Dan Miller is a retired Criminal Investigator for the Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW), a predecessor to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Although Dan spent most of his career in law enforcement related to wildlife, he started out as a game warden in 1974 with a fresh wildlife biology degree. He was assigned a western slope district based in Hotchkiss, Colorado. Following is Dan’s description of the beginning of the river otter reintroduction in Colorado in August, 1976.
Dan Miller, Wildlife Conservation Officer, West Elk Wilderness, Colorado, 1970s. Photo provided by Dan Miller
In my new district, Dave Kevin was on my northeast border. We called Dave ‘Mad Dog’ because he really liked chasing poachers. He had the Paonia District and I had the Hotchkiss District. My southern and western boundary was the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon. Dave and I used to partner and patrol together a lot.
It was towards the end of the 70s when CDOW decided to reintroduce river otters into Colorado. My district was chosen to be one of the release sites, on the Gunnison River. The other place otters were first released was the South Platte River and Cheesman Reservoir over on the Denver side.
For the otter reintroduction, Dave and I coordinated with biologists out of Denver, because otters were considered threatened in Colorado. We didn’t know of any otters in Colorado, they hadn’t seen one in a helluva long time, I guess. The otters they captured came from Canada and Wisconsin.
I had access through private property on a pretty bad road through the Smith Fork Canyon. We could get within 100 yards of the Gunnison River there. You still had to do some hiking and climbing to get to the actual river. We picked that spot to release the six otters.
They had these otters in traps and they flew them down to Grand Junction on Frontier Airlines. It was the middle of the summer, hotter than hell down there, and they’ve got these aquatic mammals in traps. I’m pretty sure they shipped them on a passenger flight instead of a commercial freight flight. They were down in the baggage hold, crying and making noises.
The plane arrived in Grand Junction late, so it was already starting to get dark. Mad Dog and I were up in Junction waiting for the otters to show up, and of course we had all the biologists from Denver with us. When the otters came out of the baggage hold, they were covered up with a brown canvas tarp. Someone had watered them down. But no one knew enough to put ice blocks or anything in there. The stewardesses took pity on these crying critters. They didn’t know otters are carnivorous and eat fish, crawdads, insects, and crap like that. The stewardesses were trying to feed them lettuce. The otters were in Have-A-Heart traps like boxes with all this lettuce in there.
By the time we got to Hotchkiss, east of Delta, it was already dark:thirty. There was no way we could get down the canyon and do anything safely. We had to put them all in my one car garage overnight. The otters kept us up all night making noises. We were fretting and going out there to make sure they didn’t drop dead. They were all alive the next morning.
In the morning the coordination started with the muckety-mucks from the Denver headquarters, the newspaper reporters, and everyone from CDOW who showed up. We had to get everybody together and figure out how to get the otters, and also all these looky-lous down to the river.
We drove the otters to the river, carried the cages over a cliff to get them down to the river bank and lined them all up so they were headed in the right direction, toward the river. We covered up the back part of the cages so the otters wouldn’t flip out because of all the people that were standing around. We slowly lifted the latches. They didn’t dart out. They looked around. They could hear people in the background trying to be quiet. We were right on the river, down at the lower end where the Smith Fork comes into the Gunnison. Finally they bolted out. The otters had been tagged with ID tags and sexed already. It was a photo opportunity, and then everybody went home.
Dan Miller releasing an otter along the Gunnison River, 1976. Photo provided by Dan Miller.
For the next couple of weeks, every other day, I’d make the long trip down the shitty road to look for the otters. Sometimes Mad Dog and I floated the river in canoes. We looked for sign- where they’d fed on something, or a slide going into the river. One of the smaller females never left the release site. She kept coming back. I had a freezer full of little brook trout that I had seized as evidence from a guy who was over his fishing limit. I didn’t want to try and move the otter, she just needed to learn how to catch fish. So I’d make trips down there with these fish that were evidence. I’d take them out of my freezer at home and let them thaw part way, and then I’d go down to the river. This little otter, she’d come up as soon as she saw me. I’d open up the fish wrapped in tin foil, hold it by its tail, lean it over my leg and squat down next to the river. That otter would come up and start eating it and put her paws on me to get at it. I did that 3 or 4 times.
The river otter reintroduction happened in 1976. After that I took the Division of Wildlife investigator position and moved to Grand Junction. Because of the law enforcement and investigative skills that I learned in the Army, I ended up as one of the four investigators in Colorado. There were four regions, and an investigator for each. When I retired I was a Criminal Investigator for the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Northwest Region. It was the best job I’ve ever had.
Along the River, linocut with watercolor by Jill Bergman