Johnnie LeFaiver took her son to the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park this summer, because the experience of watching wolves there 20 years ago seared into her memory and she wanted Micah to have the same opportunity.
One day, they watched a pack of nine gray wolves feeding on a dead bison, and on another day, two black wolves competing with a grizzly bear for a different carcass. But when they told fellow wolf watchers they were from Colorado, “it unleashed these questions about how things were going with wolf reintroduction here,” LeFavier said, “and there was so much I couldn’t answer.”
That’s because news on Colorado’s wolf front has changed so fast and furiously, she added.
Indeed it has, especially in the last several weeks.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a wolf from the state’s first confirmed pack killed livestock on three ranches in Pitkin County, resulting in Colorado Parks and Wildlife killing the offending yearling. The animal, its parents and littermates had been trapped in Grand County, moved to a sanctuary, and rereleased near the ranches with five wolves from British Columbia in January.
Then, on July 18, CPW confirmed it would kill a second Copper Creek wolf after multiple livestock attacks in the same area — but “the terrain is challenging at best,” spokesperson Luke Perkins said in an email July 31, and staff still haven’t been able to get close to the wolves after multiple attempts. They’re still looking.
And more news broke Tuesday, about CPW’s plans to kill yet another wolf after it preyed on three sheep in Rio Blanco County. This one was uncollared and likely wandered into the state from Wyoming. Wildlife officials haven’t been able to act because a fire is burning in the region.
LaFavier by then had been back home in Boulder County for a while. But even without the most recent developments, in Yellowstone, when she learned “so many passionate wolf people are watching what’s happening with our program,” it made her think more about Colorado’s reintroduction than usual, because at home, “I haven’t really expected to see wolves yet.” But she believes they’re coming.
Plenty of people have referenced the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone when discussing Colorado’s wolf efforts. But that release started 30 years ago. It came from a federal mandate versus Colorado’s voter mandate. And the first wolves to roam Yellowstone in 70 years were “soft released” inside a pen in the park before being freed into the park. It was a big contrast to the way Colorado wolves have been released, on state or private land only, and in a state with 6 million people compared to a combined 3.6 million in the Northern Rockies states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming (and far fewer in 1995).
But on July 30, a biologist involved in the Yellowstone relocation from its inception was at Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder for a National Geographic Explorer talk about his experiences. Doug Smith led the Yellowstone Wolf Project for nearly 30 years. And in the green room before the show, he offered some insights on wolf recovery to The Colorado Sun, based on his decades of research that started when he read about wolves as a nature-loving kid and felt bad about how they were treated.
“It’s going to be messy”
Smith gave another Colorado-based wolf talk in June, in Estes Park, where he said wolves are a call to action to humans to “stop paving over everything” and realize that natural resources are finite and need protection.
At Chautauqua he expanded on this premise, saying Colorado, as “a Western state with a lot of public lands, has a wildlife and wilderness heritage that is worth preserving,” and that wolves “go with” that heritage.
“They make you set aside land. They make you preserve wilderness. They make you protect public lands,” he added. “And they’re also what they call an umbrella species, which means, if you protect wolves, you protect a lot of other things.”
Yet he acknowledged that the ideal of a world with wolves is a hard concept for “bread-and-butter people, like ranchers,” who shoulder the burden of reintroduction, to accept. And he said wolf recovery will continue to cause challenges in areas with a lot of livestock until the wolves “self sort” into different territories.
“Now people try and pick those places, but it’s better when the wolves pick them and settle into them,” he added. Then, “if there’s no conflict, if there is conflict, you’ve got to deal with it. And when you have a toehold of a population, you deal with it first and foremost by nonlethal methods.”
But the early part of all wolf recovery work, including in Colorado, “is just going to be messy,” he said. “It’s bad and it’s uncomfortable and it’s crummy. But what you’re going through is not unexpected.”
Nonlethal control and killing wolves
Much is being made of wildlife agents in Oregon using recording of a scene from “Marriage Story” in which Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver scream at each other to haze wolves away from livestock, but Smith said effective nonlethal deterrents in “the New West” go way beyond that.
In the Old West, the solution to protecting livestock was to kill all the predators, which led to the extirpation of wolves from Colorado in the 1940s. Once that happened, Smith said, “you just turned your livestock loose for the summer and brought them back at the end.” And if you didn’t have all the livestock you had at the beginning, “it was because they fell in a hole. They got hit by lightning. They died from weather.”
But in the New West, including Colorado, “we can’t just kill the predators, because half the population wants wolves,” he said. “So if you’re a rancher living close to them, you’ve got to modify your practices.”
“It’s night-penning, it’s herding, it’s shepherds, it’s guard dogs. It’s radio-activated guard boxes, which in slang are ‘RAG boxes,’” he said. And it’s having more human presence on the range, which CPW and the Colorado Department of Agriculture have been helping ranchers do through the state’s range riding program.
But there comes a point “after you’ve done all that, underlined three times,” where killing wolves should also be on the table, Smith said. “And the issue so far for Colorado has been you don’t have a large enough wolf population that you can sustain that killing. The wolves aren’t expendable. They’re very much needed for population growth and getting through this low-population phase.”
Colorado Parks and Wildlife says Colorado’s wolf reintroduction will be a success when there are at least 150 wolves anywhere in Colorado for two successive years, or a minimum count of at least 200 wolves anywhere, with no temporal requirement.
Of the 25 wolves introduced since December 2023, nine have died, plus the yearling from the Copper Creek pack that preyed on cattle in Pitkin County. The mother of that pack had five pups in 2024 and a new litter this winter. And of four packs CPW recognizes, including the Copper Creek pack and three this year, it has identified six new pups and believes there are others.
But “once you get over a critical mass, you get rid of the bad apples,” Smith said. “Because the behavior spreads and antipathy towards wolves festers in the ranchers. (They say) ‘I gotta blast livestock-killing wolves on my property, but I can’t do anything about it.’” And that leads to scenarios like the one currently playing out in Pitkin County.
Killing wolves for management isn’t fair chase, Smith added, it’s “they need to die.” And in the Northern Rockies, where the wolf population is now 2,000, “if a wolf looks at a cow cross-eyed” it’s dead, he said.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming all have trophy hunting seasons on wolves. And Wyoming has a “predator zone” that covers 85% of the state, where wolves can be killed at any time without a license.
But when wolf reintroduction started in the Northern Rockies, federal officials moved any wolf that killed livestock once, Smith said, and killed it only if it preyed on another domestic animal again.
And whenever there was a wolf meeting in those early days, “it was standing room only, with people out the door on the street, TV monitors inside rooms, people yelling, screaming and giving death threats, the whole nine yards,” he said.
“Now you go to a meeting about wolves in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming, and there’s empty seats.”
Trouble with the claim that “CPW is lying”
A recurring narrative among many opposed to wolf reintroduction is that Gov. Jared Polis and CPW Director Jeff Davis have withheld crucial details regarding the efforts or flat out lied about them.
In some instances the former has been true, but Smith said if those perceptions extend to Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf conservation program manager, or Brenna Cassidy, wolf monitoring and data coordinator, they shouldn’t, because he has worked with both and knows “they’re doing the best they can.”
He pointed this out because in several news articles he’s read, sources “like to grandstand … saying ‘everything CPW says is a lie.’ But another thing that happens is things change, so when you say something on day one, on day 10, 20 and 30, the answer is different. And that’s not lying, right?”
He also said repeatedly quoting ranchers saying, “I don’t mind the wolves. I’m doing everything I can to keep them from killing my livestock. But I got to make a living, and they’re just ruining my life,’ gets lots of attention, but it doesn’t help either.”
“The media has literary license. It can do whatever it wants,” he added. “But I go back to what I said at the outset. What we’re living in is the human takeover of the planet. The reason people want to live in Colorado is because of the great outdoors, because of the mountains, because of the space. Wolves are part and parcel with that, and they will help you protect it.
“So to say I want it in a kind of controlled, picture-book way is not what wilderness is really about. It’s about blood and guts and real life. And I think it would be valuable for Colorado people to hear that things are going to go wrong, and things are going to be bad. But in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, wolves are hardly an issue anymore.”