Doing the work, together

Mar 10

By: Ellen Harris, Education & Volunteer Specialist

“Come fill up my senses, like the wind in the springtime, like the sun on a cold day, like warm rotting leaves…”

This is what I imagine John Denver would write if he was experiencing late winter and early spring on the Front Range. The gusting wind, more hours of sunlight, and the random 65-degree days followed by snow are one of my favorite parts of the year, strange as that may seem. This time of year is ripe for wonder, and always makes me appreciate the work we and generations before us have done to conserve the lands of Larimer County.

This week, I, several county folks, and a handful of Fort Collins Natural Area people scouted out a fence we plan to remove with volunteers later this spring. Along the way, I found cacti plumping up, a technicolor dream coat of lichens, and what I think is a packrat nest.

I also found that we all spoke the same language - probably a common experience in our field, where acronyms and nicknames abound. But more importantly, our language signified something else: that we looked at a landscape and saw how we could improve it for the wildlife that live here, and that we understood what was needed to get the work done.

Conservation takes place over years, over generations. Lichen can live thousands of years, and prehistoric packrat nests preserve the pollen of the ice ages. Together, we remove fences, and build trails, and find the money to keep sections of land undeveloped for a season, or a career, or a lifetime… before we pass the baton to someone else.

Thanks for doing the work with me.