Colorado Parks and Wildlife is learning in the first year of reintroduction that there’s little winning with wolves.
The agency’s latest plan to trap and move a Grand County pack that has been killing livestock riled wildlife groups, who roundly blasted the relocation plan as “being driven by politics … not rooted in science-based management” and a potential “death sentence” for the Copper Creek pack’s three pups.
The pack was named in June after CPW saw that two adults captured in Oregon and released in Colorado last year had produced offspring, the first of the reintroduced wolves. It is unclear if CPW plans to trap and relocate the pups.
Scientists who trapped problem wolves in Montana and relocated them to a different part of the state agree that the process rarely ends well for young wolves that rely on their parents and do not know how to hunt.
A study of wolf translocations to reduce livestock conflicts in Montana published by wildlife scientists at the University of Montana and biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that more relocated wolves died and survivors often killed livestock in their new locations. Of the 88 translocated wolves in the 2005 study, 58 died after the trapping and moving, which is a lower survival rate than wolves that were native to Montana.
Carter Niemeyer is a wildlife biologist who contributed to the 2005 study. Niemeyer worked with wolves for decades, helping capture wolves in Canada and reintroduce them to Montana and Idaho in the 1980s and 1990s. He also served on Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Technical Working Group as the agency crafted its wolf management plan in 2022. In the late 1980s, he trapped and relocated dozens of problematic wolves around Glacier National Park in Montana.
“The first several packs we recolonized in the middle of Montana, we ended up catching them and relocating them and it did not go well,” he said. “They were all done as politically expedient relocations … and what we learned was that the adults did not stay together and pups were abandoned and left to die.”
The Colorado wolf management plan – created with that technical advisory group – mentions relocation of wolves that are killing livestock but does not advocate for the option. Trapping and moving wolves to a new location, the Colorado plan says, “has little technical merit.”
Niemeyer said the end of summer is a difficult time for trapping wolves – using either foothold traps that do not injure the wolves or helicopters, which CPW officials used to capture wolves in Oregon last year – because vegetation is so dense and finding the animals is a challenge.
He said after “years of trial and error” in Montana relocations in the early 1990s, wildlife biologists found that acclimation pens helped increase survival rates. Those pens – “incarcerating” relocated wolves together as a pack for “several weeks” in the new locations, Niemeyer said – “is the only way you can do a successful relocation for them this time of year.”
“Even under those situations, it did not always work out well,” he said, noting that some wolves who spent weeks in acclimatization pens died or continued feeding on livestock.
Wolves that kill livestock in one area will likely kill livestock in their new region, Niemeyer said.
“It’s hard to break them of that behavior,” he said. “I would urge Colorado state folks to consider the political fallout of what they do where you release them next.”
There are many lessons that Colorado could learn from Montana, Niemeyer said. The state has not captured and relocated livestock-killing wolves at all since the poor success of the strategy in the 1990s.
Montana has seen a general decline in wolves killing livestock since 2009. The number of cattle, sheep, guard dogs, horses and goats killed by wolves has ranged from 18 in 2014 to 133 in 2020. Since 2013, the Montana Livestock Loss Board has paid ranchers $2.2 million to pay for 2,722 cattle, sheep, guard dogs, horses and goats killed by wolves, grizzlies and mountain lions.
The state has managed a relatively steady population between 1,087 and 1,260 wolves since 2011 with hunting and trapping seasons that average an annual harvest of about 256 wolves.
A new wolf management plan in Montana – now under review in draft form – suggests that Montana will not make any major shifts unless the state’s population of the predators drops below 450.
Dallas May, a longtime rancher who serves as the chairman of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, agrees that Colorado, like Montana, should learn from its mistakes. May said wolves relocated to Colorado last year from Oregon “were put in an untenable situation.”
The wolves in Grand County “are only doing what they were created to do and that is survive,” May said. “They were placed in the situation in the dead of winter with very little if any food source. We need to learn from the mistakes that have been made and that is one of them.”
CPW plans to release as many as 15 more wolves into Colorado’s Western Slope between December 2024 and March 2025 but has not identified a source for the wolves. The agency had reached an agreement to source wolves from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington state, but the tribe nixed the deal over the Colorado Southern Ute Indian Tribe’s concerns over wolf impacts to livestock and wildlife.
Colorado began reintroducing wolves west of the Continental Divide in December as directed by Proposition 114. The ballot measure was passed mainly by urban voters in November 2020.
Colorado Sun reporter Tracy Ross contributed to this report.
