At sunrise on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, a pilot, a biologist and a local game warden all jump into an airplane. This is not the beginning of a joke but the beginning of one of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s pronghorn surveys, completed via aerial survey every July and August.

The aircraft is a completely manual Cessna 185 Skywagon taildragger with four seats and an extremely tight cockpit. The pilot, Denise Corcoran, takes off and flies the group extremely low, at around 500 feet, along parallel transect lines 5 to 7 miles apart. The pronghorn have come to recognize the yearly rumble of the Cessna and are up and moving before the plane even reaches their area. Some of the fastest animals on earth, they run up to 60 miles per hour in a straight line, and Corcoran flies above them.

The biologist is literally rubbing shoulders with Corcoran on the left; she grips a tape recorder and calls out each pronghorn as a doe, buck or young of the year. It takes all three people to call out the animals, making sure not to count any twice, and when the pronghorn begin to lose their shadows as the sun moves overhead, the team calls it a day.

Corcoran is one of four pilots that make up CPW’s statewide aerial survey team, and this yearly pronghorn mission is just one the team undertakes. At its core, the aerial survey division is responsible for understanding animal populations and conducting studies on health and migration patterns.

They track bats to bears and everything in between, and they act as data collectors for the incredible diversity of wildlife in our state. Surveying from the air instead of the ground is less intrusive to wildlife, and it allows for the coverage of a larger geographic area with less human effort and better information in the end.

The team’s work is no safari; pronghorn counts are an extremely methodical three or more hours inside the 100-degree cockpit with no stretch or bathroom breaks to look forward to.

They don’t have to take a census of every single animal – usually, a statistician will tell the team how many miles they need to fly in the area in question and how many animals they need to sample in order to make a statistically valid statement about the whole group. When counting pronghorn, the crew is also focusing on ratios: the fawn-to-doe ratio and the buck-to-doe ratio, which CPW then uses to determine how many pronghorn tags to issue hunters.

Programs like CPW’s are usually found in states with big game, since it’s such a huge resource to manage, and are funded mostly by the hunting licenses they dole out. Not every state has its own pilots, but Colorado has four: Denise Corcoran in the southeast quadrant of the state, Larry Gepfert in the northwest, Brian Smith in the northeast, and Steve Waters in the southwest. If Colorado was cut into quadrants, that’s basically how the pilots split the state into regional areas, flying out of Colorado Springs, Rifle, Loveland and Montrose, respectively.

At 39 years old, Corcoran is the youngest, newest and currently only female pilot of the four. She has flown for backcountry lodges in Alaska, a nonprofit in Central America and a humanitarian organization in Africa – all before she competed against 150 pilots to land this highly coveted job.

 

Some of the more difficult work the pilots undertake is stocking high alpine lakes with trout in the early fall, which takes incredible mental and physical ability to pull off. The majority of the lakes are above timberline, and the ideal drop-zone for the fish is approximately 150 feet off the water with an airspeed of around 90 mph.

Flying this low and slow in a small plane can be an incredibly dangerous undertaking – the planes are backed right up against rock faces because the lakes aren’t very big, and if even 15 knots of wind come into the picture, the pilots might have to try another lake and come back later.

To prepare the planes, the seats are taken out so that they can carry nine storage tubes that each hold around 2,000 inch-long trout fingerlings and four gallons of water. In one voyage, a Cessna can stock up to nine different lakes – one lake per tube. Only on their third year of stocking can new pilots stock fish unaccompanied, and every detail must be thorough.

“When I was loading up the fish and took off for my first solo flight, I felt ready. It was a highlight of my career,”        Corcoran said. “Not many people do this; I think I’m the only female pilot that does high alpine stocking in a fixed wing.”

Thanks to the dense water that encases the fish, more than 90 percent of the fingerlings survive the drop. Corcoran opens the chutes with a switch on the airplane panel, and she can see the fish dropping into the lake like rain.

“You can’t hear the fish fall,” she said. “All you can hear is the hopper opening and the roar of the air coming through before you close the flap.”

States like Idaho and Montana use helicopters to do their fish stocking, but because of the distance between lakes in Colorado, Corcoran and her coworkers use fixed-wing airplanes, which can go the distance but can’t hover.

“That’s why we all respect it so much,” Corcoran said. “The plane has come to feel like an extension of myself. Knowing your aircraft is integral at such a low level.”

Flying every day could, in theory, drive one to complacency, but each pilot is exceedingly safety oriented.

“I fly knowing I have these peoples’ lives in my hands; I know their wives and husbands and kids,” northeast pilot Brian Smith said. “If there’s something in the back of my mind that I’m at unrest with, I won’t go. I’ll tell them, ‘I’m not sure what it is, but let’s see about doing it tomorrow.’ ”

As northwest pilot Larry Gepfert put it, they try to use their superior decision-making so they don’t have to use superior skill.

Some of Gepfert’s most treasured times on the job are witnessing early Colorado mornings at 400 feet as opposed to 40,000. He recounts a time a few years ago counting grouse in the spring, flying over little bald knobs of land called leks, where the grouse mingle in mating season like it’s a middle school playground.

“We can fly over at 100 feet, and it doesn’t disturb them,” Gepfert said. “The males have this white patch of feathers on their chest that they blow up. They were strutting around, and they flashed those white feathers into the sun just as it was coming up.”

That morning was a high humidity morning, which is unusual for Colorado, and a few clouds were left sitting on top of a rim, falling over the edge of it like a waterfall.

“We could see those little grouse flashing their feathers at us, kind of like mirrors in the sun, and that waterfall of clouds in the background, and it was absolutely breathtaking,” Gepfert said.

Although Corcoran, Gepfert, Smith and Waters work in different areas of the state, they all have somewhat similar tasks depending on the season. Their years usually start out with waterfowl surveys in January and nest surveys later in the spring. Summer means pronghorn flights, followed by early-fall fish stocking, as well as surveys such as black-tailed prairie dogs and lesser prairie chickens.

In the winter, the four pilots help capture and collar elk. This effort involves collaboration between the planes and the contracted helicopter capture crew. The pilot, knowing the area and wind conditions, flies ahead in the plane and spots groups of elk, then relays that information to the helicopter team. To make sure that the animals don’t become exhausted, there are rules for how long they can chase animals from the air.

“I want to be intentional when we interact with animals,” Corcoran said. “We don’t want to endanger them.”

Once an elk is located, it will be netted from the helicopter, and the biologists will secure the elk’s front legs to its back legs so that it is kept safe without drugs but isn’t able to kick. In less than five minutes, the team can have the elk’s blood drawn and a radio collar affixed to its neck.

Keeping track of elk populations via radio collars helps CPW collect data on herd distribution and demographics, and the location data helps inform herd management strategies and land-use planning decisions. Thanks to the pilots’ highly efficient scouting, this typically week-long project can be diminished to only a few days.

As all pilots agreed, the work is hard, and theirs is a very coveted yet high risk position.

“Flying in Colorado is really challenging,” Corcoran said. “In winters you have jet streams over the mountains, and in the spring and summer, you have wind shears, thunderstorms, hail, microbursts.”

The work can be mentally and physically exhausting, she said.

“I take my work very seriously, and yet I love seeing everything from the big picture perspective,” Corcoran said. “I love to see projects I’ve been working on come into fruition.”