“Bluebird Seasons” explores author’s personal vantage point for climate change

“Bluebird Seasons” was the 2024 Colorado Authors League winner for Non-fiction: Memoir. The following is an abridged version of Chapter 5.

An Autumn For Elk 

Cabin Journal – October 1999 Nine PM – From the dark meadow we hear a high-pitched moaning. Then bleating and mewing like souls lost in the night. Suddenly nearby, from the south, a distinct elk bugle.

We turn off the cabin lights and quietly, gently, ease open the door onto the porch. The autumn night pulses with music. Coyotes perform from near, in the arroyo, and far, down Long Canyon, as the song-dogs gather for their nightly sing. A great horned owl hoots from the tall ponderosas below Rattlesnake Ridge. Farther off, to the east, comes the whinny of a western screech-owl, accelerating and dropping in pitch like a ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. And from our meadow, those high-pitched moans that perplex us. 

A waxing half moon brightens the night and through binoculars we make out the movement of phantoms in our meadow. Large shapes, small shapes. Elk. We estimate forty to fifty animals. The cows call to their calves with mews and bleats. To the east, to the west, the bugles of bull elk, starting low then rising to a high-pitched screech, tapering off to chuffs and whuffs. Such a bizarre sound for animals weighing 900 pounds. Then comes a clattering sound—is it the clashing of antlers as two bulls spar? 

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Elk cows gather in nursery herds with their calves and yearlings, feeding on the lush grass of our meadow.

It is the fall rut and the bull elk are drawn here by the presence of female elk. Some of the calves and yearlings may be their young from prior years. In this season, the bulls are impelled by the rise of hormones, their necks swollen, their antlers polished and gleaming. We often find the downed remains of low-hanging pine boughs thrashed by them in mock combat as they struggle to release some of the energy and mating angst that drives them. They bugle to lure females, expending great energy to impress the cows with their size, their suitability as sires for the young that the females will carry through winter and bear next spring.

In some hard winters, exhausted by the rut, weak from spending too little time feeding, bull elk do not survive. They literally die for love. But if they have mated with one or more cows, their genes will carry on and they will have succeeded in the ultimate game of life.

We watch in silence this drama of phantoms. Milling shapes, indistinct in the moonlight, filling our meadow. The music of elk families, the bellows of hormone-driven males. Then after some time—who knows what triggers it, some slight creak of the porch floor boards, the faintest of our whispers barely heard but different from the natural music of the night, our scent carried by the slight breeze—they are suddenly all looking at us. Dozens of heads turned our way at the same exact angle as if aligned by a carpenter’s square. Then a bull blasts a warning scream, and they are all running west into the timber. An explosion. We hear a frantic jostling of large bodies, faint whimpers of alarm, the calls of mothers to their young. The trampling clatter of solid hooves across fallen trees at the base of Elk Ridge, incredibly loud as stealth is abandoned. The thudding rhythm of those same hooves running up through the pines, up a trail that in the next day’s sunlight we will find newly churned by the pounding of many hooves.

They flee—mama cows and antlered bulls, spike bull yearlings and many small calves. In moments the noise has faded up the ridge and the meadow is nearly empty, but not quite. Left behind are two or three young calves, confused, bleating plaintively for their mothers. Finally they too are gone, whether instinctively following their clan up the ridge or rescued by their mothers, it is too dark for me to know. And the meadow is once again quiet, filled only with moonlight.

At age six, Olivia knows that elk lose their antlers every spring and she has become a determined antler hunter. Antlers aren’t in short supply on our land; we’ve found many over the years, both elk and mule deer. In antler shedding season, there is one particular meadow below Rattlesnake Ridge where bull elk seem to discard their antlers. Olivia leads me there.

We’re going on an antler hunt… We’re gonna find a big one…

It’s a blustery, early April day. We move through brittle grass just beginning to green, our eyes on the ground. An elk antler is three or more feet of curving, hard, bone, a main beam with four or more branches on one side, some of those branching further. Every tip, or tine, is called a point, so a six point bull is a big boy with a fine set of antlers. The direction the tines branch from the main beam tells you whether an antler is a right-side antler or a left.

“Bluebird Seasons”

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Olivia is intent on her task, stepping around a patch of prickly pear, searching behind a rabbitbrush. But she is still just six years old, without a lot of height for a vantage point. I realize she is just a few feet away from a pair of antlers lying on the ground together. They are aligned perfectly, side-by-side, as if the bull violently tossed his head to rid himself of the burdensome headgear and they detached simultaneously, dropping to the ground in the exact placement they were on his skull. 

“Let’s look over there,” I say, leading her towards the antlers in a classic mom subterfuge. Our boots crunch the dry grass as we wander “over there.” Then she spies them.

“Mommy, look!” She is so excited, kneeling down beside the antlers. She picks one up, struggling a little because it weighs maybe fifteen pounds. Her eyes glow and she grins ear to ear. “I found two antlers!”

The antler is a six-pointer, nearly as tall as she is, but she manages to carry it all the way back to the cabin. We make quite a parade—proud six-year-old dragging and carrying a six-point antler, eager to show it off to Daddy; me following with the second antler, and our two dogs, Jasper and Rosie, prancing along behind.

Olivia has indeed found a handsome set of antlers. They are a rich brown with whitish tines that are polished and smooth. There are diagonal gashes in the outer parts of the tines. From battling another bull? Reddish-brown blood, still damp, marks the round base of each, as if the bull tossed the antlers just moments before we found them. How free he must have felt with a couple dozen pounds of headgear suddenly gone from his skull! Aaah, no more neck strain. 

His relief will be short-lived, though, for his body begins growing a new set immediately. What an investment of energy and nutrients an elk makes in antlers—thirty-plus pounds of calcium-rich antlers grown each year only to be discarded and new ones grown in their place.

We take a photo of Olivia lying on the kitchen floor with the antlers positioned above her head like a bull elk. Later we have a taxidermist mount the antlers on a handsome board which we display in a prominent spot inside the cabin, a tribute to the monarchs of the mountains that surround us here every fall. 

Over the years, we seem to see elk less often, and just a few at a time, not the big groups we once saw. Where we once recorded a dozen, fifteen, twenty elk, we now list just a handful. Some years, our journal has no entries of elk sightings at all. 

February 1, 2013 Four inches of snowfall—not a lot of elk evidence. Deer and coyote tracks on the  road and driveway but only a single set of elk tracks.

May 22-25, 2015 Five to six cow elk visible in the meadow across Toro Canyon.

February 2016 Saw three bull elk while walking on the road atop the high ridge. They crossed the road far ahead of us. 

November 2017 Elk sign around but we see only five or six animals.

January 26, 2019 Elk tracks here and there, not the tons of elk sign we used to see everywhere.

This lack of elk could be due to so many factors—increasing development of natural gas wells and their associated roads in these once-quiet hills that fragment habitat and disrupt movement corridors. More houses, roads and activity. Better grass and water somewhere else. Even the timing of our visits, that might miss some periods of high elk activity.

But it also seems like the elk we do see show up later in fall and move out earlier in spring. We hear bugling much less often than we did. By 2020, we have not seen dozens of elk in our meadows—with competing bulls, fickle cows and mewing calves—in years. I begin to wonder if the changing climate is playing a role.

Ironically, as climate change is impacting many species negatively, it may be helping elk, at least in the short term. We may be seeing them less often on our land, but not because they’re disappearing. Warmer temperatures are lengthening the growing season at higher elevations and reducing the snowpack, allowing elk to stay higher, longer. 

But that does not mean this change comes with no downside. A study from the University of Montana and the US Geological Survey found that with less snow in the high mountains, elk are able to more easily find food. They remain in these areas, browsing on shrubs and plants that would typically be buried under snow. That may be good for elk, but nibbling away at the shrubs and trees wrecks habitat for songbirds and other species that depend on it for nesting, food and cover. Elk seeking winter food strip the bark from aspen, killing the trees; eat alpine willows needed by ptarmigan and songbirds; trample alpine tundra, killing plants that take centuries to regenerate and increasing erosion. 

The study described a “trickle-down ecological effect” that meant fewer birds could use that habitat, and the ones that did were preyed on more heavily because the munched down trees and shrubs didn’t offer them good enough protection. Another nail in the coffin of North American migratory birds.

While less snow might help elk in some ways, warmer temperatures are benefitting parasites and infectious organisms that infest them. Climate change has led to population explosions of winter ticks, hurting elk and other large mammals. Moose in particular are being literally bled to death, single animals sometimes infested by hundreds of ticks, leaving them weak from anemia and vulnerable to all kinds of disease and stresses.

Wildlife disease specialists with Colorado Parks and Wildlife worry climate change may bring a boom of various diseases that affect elk and deer. Many are spread by biting flies and gnats, which benefit from a warmer climate. A CPW pathologist estimated three to four times as many deer died in 2021 from hemorrhagic diseases over previous “normal” years, because of drought and delayed freezing temperatures, which would otherwise kill the insects that spread the disease. Drought and delayed winter—a likely new normal.

It’s been many years since we found shed antlers in that high meadow below Rattlesnake Ridge. Olivia is in her twenties now, living in another state, and her days as a cracker jack antler hunter are long gone.

Some Aprils, I still search that meadow for antlers. Maybe this year I’ll find one.

Mary Taylor Young has been writing on the landscape and natural communities of Colorado and the West for 37 years. She is the author of 23 books. Young received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Authors League, 2019 induction to Colorado Authors Hall of Fame and was the 2018 Frank Waters Award honoree for a canon of writing that communicates a deep understanding of the West.