Located eleven miles northeast of downtown Denver, Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is the largest contiguous open space in the Denver metropolitan area, and with an environmental restoration program to be completed in 2010, it will be one of the largest urban national wildlife refuges in the United States. Before World War II, the arsenal was farmland, and in the 1880s settlers broke the shortgrass prairie sod, planted trees and crops, and brought irrigation to the area. In 1942, the U.S. Army bought thirty square miles of farmland to establish Rocky Mountain Arsenal as a chemical weapons manufacturing facility, and weapons produced there during the war deterred the use of chemical weapons by the Axis Powers and helped achieve victory over Germany and Japan. The refuge stands within the broader history of the National Wildlife Refuge System, which began in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt set aside Pelican Island off Florida as the first national wildlife refuge after plume hunters had ravaged southeastern bird rookeries. Native wildlife at the refuge are adapted to the northern shortgrass prairie, where bison and black-tailed prairie dogs were once keystone species whose grazing and burrowing created habitat for many others. Today the refuge supports many original inhabitants, while added water, lakes, wetlands, and planted trees have increased species richness by allowing many eastern species to become naturalized there. Visitors may see black-tailed prairie dogs, coyotes, bald eagles, mule deer, white-tailed deer, many waterfowl, and numerous hawks and owls, and the refuge is especially important for burrowing owls, with dozens of pairs raising young each year in prairie dog towns and the largest remaining breeding population along the Colorado Front Range. The text also connects this landscape to urban and community forestry, noting the environmental and social benefits of trees, and to Arbor Day, first celebrated in Nebraska in 1872 after J. Sterling Morton promoted tree planting.

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Denver, Colorado · USA