Don't Call Me Ishmael: Coyotes on the edge of Chatfield Farms

Distant coyotes yipping away

Deer Creek with actual flowing water

Those couldn’t be coyote yips this late in the morning, I said to myself.

No one was there to hear me on the Chatfield Farms’ Deer Creek Natural Area. No one else saw two coyotes prancing through a prairie dog town looking for an easy meal.

Well, no other humans did - the prairie dogs saw them, made their emergency calls across the town and hunkered down till the threat moved on. Then again, anyone visiting Chatfield Farms on a weekday should expect to have the natural area to his or herself.

Main ranch house.

View from the Hildebrand Ranch

Chatfield Farms goes back to the homesteading days of Colorado’s Front Range. The Denver Botanical Gardens own the 700-acre farm, but the farmhouse of the Hildebrand Ranch dates to the 1860s. It’s surrounded by a number of vintage buildings, many of which still serve the working farm.

The farm was in early spring mode, with plantings just beginning, with safeguards in place for frosty nights and snowy days that can still arrive through Memorial Day. In many places, dirt had been tilled but nothing sprouted yet. Hop trellises stood empty, but by mid-summer would be flush with the vines and their cones ready for brewing. As I wandered the farm, I knew I came a little early in the season.

But on this April morning, I was more interested in the Deer Creek Natural Area since other attractions could wait till later in the summer (plus the very affordable annual pass applies to both Chatfield Farms and the Denver Botanical Gardens).

Deer Creek originates in the nearby foothills. Due to many modern water diversions, the creek more a series of pools near the end of the farm property than a flowing creek. That made it difficult to picture the creek that would have drawn homesteaders to this land. The Chatfield Reservoir across the highway at the farm’s edge didn’t help either.

Prairie dogs before the yips started

Deer Creek riparian zone

But the farm is protected, as is a touch of wilderness at its edge. A short distance from the activity stations where classes of children visited, I ended up on a nature walk near Deer Creek.

The change was abrupt but welcome. A red-tailed hawk dove into the riparian zone and vanished. The dense vegetation on both shores lent itself to hiding animals. A few weeks after I visited, Chatfield Farms posted a photo of a porcupine in the tree. Apart from large fauna like black bears, mountain lions or elk, there’s really know limit to what could hide within. As I learned years ago, a bobcat could walk from plain view into brush 10 feet away and give no indication of its presence.

I still get a little excited at coyote yips. There’s something about that noise, so close to a dog yet so wild. It’s a noise I’ve usually heard just beyond the light of a campfire, not on a sunny morning.

But it also made me wary that the natural area had its threats. I had no hiking poles or anything to ward off the coyotes if they came too close to me, so I stayed alert and kept my distance. The pair trotted into the woods.

Coyote in the distance

I came to the end of the path, where a wooden bridge gives scenic views of Deer Creek, which starts in the mountains and merges with the South Platte River nearby. That juncture is hidden beneath Chatfield Reservoir today, the creek funnelled under the highway in a drainage pipe. I looped back around the series of small ponds that stored water from Deer Creek.

I felt eyes on me and spotted another coyote in a slow trot on the pond’s far side. My presence was enough to grasp its attention. We traded glances for a while the ducks on the pond oblivious to the predator hidden by foliage a few yards away. Gradually it left the pond loops and disappeared instantly among the cottonwoods on the creek banks.

I knew what that little thatch of woods of the intermittent Deer Creek held. I would have no choice but to see what might emerge from the thickets later in the warm months.