concerns by asking residents voluntarily to stay away from a pair of nesting golden eagles in Skunk Canyon. Boulder became the first land regulator along the Front Range — and one of the first in the nation — to initiate a volunteer closure. And not without controversy. Apart from barriers erected to keep hikers from short-cutting and causing erosion along trails, Boulder citizens had never been told to stay out of a part of their parks before.

Hatfield admits the closure was a tough sell. Not surprisingly, compliance was questionable.

In 1986, land-management officials decided that the Skunk Canyon closure was no longer voluntary and made the area off limits from Feb. 1 through July 31. As other nesting and roosting sites were documented, additional closures were added, including the Third Flatiron, Green Mountain's Sacred Cliffs, the Devil's Thumb ridge, the Mickey Mouse Wall and The Matron.

By 1991, the peregrines had returned.

Raptor rookery

"There's a lot of different ways for raptor eggs to fail, for chicks to die," Hatfield explains, aiming his spotting scope at the nest. "A lot of it has to do with the age and experience of the adults. Weather comes into play. Site selection comes into play. It's not an easy thing for them to raise their young."

Some 400 feet away, the female prairie falcon turns her head and looks at us. I get a close-up view through the scope. The streak beneath her eye reminds me of the Egyptian god Horus. Though wary, she doesn't seem bothered by our presence. Behind her, three chicks nestle in the rock, looking like white puff balls with big talons.

Still helpless apart from those talons, these hungry little fellows face an uphill battle for survival. Vulnerable to a host of predators while in the nest, they might not live long enough to fledge. There is a long list of factors that decrease their chances for surviving long enough to breed and raise young of their own, with great horned owls and golden eagles posing the greatest threat.

"The closures are an effort to say, 'We're going to remove human disturbance from this list of factors,'" Hatfield says.

All cliff-nesting raptors are protected under the Migratory Bird Act, a federal law, and golden eagles have the added protection of the Bald Eagle Protection Act. But if laws were enough to win compliance, there'd be no need for fines or jails. The best way to win support for anything is to explain it to people so that they understand its value themselves. And so Mountain Parks has put a great deal of effort since then into educating the public about the significance of the closures.

Although most of us can readily embrace the idea of not harassing a mother bird caring for fuzzy little chicks, it is perhaps more difficult to understand exactly what is meant by "human disturbance." What does a person have to do to disturb nesting raptors?

Not much, it turns out.

Once a cliff-nesting raptor lays her eggs, she has to tend them around the clock in order to ensure that they hatch. If the eggs get too cold, the chicks will die. For golden eagles, the incubation time is about 55 days. For falcons it's somewhere between 32 and 39 days.

"If there's a climber nearby or some kind of human disturbance that drives the birds off of those eggs, it leaves them exposed to temperature extremes and to predators like magpies and ravens," Hatfield says.

Many times hikers don't even realize they're near a raptor nest, he says. But if their presence frightens the brooding female and causes her to leave her eggs, they've disturbed the nest.

Closures are designed to eliminate those disruptions and give the birds time to pick their nesting sites, to mate, to hatch their eggs and to raise their chicks undisturbed.

Occasionally, a climber will head up into the foothills and knowingly violate a closure, Hatfield says. However, most closure violations are committed by day hikers.

"Climbers know where they're going the next day," Hatfield says. "They go online the night before to plan their climb. They're familiar with the closures and know where they are."

Day hikers, on the other hand, often don't take time to read about park rules and regulations. They walk past information posted at trailheads and are often much less familiar with park terrain and rules. Sometimes they violate a raptor closure simply because they've gotten lost. Hatfield says rangers take these subtleties into account when enforcing the law.

"There's a big difference between 'Yeah, I saw the signs, but I wanted to climb there anyway' — deliberate violations — and someone who really has no idea where they are," he says.

Rangers gauge the impact caused by the violation and the reason behind it before handing out tickets. And the punishment for violating a closure? The highest possible municipal penalty: a maximum of 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. In the past, tickets have led to everything from no punishment at all to fines to community service to jail — the full spectrum of penalties.

Last year, rangers gave out five tickets. So far this year, there have been none. However, it is still early in the season.

"I'm hoping to get through the year without writing a ticket," Hatfield says. "But people are just getting outside. We're at Memorial Day. We're having more and more people out. We're getting more people from out of town."

But no tickets doesn't mean everyone is respecting the closures.

"We did have one report this year of someone climbing the Third Flatiron before the sun came up," Hatfield says. "We weren't able to contact that person. So even though we haven't written a ticket this year, we know we've had violations."

That kind of willful disregard for closures angers Hatfield.

"It does a disservice to the rest of the climbing community that wants to follow the rules and does in large measure," he says. "We get very, very good cooperation from the climbing community, particularly the local climbing community. So if someone's doing that, they're doing it recklessly. It disregards the work that we've done, and it disregards the local sentiment, which is respect raptor closures."

Climb on

Hatfield isn't the only one who gets upset when a climber deliberately violates a raptor closure. Tom Isaacson, president of Flatirons Climbing Council (FCC), a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of area climbers, is also concerned when he hears such things.

"If we had some more information to allow us to figure out who it was, we would absolutely speak to them as forcefully as we [could] to dissuade them from that," Isaacson says. "If you accept the premise of the closure, then whoever is climbing there is potentially disturbing the raptors, and we don't want that to happen. It's important for us to show good faith and cooperation with these closures. It doesn't take a whole lot of people who disobey something to create a bad image for the rest of the group that may not be deserved. The whole thing about a few rotten apples is unfortunately true."

FCC works to educate the climbing community about the importance of closures and other park rules, Isaacson says.

"I think we're continuing to do a good and responsible job of making sure that the climbing community respects the environment," he says.

It's no secret that in a broader sense there are significant disputes between various segments of the recreation community and Boulder's Open Space officials, but most climbers understand and even support raptor closures — and not just because it's politically expedient to do so. Most climbers have a deep love of the natural environment and want to preserve it.

"There's a long tradition in the climbing community that where there's a raptor closure, the climbers will obey it," Isaacson says. "They respect the idea of protecting raptors and would feel genuinely bad if they did something that undermined a raptor's environment."

If there's a dispute over a closure, climbers work within their advocacy groups to take their concerns to the land regulator rather than defying the closure, he says.

For example, when climbers recently wondered why Mountain Parks' closures were so much more extensive size-wise than those of other Front Range parks, such as those in Eldorado Canyon State Park, they didn't start climbing the Third. They contacted Mountain Parks and sat down with Hatfield.

"We're not wildlife ecologists by and large, and it struck us in a layman's sort of way that some of the closures, particularly surrounding the Third Flatiron, might be bigger than what was necessary," Isaacson says. "We approached Open Space to have a dialogue about that. They were very receptive to our concerns. They listened to what we had to say and spent quite a bit of time explaining the science behind it and why they felt the closures needed to be as broad as [they were]."

Unlike other land regulators, Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks protects not only the immediate area around nests, but also roosting sites that accompany the nest.

"From the very start, our closure program protects both nesting and roosting sites," Hatfield says. "Roosting spots enable raptors to keep an eye on the nest, to watch for their mate to come back with prey. They know what the best roost, or perch, sites are in their territory. In a lot of these cases, the roost site may be just as important as a nest site."

Isaacson says his group was satisfied with that answer and with the science behind it and currently has no disagreements with the city of Boulder about raptor closures. Climbers are upset, however, about an ongoing dispute with the U.S. Forest Service, which has closed Security Risk Crag based on hotly disputed evidence that golden eagles might nest there. Experts have claimed that eggshell fragments found at the crag do not belong to eagles, yet the closure remains.

The situation is different in Boulder's parks, in part because of the volunteer program, which now boasts 45 to 50 regular volunteers, each one of whom spends two hours a week monitoring a nesting site.

"They're diligent at monitoring what's going on so we don't have that issue of phantom nests or phantom birds," Isaacson says. "If there's a closure, it's because there's a bird there. And so that obviously helps improve the atmosphere of respect that they're careful to be sure they're monitoring and there really is a nesting raptor."

But the volunteer program helps climbers in other ways, Hatfield says. By providing ample and accurate information, the volunteers make it possible for the city to tweak closures.

"It's a big deal for us to close down these areas," Hatfield says. "We know that climbers are the most impacted individual user group of any of the visitors that we have. Our commitment to them since we are getting such good information is that if a particular site has a failure or if it's inactive for whatever reason that year, we don't have a compelling need to keep it closed until July 31, and so we open it early."

Isaacson says his group would only challenge the closures if some new science indicated that current policies were flawed in some way.

"There is a very good amount of good, climbable rock that is subject to raptor closures within the city of Boulder," he says. "Just in terms of the geographic scope, it's a lot of rock, and it's closed for five months. It's a large closure so it's certainly on the climbers' radar screen as by far the single biggest limitation on where climbers can go. But as long as we think the science supports them, we're not going to fight over that."

Feathered evidence

"You're lucky," Hatfield tells us as we watch the male hand off prey to his mate then disappear into the sky. "We get lots of reports from volunteers who sit here for two hours and see nothing."

Volunteer raptor monitors undergo training and then take on the responsibility to spend at least two hours a week monitoring a nest site and taking notes, he says.

"Our volunteers remain some of the most committed, most passionate people that I've ever met," Hatfield says. "All of them are busy. They all have families. They all have jobs. Yet they find the time to go up and spend large portions of their day monitoring these nest locations for us. They're very committed people. No matter how much I get called to do other things, I'm always inspired by that."

Not only do the volunteers serve as eyes and ears for rangers — reporting nest activity, closure violations and other problems, like dogs off leash — they also collect priceless data.

Nesting information dating back to 1990 was recently compiled, offering a cumulative look at what's happening in closure areas. After all, the proof is in the feathers.

Between 1990 and 2006, 131 young prairie falcons fledged in closure areas, giving mating pairs in those areas a nesting success rate of 91.9 percent. During that same period, 32 young golden eagles fledged, a success rate of 82.8 percent. Perhaps most exciting is the fact that peregrines have fledged 57 young since their return in 1991, a success rate of 60.4 percent for this environmentally sensitive raptor.

"Undoubtedly there's been success," Hatfield says. "We're seeing excellent stability."

Another thing the data demonstrate is that raptors are nesting in higher-than-expected densities in our foothills, Hatfield says. Although science suggests that a nesting pair of peregrines needs 10 square miles of defensible habitat to hunt around their nest, Boulder hosts three nesting pairs in that same space.

From Hatfield's point of view, this information justifies the closures.

"I fall toward the resource-protection side of it, because I know the incredible resources that we have here, and I know the visitation pressures that we have here, not just from climbers," he says. "You look at the visitation numbers, and they defy belief."

Current estimates suggest that Boulder's mountain parks receive as many as 6 million visits per year. That number doesn't reflect the number of people who use the parks, but rather the number of times they use it. More concrete data prove that Boulder's mountains receive more visitors each year than Rocky Mountain National Park. However, that usage is concentrated in an area that is only one-sixth the size of the national park.

"I talk with rangers from other parks, and one guy from Chaco Canyon was complaining that they were overrun by the 150,000 visitors they have each year," Hatfield says. "I said, 'Man, that's a busy weekend where I work.'"

One of those busy weekends lies ahead of us, and Hatfield is hoping to get through it without closure violations.

But perched ahead of us on the cliff face, the female prairie falcon isn't aware of the effort that's gone into giving her a safe nesting place. Driven by instinct, she has returned to mate and raise her young, Boulder's crags having been imprinted on her since the moment she hatched. With her chicks fed, she looks skyward, anticipating the next prey exchange and perhaps a chance to stretch her own wings.

Above us, her mate soars high, wings spread on the wind.

Says Hatfield: "No matter how many times I see it, it's like seeing it for the first time."

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