Moose’s impact on one of Colorado’s most cherished landscapes has been a concern over the years. 

Now Rocky Mountain National Park officials are launching an effort to address it. 

A recent webinar marked “the very beginning of this planning process,” the park’s large mammal ecologist, Will Deacy, emphasized to the virtual audience. This was in prefacing a Q and A session that would “focus on overall context and key issues rather than specific management actions,” he said. 

But a plan for moose might recall specifics from the national park’s previous plan for elk, whose similarly rising numbers were found to be eating away tall willows and wiping out wetland habitat. 

Most controversially, the Elk and Vegetation Management Plan resulted in sharpshooters killing 130 cow elk between 2009 and 2011, as reported during the recent webinar. That plan also resulted in fencing to block elk from some willow and other ongoing efforts to ultimately foster “a more natural migration pattern” and spread out browsing, Deacy explained during the webinar. 

He presented data suggesting success in that regard, with fewer elk munching in the park year-round “while maintaining viewing for visitors.” But overall, Deacy said, the elk plan has not succeeded in recovering wetlands.

These were “biodiversity hot spots” hosting an array of birds, bugs and animals big and small, Deacy noted. And the benefits went beyond wildlife, he said, describing wetlands’ role as a “filter” for water quality and as a “sponge” guarding against flooding. 

“And really importantly, they act as a firebreak,” Deacy continued. 

He showed side-by-side pictures depicting a lush area from the 1960s and an altered habitat, something more like a grassland, in more recent years. “The East Troublesome fire in 2020 flew straight through this area because it was a degraded wetland,” Deacy said.

On the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, research has determined a 98% loss of historic wetlands. That’s the side closer to North Park, where moose were delivered by helicopter in 1978 and began to spread in Colorado — including to the national park. 

“We don’t think it’s a coincidence that willow declines have been really dramatic in the west (side of the park) where moose have been established the longest,” Deacy said. “And we are concerned that the same declines could be coming for some of the patches of healthy willow on the east side of the  park and other areas of the park.”

On that east side closer to Estes Park, historic wetland loss has been tracked around 55%. That’s while the national park’s moose density has increased by 49% in the past five years, according to data presented by Deacy, who implied that increase had no signs of slowing in a place where hunting is not allowed and where the ungulate’s natural predators were extirpated long ago. 

He said the park’s moose population was estimated around 240 — equaling closer to 3,600 elk in terms of willow consumption. One moose is thought to eat willow at the rate of 15 elk, research has suggested. (Ahead of the Elk and Vegetation Management Plan, the east side of the park’s overwintering population was estimated between 1,000 and 1,500.) 

During the webinar, Deacy showed a visual of a threshold depicting wetland and altered grassland. “What we think has happened is we’ve gone over a tipping point,” he said.

Said park Superintendent Gary Ingram: “While moose are loved by many visitors, their increased numbers are making it infeasible to protect and restore these sensitive areas.” 

The areas were once home to beavers. Counts in the 1940s found 945 of them in certain areas of the national park. More recent counts have found 12 in those areas.

“These situations are complex, but this strongly suggests that competition with elk and moose continue to limit beaver populations,” Deacy said. 

The loss of beavers and their dams goes hand in hand with wetland loss; the dams keep water and thus green up valleys, and in thinning the woods for building material, beavers are credited for maintaining healthy growth. This is explained in Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s recently drafted Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy, which aims to boost populations statewide more than a century after they were decimated by fur trapping. 

That draft strategy calls for translocating beavers in some parts of the state. Could that happen in Rocky Mountain National Park? It’s a common question, Deacy said in a previous Gazette interview. 

“We can’t just have beavers show up, because there’s nothing to eat,” he said, alluding to that competition with moose and elk.

In the park’s western Kawuneeche Valley, attempts have been made to mimic beavers with dam-like structures. That’s while elk- and moose-blocking fences have been installed around wetlands, native vegetation has been planted and exotic species removed, Public Affairs Officer Kyle Patterson told the recent webinar viewers. 

“All focused in small areas,” she said. “This management plan that we’re talking about tonight would be the first to address wetland restoration on a park-wide scale.” 

And the first to address moose. 

It’s another common question Deacy has heard: “Why are we meddling in these systems? Why don’t we let nature take its course? And I always reply, ‘This is not a natural situation we are in,'” he said, mentioning the extirpation of predators and agricultural ditching that also diminished the park’s historic wetlands. 

“All these steps were human-caused,” Deacy said while showing that visual of a threshold between wetland and transformed grassland, “and unfortunately we are in a situation where it’s likely gonna take human action to return to this side of the threshold and let wetlands be restored.”

Human intervention has been met with pushback in other national park plans for wildlife deemed troublesome, Frank Buono said in a previous Gazette interview. He is a former National Park Service manager and contractor specializing in law and policy.

“There’s a lot of emotional affection for moose. They are magnificent, beautiful animals,” he said. “And they’re big, and they’re difficult to catch.”

Meaning roundups would be difficult — as other wildlife plans have preferred, Buono noted. Other plans have called for culling, including Rocky Mountain National Park’s 2008 elk plan, which was challenged in court by an environmental group.

Another group, Defenders of Wildlife, challenged the idea of a “moose problem” in a previous statement to The Gazette: “To the extent that Rocky Mountain National Park has issues with herbivores overbrowsing willows, young aspens, etc., that’s a ‘lack of native predators’ problem. And that problem has an obvious and natural solution — allow Colorado’s gray wolf population to recover.”

It would not be so simple even if the state’s struggling reintroduction effort proved successful in years to come, Joel Berger said in a previous interview. The Colorado State University professor has studied the return of wolves in Yellowstone while also analyzing the wetland loss in Rocky Mountain National Park, which he sees as “probably too small to even sustain the movement of one wolf pack.”

And wolves would prefer the park’s abundant elk over bigger, aggressive moose, Berger added. “And so wolves, for a lot of different reasons, are not gonna be the panacea that some people might be waiting for.”

While predicting controversy, Berger suggested it was best for Rocky Mountain National Park to not wait on a plan for moose: “What will happen is moose will eat themselves out of a home.”

During the recent webinar, the park’s superintendent insisted no specifics had been determined. “We are in the early stages of planning,” Ingram said, “and your input throughout this process will help shape effective management strategies.” 

The park is taking written input through a project webpage until Jan. 8: tinyurl.com/yc3nwns5