A second wave of wolves released in Colorado this winter will hail from Canada.
Colorado Parks and and Wildlife on Friday announced it had reached a deal with the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship to source as many as 15 wolves for reintroduction in Colorado from December to March next year.
“Their willingness and ability to work with another jurisdiction to support our conservation priorities, as they have in past translocation efforts, demonstrates their long-shared commitment to seeing this species succeed,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis said of the B.C. ministry in an emailed statement.
The Colorado plan for reintroducing gray wolves into the Western Slope calls for releasing as many as 15 wolves a year for three to five years. Last year, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released 10 wolves captured in Oregon on state land in Grand and Summit counties. Mostly urban voters along the Front Range narrowly passed the wolf reintroduction plan in November 2020. Colorado Parks and Wildlife spent three years crafting a reintroduction plan.
Three of those 10 Oregon wolves have died, including an adult male that was part of a six-wolf Grand County pack — two adults and four pups — relocated by state wildlife officials after killing livestock. On Monday, a tracking collar on a different male wolf from Oregon sent a “mortality signal.” A mountain lion is suspected of killing another relocated wolf in Larimer County in May.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists will begin working with their British Columbia colleagues this winter to capture and transport wolves. The wolves, like those captured last year in Oregon, will be tested and treated for disease, collared and released in Colorado soon after they arrive in the state. Injured wolves or wolves involved in livestock depredation will not be relocated to Colorado, officials said in a statement.
Eric Odell, the wolf conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in a statement that state wildlife managers “learned a great deal” from the capture and transport of the Oregon wolves last year and his team “will apply those lessons this year.”
“Gray wolves from the Canadian Rockies were used for reintroduction in Idaho and Yellowstone,” Odell said. “There are no biological differences between wolves in British Columbia and the wolves released in Colorado last year, and the new source population will provide additional genetic diversity to our state’s small but growing wolf population.”
In June, a Native American tribe in Washington rescinded its offer to provide Colorado with 15 wolves, saying the state has not addressed concerns raised by the Southern Ute Tribe involving wolf reintroduction.
Wolf advocates cheered the decision to use Canadian wolves for the reintroduction effort.
“With more paws on the ground this winter, we’ll be closer to reestablishing a flourishing population of wolves, righting the historical wrong of their extermination from our state, and fulfilling the will of the voters who supported this restoration,” Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an email.