Montezuma County Commission Chair Larry Don Suckla continues to suggest that wildlife officials moved a golden eagle’s nest onto the Phil’s World mountain biking area. The Bureau of Land Management is considering a trail expansion in that area.
Suckla points at a single paragraph in the BLM’s preliminary environmental assessment for the Phil’s World expansion. Part of it reads that an eagle’s nest was on a nearby landowner's property but “moved its current location on BLM land following the construction of the home.” Suckla believes the phrase could indicate that humans moved the nest, but BLM officials say it was the eagles themselves who decided to leave.
BLM supervisory wildlife biologists Nathan West and Mike Schmidt say they’ve monitored four eagle’s nests in the area since 2010. They say the nest on the property adjacent to BLM land is in poor condition, but has not been abandoned. They explained that eagles do not physically move their nests, but can move between multiple nests within one territory.
They say wildlife managers don’t move eagle’s nests either, and that any disturbance of an eagle’s nest is a violation of federal law.
Suckla says he sees the nest as a barrier to expansion of the Phil’s World trail, and that he is not convinced that the BLM's assessment of the nests is accurate.
