Colorado’s controversial efforts to reintroduce gray wolves hit another major stumbling block this week when state wildlife officials informed the public they would be relocating a pack of wolves that have been killing livestock in Grand County.
In the surprise announcement made around 8 p.m. Tuesday, officials with Colorado Parks and Wildlife said they had begun an operation to capture and relocate the Copper Creek pack, which became the state’s first named wolf pack after two of the wolves that were introduced from Oregon over the winter formed a mating pair and the female gave birth to three pups in this spring. The announcement comes after the agency denied repeated requests from area ranchers to lethally remove the depredating wolves, and it was couched with a carefully-worded explanation that this is not how CPW plans to handle these types of conflicts in the future.
“Our options in this case were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward,” CPW Director Jeff Davis said Tuesday. “The ultimate goal of the operation is to relocate the pack to another location while we assess our best options for them to continue to contribute to the successful restoration of wolves in Colorado.”
It’s unclear how the agency plans to capture the wolves, which are fitted with tracking collars, or how much the operation could cost. (Wildlife managers typically capture wolves during the winter because they’re easier to track in the snow.) It’s also unclear if the wolves will be relocated outside the state or taken to a different area in Colorado. A CPW spokesperson tells Outdoor Life that the agency will “provide more information and details at the conclusion of the operation,” but officials have so far been unwilling to answer additional questions about the operation.
This speaks to the extremely fine line that CPW is now walking as wildlife managers work to fulfill a mandate handed down by a slim majority of Colorado voters while trying to meet the needs of Coloradans whose livelihoods are being affected by the wolves.
The agency has both the authority and the ability to provide ranchers with chronic depredation permits for wolves that harass and kill livestock. The 10 gray wolves brought over from Oregon were designated as an experimental population from the beginning, which opened the door to lethal removal. And in June, after confirming double-digit livestock depredations by gray wolves in Grand and Jackson Counties, CPW established new regulations allowing for the lethal take of depredating wolves under certain conditions.
Those conditions seem to have been met. SkyHi News reports that the Copper Creek pack has been responsible for the majority of livestock depredations that have occurred statewide since reintroduction began. (A CPW spokesperson did not confirm or deny this fact.) But by killing the only known wolves that have successfully reproduced since reintroduction, the agency would make it that much harder to achieve its long-term goal of establishing a self-sustaining population of gray wolves in the state.
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This goal has already been complicated by the death (likely due to a mountain lion) of one of the 10 reintroduced wolves in April, and by the Colville Tribe’s decision in June to rescind its offer to provide CPW with its next batch of gray wolves. Those wolves were supposed to be released later this winter, but CPW still hadn’t found a new source by the time officials announced their decision to relocate the Copper Creek pack.
“A Troubling Trend”
CPW confirmed multiple livestock depredations by the two adult wolves in the Copper Creek pack between April and the end of July. In a Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting on Friday, CPW’s director of policy Reid DeWalt reportedly told commissioners that the adult pair have caused “the main issues in depredation” among all the wolves that were relocated there from Oregon.
The first depredation occurred on a Grand County ranch in early April. Later that month, the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association wrote a letter to the CPW and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking for the wolves responsible to be lethally removed. That request was denied. CPW explained in an April letter that the agency suspected wolves were denning and that “removing the male breeder at this point would be irresponsible management and [would] potentially cause the den to fail.”
The Copper Creek pack has been linked to the deaths of at least three cows and one sheep since then, according reporting by the Colorado Sun. The agency also confirmed that an additional eight sheep were killed by wolves in the county as part of a July 28 incident that involved 15 sheep in all. On July 31, however, CPW denied another request from the MPSA for a chronic depredation permit that would have allowed ranchers to kill the adult wolves in the Copper Creek Pack.
“CPW’s decision to deny the permit — despite documented and increasingly common depredations — highlights a troubling trend of prioritizing wolves over the legitimate needs and rights of livestock producers,” reads an Aug. 14 letter sent to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and CPW director Jeff Davis by the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. “Critically, when CPW issued its permit denial, CPW knew that at least eight sheep had been killed in a depredation event. This brings Colorado’s total loss of livestock over the first eight months of this reintroduction program to 24 confirmed deaths.”
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In the same letter, the Cattleman’s Association puts that number in context by comparing it with the number of wolf depredations that took place in Montana throughout 2023. There are an estimated 1,096 gray wolves in the state, according to the most recent estimate from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
“Montana has 70 [times] the number of wolves as Colorado and had just eight more livestock loses in all of 2023 than Colorado has confirmed in the first seven months of 2024,” the letter reads. “By refusing to manage problem wolves, CPW has allowed livestock depredations to continue unchecked, while at the same time fostering a pack of depredating wolves. Pups from these problem wolves will be trained to ‘hunt’ and survive off livestock.”
Again, it’s unclear at this point where the Copper Creek pack will be relocated. But if they are to remain free-ranging wolves in the state, or anywhere else in the West, there’s a strong likelihood they will encounter other livestock operations.
