Touch Grass: Tarantula Migration 2024
For the drone footage of this location, scroll to the bottom of the page! For more photos and videos, check out our Instagram and YouTube, both @chinookdroneco.
For most of my life, I’ve been wanting to make the trek to southern Colorado for the tarantula migration that happens every fall. But a combination of several factors - the short peak of the migration, living on the opposite end of the state, and the lack of other destinations in the surrounding area - have made it difficult to prioritize. For background, I also spend quite a bit of time on the eastern Colorado plains for work during the summer months, so by the time October rolls around, I’m ready to head for the hills and see some new scenery.
But this year, a friend invited me to go tarantula spotting and it was just short enough notice for me to leap without overthinking. And man oh man, I’m so glad I did!
the migration
Every year in the state of Colorado, from September to October, tarantulas pop out of their burrows to navigate the high desert in search of a mate. It’s been on my Colorado bucket list for a long time and this year all the stars aligned to make the trip happen.
While typically this event is referred to as a “migration,” it’s actually a mating ritual. There is no Point A to Point B; the males simply wander around their home burrow in search of a female burrow. Although their numbers used to be far greater, you can still have great success seeing dozens of tarantulas scampering across the landscape.
The males are the only ones participating in the walkabout and can travel up to a mile searching for a mate. Once he thinks he’s found a good match, the male will tap his pedipalps at the mouth of the female’s burrow and wait for her to emerge. Regardless of his success, it’s a risky move that could be the last thing he ever does. The female will judge his suitability as a mate and may either see the male as an easy meal or elect to mate with him (and perhaps consume him shortly after). For the males that are able to make a quick getaway, they will likely fall victim to tarantula hawk wasps, coyotes, a cold fall night, or other predators. Few males survive more than one breeding season, while the females can live for decades producing about 1,500 eggs each year.
[Side Note: if you haven’t heard of tarantula hawks, you should really give them a Google. Few things in nature have made my jaw drop in the way it did when I first saw one of those creatures with my own two eyes. Equally amazing and terrifying.]
You can read more about the tarantulas in this interview with an entomologist from Colorado State University.
For tarantula spotting, we got to the Timpas Creek trailhead in the Comanche National Grassland about an hour before sunset (we were told this is the best time to see them). After walking around the trail for a bit, I put the drone in the air to get some shots of the sunset and the shortgrass prairie around us. As the sky started to get a little dimmer without a single tarantula sighting, we decided to switch gears and cover more ground in the car. We took off on a backroad near the trailhead, and that was just the trick! We quickly saw a tarantula crossing the road, then another, and another! By the end of the night we’d seen about a dozen and on the way back to town saw a couple dozen more.
I think sometimes when people hear the term “migration” they picture hundreds or even thousands of tarantulas scittering by, but the reality is a much more intimate experience. If you’re respectful of the spiders, you can get up really close and embody your inner Steve Irwin. I’m not sure I’d get as close if they moved across the landscape in a large mob, so I found the experience to be really rewarding. If you mitigate your expectations before going out, I think you can appreciate what a wonderful thing it is to observe.
The city of La Junta has leaned into the weird and starting in 2022, has hosted the annual Tarantula Fest. They offer tours, vendors, contests, a parade, a showing of Arachnophobia, and lots of other events. I’ve heard great things about it already and I’m certain over the next couple years it’s going to have quite a draw. I had to be back up in Boulder the next day for another event and unfortunately couldn’t stay for the festivities, but I’m already planning on going back for next year! Check out the city of La Junta’s website here to get more info!
the location
I’ve always been fascinated with the “in-between” zones of life. Wedged between more conventionally desirable locations, they are often driven through without stopping and even more often flown over. They are desolate and tough to live in and because of this few people give them a chance. But for those that do live here, they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. There’s an often quoted line in these parts:
“Anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.”
The Comanche National Grassland falls into this category. It really takes a character to love this shortgrass prairie for what it is. It’s nestled in the transition zone of the more agrarian northeastern Colorado and the dry, arid desert of New Mexico. It’s beautiful because of its vastness and potential.
This particular part of the state holds so much of the history of the Old West - it’s enough to make your head spin. In the 1930’s, this area was consumed with the struggle of the Dust Bowl, a time that made a dry, tough place to live even drier and even tougher. The trailhead we stopped at near Timpas Creek was previously an important watering hole for stage coaches traveling from east of the Missouri River along the Santa Fe Trail. Prior to that, this trail existed amongst a network of trails connecting various indigenous tribes.
In the 1800s, this area was home to Spanish settlers moving north. Southeast of Timpas, the remains of these settlements and the Dolores Mission can be found. In Picture Canyon (nearly at the Oklahoma border), there are petroglyphs, cave dwellings, tipi rings, and stone tools suggesting this area has been inhabited near continuously for thousands of years. Go back even further in time, and travel just slightly south of the Dolores Mission to Picketwire Canyon and you can see the largest set of dinosaur footprints in North America.
And all this doesn’t even begin to touch on the ecosystems, plants, and animals that are found nowhere else in the state of Colorado. For anyone interested in the history of the plains, this is truly a one-stop shop. It’s rare to find an area so untouched that you can feel out of place in time by standing in it. But if you do take the time to stop, you can almost imagine what it was like to live in another era of Colorado history. The wide open spaces are enough to make you feel like a tiny speck in a big universe in the best way possible.
the flight
Flying in Colorado is often tricky due to the large amount of military training space, national park and wildlife areas, and local drone laws that limit flights. This is particularly true in southern Colorado which has a high presence of air or space force bases and training areas. Thankfully, the location we found was just north of the Pinon Canyon Military Operations Area (MOA), which left us in Class Golf airspace. Regardless of the airspace designation, flying over a national park, monument, historic site, wilderness area, or wild/scenic river is prohibited. National forests and grasslands, however, do allow drones.
In the map to the right, you can see a tiny town called Timpas near the center of the map along the railroad, which was the site of our flight. Because the trailhead is located on the Comanche National Grassland, it was perfectly legal to fly.
The tarantulas don’t emerge until very late in the day, just as the sun is going down, which made for some very interesting lighting challenges that also resulted in some really beautiful footage. It also helps that this area is in a high desert, arid landscape, which really made the greenery and waterways pop.
My ND filters still hadn’t come in the mail at the time of this flight so adjusting for the lighting was purely flight angles and a small amount of post-flight editing. Overall, I think the changes in lighting reflect how it felt on the day. The bright beautiful sun against the lush riverbeds is such an incredible contrast with the mostly monotone shortgrass prairie. But I love how even if you look closely within the “monotones” there’s a depth of color that varies between soil and foliage types.
the footage
Here’s a quick compilation of the footage captured on this trip! Enjoy!
