Planting seeds
“For pollinator conservation, it really does require understanding the relationships between our plants and our pollinators,” said Adrian Carper, manager of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Pollinator Conservation Program, at the planting of Barr Lake State Park’s pollinator garden in May 2025. Volunteers were gathered on an overcast spring day to plant flowers, grasses and other plants to support local butterflies, moths, bumble bees and other native pollinators. As older volunteers focused on digging and planting, younger volunteers scoured the landscape with butterfly nets, conducting their own small-scale species inventory of this garden-in-progress. As Carper described the great variety of pollinators in the insect world, these young volunteers ran up to him periodically to show the bees and flies they had caught. “We got another creature!” one of them announced. Carper happily helped identify the bumble bees, flies and other insects in their catch, giving us a small taste of the booming variety of pollinators in Colorado.
The planting at Barr Lake was a precursor of more gardens to come. In early April, Governor Polis and CPW announced the first round of wildlife and habitat projects to be funded through Senate Bill 24-230 (SB230), which established new production fees on oil and gas development to mitigate the adverse impacts of these operations on wildlife and their habitats. CPW leadership identified projects for early investment of this new funding in fiscal year 2026, including a $300,000 per year increase for park pollinator gardens.
In the gardens
“There are a bunch of parks that are already interested and trying in some way to make gardens happen, but funding is just a huge barrier,” said Hayley Schroeder, manager of CPW’s Invertebrate and Rare Plant Program. This new funding supports not only the tilling of soil and the planting of flowers, but provides habitat to native pollinators, easy-to-access sites for CPW researchers and volunteers to survey pollinator populations, and opportunities for volunteers of all ages to engage with Colorado’s natural resources.
The two completed pollinator gardens at Colorado state parks, one at Barr Lake and the other at Lory State Park, are each small plots near the park visitor center. Filled with local plants, both of these gardens provide a “summary” of their park, giving visitors a brief but broad look at the surprising diversity of plants found in the surrounding landscape. (You can read more about the planting of the gardens at Barr and Lory here.) This is a priority for future gardens, too. The ecology of Colorado can change dramatically between regions, and so gardens require specific curations of local plants. “Across the state we have this incredibly diverse set of habitats, and so we really want to reflect that in the gardens to represent the biodiversity of that park,” said Schroeder.
The educational aspect of these gardens is critical. Not only do they reflect the real ecology of parks, but they show visitors that supporting local pollinators is as simple as planting a garden. Schroeder’s hope is that visitors will be inspired to create their own gardens at home.
But the gardens won’t just be a presentation of established knowledge; they’ll be a part of discovering the true diversity of their parks.
“Just by having a really biodiverse, robust habitat on the landscape, we can use that as a monitoring tool,” said Schroeder, “because it’ll bring in insects from across the surrounding landscape that we can, through this really dense resource, assess the species that are there.”
Studying species so small in a landscape so vast is difficult, but gardens can serve as a pollinator watering hole, a gathering place that presents a crisp cross section of the larger community of creatures. Gardens attract bumble bees, which can travel great distances to take advantage of pollen resources, especially in early and late spring. These gardens will also serve as observation posts for participants in Bumble Bee Atlas, a project in which volunteers contribute data and photographs that scientists use to study bumble bee populations. Pollinator gardens give visitors an accessible, easy way to contribute meaningfully to science, helping experts understand when insects emerge in the spring and their distribution in the state.
The educational benefits are evident and the scientific value clear, but can these gardens directly help pollinators? Can a few flowers and grasses in a small plot of land really give a boost to an entire community of bees, butterflies, moths and other pollinators?
“There are studies that have looked at the scale of, basically, habitat interventions,” said Carper. The best size of a pollinator garden, according to this research, is surprisingly small. “I’m talking 1,000 to 5,000 square feet, like the size of your home,” said Carper. In Carper’s view, large plots may cover more ground, but they can spread resources thin. Seed mixes are cheaper and good for installing a large number of plants, but they’re limited to the plants that are available commercially, not necessarily those that are best for pollinators. Investing in smaller plots can allow gardeners to curate more varied communities of local plants. “From a diversity perspective, these small-scale, really intensive habitat alterations can actually be really important.”
Steamboat tilling
Though these long-term plans are still very much in their larval stage (or seedling phase, whichever allusion you prefer), some parks are already thinking ahead. Julie Arington, manager of Steamboat Lake State Park in Routt County, has been building up her park’s pollinator resources for years and hopes the new funding from SB230 will help take her efforts to the next level.
The gardens-in-progress at Steamboat Lake started with a project to remove non-native grasses around the visitor center. While removing something harmful, it seemed only natural to Arington to replace it with something helpful. As this small, informal project continued, Arington noticed that the native plants weren’t just attracting bees, wasps and butterflies; visitors were taking an interest, too. “It’s been a great opportunity to interact with people and tell them about native plants, and tell them about butterflies and pollinators,” she said. These occasional plantings have grown into greater ambitions for a complete pollinator garden. Through this process, Arington and her team are being very deliberate and authentic about what they plant. Most of what’s planted in the gardens comes from seed collected in the park by volunteers and scout groups. “We don’t have anything that we’ve introduced that is non-native or something that isn’t going to grow naturally,” she said. “And we felt pretty strongly that we wanted to make sure that the garden was not only pollinator friendly, but it was going to be a demonstration of what could be found here.”
But, again, these gardens aren’t just exhibitions of local flora. Arington said that even in this early phase, she’s seen increases in pollinators. “When it was just grass, we didn’t have a whole lot of things going on out there,” she said, “but as we have those native flowers blooming, we have already seen lots more bees and butterflies out there.”
Niche switchers
Steamboat is a treasure trove of insects. When I asked her about the butterflies at the park, Arington rattled off a lengthy list of just the “blues” (species in the group Polyommatini): silvery blues, western tailed blues, Melissa blues and lupine blues. When caterpillars, lupine blues use buckwheat as a “host plant,” the main plant they rely on for food and shelter. Many butterflies are wholly and completely dependent on a single host plant when caterpillars. According to Arington, springtime at Steamboat sees many lupine blue caterpillars eating away at buckwheat on the ground. Later in the year, once these caterpillars undergo metamorphosis — the radical physical transformation between larval and adult stages that many insects go through — they drink nectar from a great variety of flowering plants, no longer tied to a single host to sustain them. The difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly isn’t as simple as growing wings; in a way, it turns into an entirely different animal.
“Almost all insects that undergo metamorphosis occupy different ecological niches as larvae and adults,” said Carper. A species’ ecological niche is its own slice of its habitat. Many species can share an environment, but each species has a unique way of using that habitat. A single tree may be the home of a woodpecker and a robin. The woodpecker nests in the tree’s trunk while the robin nests on one of its branches; the woodpecker eats beetle larvae living inside the bark while the robin pulls up earthworms from the ground below. They occupy the same general space but focus on their own niche within it. Most birds use their habitats in more or less the same way throughout their entire lives, but an insect that goes through metamorphosis switches niches almost entirely. As a result, a single species of insect can play two distinct ecological roles in its lifetime. As larvae, Syrphid flies are voracious carnivores with menacing “mouth hooks,” which they use to capture and hold prey while sucking out the insides. These formidable (in their own way) predators form a cocoon and emerge as delicate pollinators, swapping knife-like mouthparts for a short, spongy pad for lapping up nectar. According to Carper, this incredible flip in lifestyle is what makes insects such important species. “That’s what’s enabled them to conquer the globe, to provide the ecosystem services that we depend on, not just pollination, but control of important agricultural pests. We overlook that these things occupy more niches than there are species.”
Pollinators in flight
Pollinators, and insects more broadly, have incredibly complex relationships with their environments, and are part of the humming machines that are intact, healthy ecosystems. One of the many reasons to conserve insects is to ensure the survival of bigger systems at play. Carper referenced the Rivet Hypothesis by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which compares species in an ecosystem to rivets on an airplane. To fly, a plane depends on all the rivets being in place. There’s no one rivet that holds the whole plane together, but all the rivets combined ensure a smooth flight. Losing “one rivet probably won’t make that much of a difference,” said Carper, “but the more rivets you take, the more unstable the entire plane becomes, and if you remove enough, then you crash.”
At Steamboat Lake, Arington is already seeing some of the larger ecological benefits of her efforts. Around the park, it’s common to find pieces of moth wings on the ground, surefire evidence that a bat made a successful meal out of one of the park’s nightshift pollinators.
Keeping the ecological planes in the air is one of the main benefits CPW’s park managers and pollinator experts hope to achieve. “One nice thing about invertebrates is that even a small scale habitat improvement is impactful,” said Schroeder. Compared to large mammals which require expansive and difficult-to-maintain habitats, insects can get a significant boost from a small garden in a park or a front yard. A bee’s nest, for instance, can rely exclusively on one patch of flowers for its entire lifetime. For butterflies, which are more nomadic than bees, habitat connectivity is important. Residential neighborhoods may not have large fields of flowers, but a decent string of small gardens can give caterpillars reliable patches of host plants, and adults with nectar stops along their migration routes. Just a small series of gardens can significantly reduce the gaps between tracts of habitat.
“It also adds an element of resiliency,” said Schroeder, adding that maintained, well-watered gardens can be an oasis in a landscape affected by drought. If low rainfall results in fewer flowers or low nectar production, gardens can be a relief for insects in need. “We’re able to have such a higher impact with this smaller space,” said Schroeder, “which is very encouraging for the public.”
Join the pollinator community
Noting how habitat connectivity and other benefits of pollinator gardens satisfy the requirements outlined in SB230, Schroeder returns to how gardens nurture the curiosity and wonder of visitors. “Our state parks are the gathering place for people to experience wildlife. It would be amazing for every state park to have a pollinator garden.” While gardens are still in the stage of early planning, Schroeder and her team plan to plant four gardens per year around the state. As gardens arise, we encourage visitors to engage in the many pollinator monitoring efforts CPW is engaged with. For monitoring at Steamboat Lake, download the iNaturalist app and upload your photographs and observations with Steamboat Lake as the location. You can also volunteer as a monitor with Bumble Bee Atlas. And you don’t have to wait for CPW to open a pollinator garden near you — you can start your own! Using your own property or a community space can be a great way to support local pollinators. Find the optimal seed mix for your home or community with the Colorado Seed Tool app. By selecting “Pollinator Habitat” in the Management Goals section, you’ll get a list of plants that will benefit the pollinators, and the ecosystem, of your area.
By: John Anglin, CPW Communications Specialist
