Just a few hours after U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists confirmed that one of the 10 gray wolves transplanted to Colorado in December was found dead in Larimer County, the state’s top wildlife official told ranchers he will not kill a wolf blamed for the death of four cows in Grand County because it is likely the mate to a wolf that appears to be denning.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis on Tuesday said GPS points from the female wolf’s collar indicate that she is likely in a den. In early April, GPS points stopped uploading and very recently those points began to upload again.
“The biological interpretation of this is that she was likely in a den during the time when connectivity with the collar was interrupted, which aligns with the expected timing of wolf reproduction,” Davis wrote to the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association after they sent letters to Gov. Jared Polis and the Parks and Wildlife commissioners on April 18 and April 22 demanding CPW kill the wolves before they kill more cattle.
If the pieces add up, this will be the first offspring from wolves reintroduced to Colorado. CPW is working to confirm the den.
In June 2021, a state biologist and a district wildlife officer observed a litter of pups in Jackson County. They were the first gray wolf pups recorded since the species was extirpated in Colorado 80 years before.
Their parents included a collared female that migrated from the Snake River pack in Wyoming in 2019 and a male that Colorado wildlife officials darted and outfitted with a tracking collar in February 2021. As has occurred with the Grand County wolves, biologists observed that April that the female had retreated to a den.
When the first five wolves captured from packs in Oregon were released in southwestern Grand County in December, Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists gave detailed information about the age, sex and color of each animal. The group included two yearling females that they said may have been too young to breed.
A second group was released in secret a few days later on state-owned land in Summit and Grand counties.
In total, six yearling females were released.
The wolf found dead in Larimer County appears to have died from natural causes, though a necropsy to determine the cause of its death is being conducted, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Tuesday. The agency did not say what gender the animal was.
Killing wolves is “irresponsible management”
In his letter to the stockgrowers, Davis was adamant about not killing the male wolf, which is one of two that have been killing cattle in Grand County.
Killing the male would be at odds with the voter-directed goals of wolf reintroduction. The state’s detailed plan suggests the species will be considered recovered when there are about 200 wolves in 25 packs across Colorado.
“Removing the male breeder at this point would be irresponsible management and potentially cause the den to fail, possibly resulting in the death of the presumed pups,” he wrote. “This is not a desirable result and I am therefore not going to take action at this time to lethally remove this animal.”
Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke declined to comment on the letter late Tuesday evening, saying he was “still thinking about it.” But earlier in the day he and the other commissioners sent their own letter to Gov. Polis saying they “stand united” with the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association in requesting the offending wolves be killed.
Davis cleared up one additional issue in his letter, that of the stockgrowers’ insisting that the reintroduced wolves came from depredating packs in Oregon.
“While the wolves that were selected for reintroduction may have come from packs that were historically chronically depredating packs, management action was taken in Oregon and in the months leading up to capture prior to translocation to Colorado, the packs were not implicated in depredation,” he said. “To continue to state that we brought known problem wolves into the state is a falsehood. Where wolves and livestock share the landscape, there will be conflict. We will hold tight to the recommendations of the Technical Working Group and what is stated in our plan that we will not bring currently chronically depredating wolves into the state.”
Davis acknowledged the challenges for the Middle Park stockgrowers but said the agency would not be killing any wolves in the near future. He cited rules in the nearly 300-page Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan that dictate CPW must “evaluate the use of lethal control on a context-specific basis.”
Determining factors include the ability to target depredating wolves, the efficiency and effectiveness of conflict minimization, financial cost, wolf reproductive and recruitment success, wolf population size and listing status, impacts to livestock owners, and social/stakeholder interests when considering lethal take options.
As with all wolf management practices, he wrote, “lethal control will only be implemented when in compliance with all state and federal laws and regulations.”
The wolf restoration plan was developed over two years of meetings held statewide. The plan calls for phased management that can be adjusted as wolf populations grow in the state. In the restoration process, CPW also was granted the designation of an experimental population under section 10(j) of the federal Endangered Species Act to provide increased flexibility to manage wolves once they were reintroduced to Colorado, including killing wolves that prey on livestock. Gray wolves are considered endangered in 44 states.
But Davis said the wolf population in Colorado is currently “far below any restoration goal,” and that CPW has “the legal duty to establish a self-sustaining population of wolves while minimizing conflict risk.”
“As the wolf population in Colorado grows, and as we get to points where we enter different management phases, the approach to lethal removals will likely become more liberal,” he added.
The Middle Park Stockgrowers Association and the North Park Stockgrowers Association in their letters earlier this week compared CPW’s wolf management practices to those of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, where Davis worked for 23 years before joining CPW in March of 2023. The ranchers said by Washington’s definition, “chronic depredation is demonstrably occurring in Grand County.”
Colorado’s plan does not include a definition of chronic depredation.
Davis said that while other states have quantitative metrics to define chronic depredation, “it is important to understand that simply meeting that metric does not necessarily initiate lethal removal.”
“An evaluation of the circumstances, including an evaluation of the status of the entire wolf population, informs decisions on wolf management,” he added. “As you are aware, Colorado’s Wolf Restoration and Management Plan does not have a quantitative definition of what constitutes chronic depredation. This was intentional, and results directly from the recommendations of the Stakeholder Advisory Group. The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission will be considering whether it is advisable to modify the plan to quantitatively define chronic depredation, and if so what that definition should be, at the commission meetings this summer.”