Aspen are among the most prolific native trees in the Rocky Mountains, and the shoots they send out each year provide crucial winter food for wildlife. Mature aspen groves are critical habitat for songbirds, butterflies and beavers.
But new aspen aren’t growing in Rocky Mountain National Park – because thousands of hungry elk are devouring the shoots. A similar thing has happened to the willows so vital to the park’s wetlands. Unsustainably large elk herds threaten the park’s ecological balance, including other wildlife like deer and big horn sheep.
To save the ecosystems, elk numbers should be cut from an estimated 3,000 to about 1,700. This week, the National Park Service released a draft document analyzing the options for doing that.
Elk can’t be moved as the rest of Colorado also has too many. Birth-control measures are expensive and unreliable.
Some environmentalists want the government to bring wolves to the park to prey on the elk, but reintroducing the predators is impractical at this point. If wolves naturally wander into Colorado from Wyoming (as they seem to be doing) they could be part of the long-term solution. But any plan to deliberately bring wild wolves to Colorado would spark a very long political and legal battle.
Rocky Mountain National Park’s embattled ecosystems can’t wait years while we humans sort out our differences.
So, with some sadness but a sense of necessity, we support the National Park Service’s general plan to shoot some elk in the park.
But how the program is implemented deserves public scrutiny. Federal law outlaws sport hunting in the park, so the agency intends to use government employees or contractors. Its preferred plan calls for the shooting to be done at night, using night-vision goggles and rifles equipped with silencers. But Colorado law bans hunting at night because it’s considered unsafe. While the park service isn’t obliged to obey state law, the agency still should prove that night hunting is better than temporarily closing parts of the park and shooting elk during the day.
Some carcasses will be left for natural scavengers, but the park service may give away meat for human consumption. Because chronic wasting disease exists in the park’s elk herds, the agency could only give meat to individuals who are fully informed about the disease. So, meat can’t be donated to homeless shelters or other non-profits.
Killing some of the park’s signature elk is a painful prospect for many wildlife lovers, but the overall health of area’s ecosystem must take precedence.
