Boulder Buys Windhover Ranch July 2011

BY GENEVIEVE JACOBI
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On April 12, Boulder City Council approved a $5 million land deal to acquire Windhover Ranch. The 243-acre property is well-hidden and not readily accessible by roads but is in Gunbarrel’s backyard, located one mile north of Valmont Road and a half-mile east of 75th Street, south of the Heatherwood subdivision.

Photo courtesy of City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks Department
Aerial view of Windhover Ranch

For years, the property was owned by the Weiser family. Aware of the value of the land, in 1993 the City of Boulder invested $1 million on a conservation easement on the property. This gave the city the right of first refusal to purchase the land before other prospective buyers.

The City of Boulder had the opportunity to buy the land when the Weisers entered into a contract to sell the acreage for $4 million. The property’s would-be-buyer, a private individual from Louisville, was not a developer, but intended to use the property for his own personal enjoyment and for its investment potential.

There were, however, concerns by environmentalists about this buyer’s plans for initiating hunting and some construction on the land. Jim Schmidt, a property agent for the City of Boulder for the past 20 years, was responsible for arranging the deal. The city will acquire Windhover Ranch no later than June 20 and the land will likely be closed for approximately a year as a management plan is developed.

Schmidt said this area will be, “a real crown jewel of open space property. When the people who set up this open space program trying to preserve land, it was a property like this one they would have had in mind.”
In 1979, with the Weisers’ permission, just over 100 acres were designated as the White Rocks State Natural Area by the Colorado Natural Areas Program. The area includes outcroppings of fox hill sandstone, sometimes called turtle backs.
There are also many rare plants, including the black spleenwort fern, one of the rarest ferns in North America.
The list goes on: four rare species of ants, one of which is considered globally imperiled, a species of solitary and burrowing bee, tiny fairy shrimp, the northern leopard frog, and six-lined racerunner lizards.

The site is also the county’s only natural nesting place for barn owls. In the Cottonwood Gallery Forest along Boulder Creek, which bisects the property, are large herds of white-tailed and mule deer, and even the occasional elk. Large varieties of songbirds utilize the riparian corridor.

But it is the eagles that perhaps draw the most attention. A pair of bald eagles has been nesting at Windhover Ranch since 2002, one of only six pairs now known to be procreating in the county.

In the course of nine years, the eagles have built four nests and fledged nine eaglets. Two more eaglets hatched in April this year. Because of the sensitivity of bald eagles when they are establishing a nest site, the closures around known nests are longer than many other raptor species, from Nov. 1 through July 31. Schmidt thinks it is possible that the eventual management plans may involve ways to allow the public to observe the nesting eagles from a distance, for example, from behind a blind or screen in small groups.

“The challenge is to allow the public to see and experience the land while at the same time protecting it,” said Schmidt.