Audio By Carbonatix
It’s springtime in the Rockies, and things are officially getting weird. For the third year in a row, Governor Owens and Mayor Hickenlooper engaged in their annual game of catch, and right when Owens was answering a reporter’s question, Hick up and fired the high heat, beaning the Guv square in his giant forehead, knocking him out cold. Then Hick threw a smoke bomb and disappeared from sight, some believe into the city’s sewer system. Bizarre. Meanwhile, just across the street, the state legislature was deciding for us whether we could smoke cigarettes or pop Plan B pills.
Even the animals are getting restless.
In Grand Lake, a town previously made famous by the nutcase who pimped his bulldozer and then blitzkrieged almost every building in town, an injured moose attacked the 92-year-old former mayor as he was on his way to church. (The mayor, not the moose.) The moose repeatedly butted the poor fellow, causing severe head injuries and sending the man to the hospital, then a hospice. Goddamn. If only there were some way of tracking moose — or, as they’re referred to in more rural, desolate communities, nature’s fat chicks.
Cue the trumpets. The Colorado Division of Wildlife is on it.
To be more precise, the DOW is helping students track two moose that were captured in Utah and released near Grand Junction, and hyping it as an educational experience. Or, as the agency’s website says: “Have you ever moved into a new home in a new city? Or just changed schools? It wasn’t always easy, was it? You had to learn your way around a new neighborhood, make new friends, and find out where to go to do all of the ordinary things you have always done. You had to learn all about your new environment, your new ‘habitat.’ Imagine if you were a moose instead of a person! Do you think it would be easier for a moose to adjust to different surroundings? What would a moose have to learn? How would you answer these questions?”
Never mind this state’s ever-withering test scores, let’s just have the little glue-sniffers pretend they’re moose moving into some new digs. That’ll solve everything! But on the bright side, at least there’s finally a classroom scenario that Manual students can wrap their heads around.
The DOW should forget the moose nonsense and pay more attention to bird flu. That’s all anyone can talk about, anyway. In City Park, the geese are eyeing each other suspiciously, ready to turn on the first honker that so much as sniffles. In Park Hill, Mama What’s So Funny is busily stockpiling water, canned foods, batteries and flashlights, stacking them carefully on her previous doomsday collection from Y2K. If the bird flu hits with the wrath that some scientists are predicting, one day — most likely a Thursday — all of society will wake up with no skin. We’ll be like this for forty days and forty nights, and then we’ll suddenly grow feathers and beaks and be forced to congregate on statues for the rest of time, shitting liberally. It’s a troubling scenario. If only there were some way of tracking the birds.
Cue the trumpets. Xcel Energy is on it. It’s about time the company did something besides rape my bank account every month.
“The open space, vegetation and water surrounding our power plant sites makes them excellent homes for wildlife,” reads Xcel’s website. “We have installed several web-based Bird Cams at our facilities to help raise awareness for these wild creatures and share them with the public.” Indeed, using Xcel’s handy bird cam I was able to view a variety of raptors, from peregrine falcons to kestrels, and I learned that at approximately 15:24:38 hours on March 31, there may have been an owl at the Xcel Energy Valmont Power Station in Boulder. But the picture was a little unclear; it may have been a human foot. I was also able to determine that at 15:26:29 hours on March 31, the bald eagle at the Fort St. Vrain Power Station looked extremely pissed off to find a camera essentially inside his nest. You keep glaring, bald eagle, because the second you start to look sickly, we’ll turn our backs on you faster than Oprah did on James Frey.
“I used to be the goddamn national icon,” you’ll wheeze to all the pigeons and songbirds at the aviary clinic. “Now look at me.”
Tough times call for tough measures. But as spring turns to summer and the animals get even crazier, we can all take comfort in the fact that the means exist for constant vigilance. Superfluous, baffling, constant vigilance.
