It turns out Golden is a good place to raise kids, even if you are a bird of prey.
In early August, Jefferson County Open Space lifted seasonal closures of the Rim Rock Trail in North Table Mountain Park after bird watchers there determined that three or four prairie falcon chicks had
successfully “fledged.”
“Which means they’ve learned how to fly,” said Bryan Posthumus, natural resource team lead for Jeffco Open Space.
The seasonal closures also affected rock climbing and hiking trails in the Cathedral Spires area in south Jeffco, where there are peregrine falcons.
The closures help protect raptor nesting sites from the start of the courtship period in April through the fledging period, and a little beyond, up to the end of July.
“We like to give the birds a little time cushion to grow. We’ve seen some of the adults flying with a group of young birds for weeks after they leave the nest,” Posthumus said. He guessed that the young birds were learning flying and hunting techniques.
“We have pretty high park use. The concern is that it may cause nest failure, and those birds may not return,” he said. Too much human activity by the cliff edges would send the birds into the air quite a bit, he said.
Flustered adults could break eggs or leave nests unguarded from the elements and predators. Hatched birds could also be startled out of the nest before they are ready to fly.
Jeffco Open Space and a dedicated group of area volunteers have monitored raptor roosting sites along the cliffs of the Table Mountains for 15 years.
The cliff nests see a variety of visitors, Posthumus said, including golden eagles, great horned owls and red-tailed hawks.
Swallows, swifts and ravens are also known to make their nests in the cliffs.
In a given year, Posthumus said, there were probably four to six nesting falcon pairs within the Table Mountain area.
Open Space surveys about 32 nesting pairs of raptors every year, he said, and they tend to move around.
“It is a challenge in managing recreation and protecting these raptors,” he said.
The hard part, he said, was in trying to set up boundaries that humans might respect, even though the birds don’t.