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Denver’s public-art program has attracted plenty of attention over
the last year, first with “Mustang” and then “National Velvet”
capturing the public’s eye — and ire. And now Greenwood Village
has come up with its own artistic oeuvre: pink painted coyotes.
As part of its continuing battle against an influx of howling
critters, the suburb hired a $20,000 animal-control expert to pick off
particularly menacing coyotes, then bought a pair of paintball guns in
an effort to scare them off. Officers have patrolled the parks every
morning for the past two weeks and have nailed two animals and missed
four others, according to Greenwood Village police lieutenant Joe
Harvey. “It’s the same stuff that kids use in paintball wars,” he
explains. “It explodes, and a little bit of paint comes out on the
animals. It causes a welt, but no permanent damage.”
But a Greenwood Village police officer did cause permanent damage on
Friday and Saturday, taking out one coyote in Monaco Park that Harvey
describes as “aggressive” and another near Tommy Davis Park that had
been threatening pets.
The Friday shooting inspired a protest from residents and
animal-rights activists who are trying to save a second Monaco Park
coyote who lives in the park, an animal they’ve named Limpy.
The protesters, including Nicole Rosmarino of WildEarth
Guardians, would prefer that the city keep paintballing coyotes rather
than kill them. “They really just went through the motions on that,
Rosmarino says. “Their program was only two weeks.” (For all the sad
pics, go to www.letlimpylive.org.)
But on Monday, the city decided to extend its paintball program for
at least three more weeks. The biggest problem, Harvey explains, is
that paintball guns aren’t very accurate weapons. “We were able to see
a lot of coyotes but were only successful in hitting two of them. We’ll
give it more time before we decide whether it is a good use of
resources.”
Denver has seen its share of wily coyotes over the past year, but
has no plans to imitate Greenwood Village’s tactics. “We’re not
paintballing our coyotes,” says Jill McGranahan, spokeswoman for
the Department of Parks and Recreation. “We have been very effective in
our hazing and have had lots of people walking around with noisemakers
and air horns and beating pans together.” Compared to that,
paintballing “seems awfully mean.”
Hazing coyotes has kept Denver’s parks department busy, but not too
busy to celebrate the completion earlier this month of the Mile High
Loop, a 5K gravel path that winds its way past scenic, historic sites
in City Park. The trail will be studded by eight Mile High Markers
denoting spots that are exactly 5,280 feet above sea level, but those
markers haven’t yet been manufactured, McGranahan says.
In the meantime, the $412,000 trail, four years in the making, will
be feted by the City Park Alliance at an open house from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
on Thursday, May 21, at the Pavilion at City Park — a spot that
may or may not be a mile high, and may or may not be coyote-free.
Pressing engagement: Pakistan is hardly the safest place to
travel these days, what with a lethal car bombing in Peshawar this past
weekend, not to mention ongoing battles between the government and the
Taliban. So what is Amy Herdy doing there? A former journalist
for Channel 9 and the Denver Post who’s now the advisor for
www.CUIndependent.com, the
University of Colorado at Boulder’s online newspaper, she’s meeting
with professional journalists and students under the auspices of the
U.S. State Department in an attempt to foster better media coverage in
Pakistan. Read her wide-ranging travel dispatches on the Latest Word
blog at westword.com.