A new wave of upgrades at City Park’s Duck Lake is reinvigorating the oft-troubled, 5-acre site, including water filtration to fight rampant summer algae, new nesting structures to combat the bird poop that is weakening trees, and a long-overdue public art project that will transform the lake’s northeast border.
“Since the pandemic, it’s been rediscovered,” said Georgia Garnsey, president of City Park Friends and Neighbors, a registered neighborhood organization. “Especially lately, with the two [bald] eagles hunting there, since they don’t usually appear in pairs. It’s a birder’s paradise.”
Duck Lake hosts more than just its namesake waterfowl, with cormorants, geese, herons, egrets and migrating birds from across North America, according to City Park Alliance. It’s distinct from City Park’s 24-acre Ferril Lake, and it borders the Denver Zoo (now called the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance).
As such, it requires special attention, boosters said.
Problems with the knotty, tangled trees, for example, are being directly addressed as dying cottonwoods and chokecherries are removed and more climate-adjusted types are replanted, following years of bird-poop-covered blight. Those were the only sort of trees available to landscapers when Duck Lake was first built in 1891, as an overflow pond for Ferril Lake. Duck Lake was also the site of the park’s first pavilion, according to historical records.
Big changes at Duck Lake actually started about five years ago, said Ian Schillinger-Brokaw, Denver Parks and Recreation’s associate urban ecology planner. But some of them are just now becoming visible to park users, following a burst of work in late 2024.
“Water quality has improved substantially in the past five years with the efforts of [Denver Parks & Recreation] and the Denver Department of Public Health & Environment,” Schillinger-Brokaw wrote via email. “They reduced algae and vegetation issues and we have not had an outbreak of avian botulism at Duck Lake during that time.”
While improvements were led and funded by Denver Parks & Recreation, which manages the self-contained lake, neighborhood groups have gone all-in on the process. They also benefit from the shoreline restoration and new aeration system, the forthcoming “floating wetlands” experiment, invasive-plant removal, revegetation efforts, tree bracing, and “habitat structure installation,” according to Denver Parks & Recreation.
“The trees there are dying,” said Garnsey, who has lived in the same Park Hill home for 50 years. “But there are new kinds of concrete bird stands that would be the height of a tree — and they’re not falling down during storms because they’re weakened by poop.”
Duck Lake is the state’s fourth-largest rookery, or elevated breeding ground for birds, according to Denver Parks & Recreation. That little-known fact has led to collaboration with the Denver Field Ornithologists, with “field trip” group tours and daily visits from wildlife photographers.
The area has been in contention at times, Garnsey said, as the Denver Zoo canceled a much-ballyhooed gasification project in 2015 that would have converted elephant dung into electricity. The zoo expanded its footprint closer to Duck Lake and constructed new buildings for the project, investing $3.7 million into the ultimately failed effort.
After the project was abandoned, the newly constructed buildings quickly became storage eyesores, Garnsey said, with few efforts to hide them from Duck Lake visitors.
Despite the ceded land, the zoo’s footprint isn’t solely that nonprofit organization’s, according to Jake Kubié, director of communications at the zoo.
“(It’s) determined by Denver Parks & Recreation and the community. We do not have the ability to claim or return property independently,” he said. “We believe the development along Duck Lake was done within our historic boundary.”
Garnsey hopes a new mural and installation by artist John Pugh, which has been about eight years in the making and will depict more than 30 animals, will help soften the view.
“This is a challenging but adventurous installation,” Pugh wrote on Instagram in October. “We made a drawbridge to cross the little habitat creek over to the mural’s trailhead, and used a machete to blaze a passageway. Our neighbor in the center gap is a sweet teenage elephant (real) named Baylor. It’s a jungle out here.”
The ancient grotto-style project is still very much in process, Pugh added. But with 50 or so volunteers helping plant native vegetation as part of the Adopt a Flower program, and assistance from local youth groups to pilot the wetlands project, work around the lake is coming along quickly.
“It’s been a fight to preserve some areas of City Park (in general),” said Garnsey, whose husband Woody represents Save Open Space Denver. That group for years pushed for a city takeover of Park Hill Golf Course, eventually leading to an unprecedented land-swap deal that was brokered by Denver Mayor Michael Johnston, and announced on Jan. 15. It will reopen the disused park by summer 2025, and add momentum to broader strides toward park-system conservation, Georgia Garnsey said.
“We had to fight to keep the City Park Pavilion open for public use, and we had to fight to keep the big playground that’s now at Paco Sanchez Park out of City Park,” she said. “But with Nature Play and other projects from Denver Museum of Nature & Science (on the park’s eastern end), we’re seeing ways to preserve its beauty, keep it wild, and open it up for more visitors.”