Colorado’s wolf restoration program is struggling amid federal roadblocks over where the state can source new wolves for reintroduction and the death of a 10th translocated wolf.
The latest wolf fatality, announced Friday, puts the survival rate for the reintroduced wolves at 60%. That’s well below the anticipated survival rate of 70% to 85% for the early years of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program, according to the Colorado Wolf Management Plan. CPW released 10 wolves in December 2023 and another 15 in January 2025.
Luke Perkins, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesperson, said the agency is “committed to fulfilling the will of Colorado voters in restoring a sustainable wolf population” and is evaluating all options to support wolf releases scheduled for this winter. Their most recent request is to the state of Washington, which will discuss the matter at the Washington Fish and Wildlife commission’s meeting Nov. 15.
But an order by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director has limited those options.
The state signed a contract Oct. 3 with British Columbia to pay its government up to $400,000 for 10 to 15 wolves to bring to Colorado in December and January. But a week later, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Brian Nesvik said special permitting in the Endangered Species Act allowing Colorado to reintroduce wolves contained rules CPW violated.
Colorado wolves must come from northern Rockies states, Nesvik told Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis in a letter sent Oct. 10. But most of those states — including Idaho, Montana and Wyoming — have said they do not want to be part of Colorado’s reintroduction project.
Colorado sourced wolves for its first releases in December 2023 from Oregon, unleashing a controversy when it was discovered that two had come from a pack blamed for predation.
Colorado’s wolf management plan says wolves with a history of chronic depredation should be excluded as a source population. But CPW spokesperson Travis Duncan said at the time that any wolves that have been near livestock will have some history of depredation, including all packs in Oregon, but that didn’t mean the two in question had a history of chronic depredation.
“If a pack has infrequent depredation events, they should not be excluded as a source population, per the (Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management) plan,” he said.
Eight months later, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Nation in Washington rescinded its offer to give Colorado wolves, stating “necessary and meaningful consultation was not completed with the potentially impacted tribes” in Colorado “when the state created and implemented its wolf reintroduction plan.”
Last year, Gov. Jared Polis blamed ranchers for the high cost of wolf reintroduction, which has cost taxpayers around $8 million since Proposition 114 was passed in 2020. He said the state wouldn’t have had to go to British Columbia if ranchers hadn’t said, “don’t get them from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho.” But statements from Wyoming and Idaho officials suggested that wasn’t true, which drove a wedge between the governor and ranchers deeper.
CPW said one of the reasons it sourced wolves from British Columbia last year was to obtain animals with no prior interaction with livestock, thereby minimizing the potential for wolf-cattle conflict in Colorado. Rob Edward, president of Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, said in the 11 months since their arrival, the British Columbia wolves have killed no livestock his group is aware of, “beyond wolf 2505, that was killed in Wyoming for supposedly preying on sheep.” So the block on wolves from Canada has left many scratching their heads and surmising that it was purely political.
The 10(j) rule, approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in November of 2023, declared Colorado wolves an experimental population and authorized certain management techniques, including lethal removal.
Tom Delehanty, an attorney with Earthjustice, says the 10(j) rule at the heart of Nesvik’s block has nothing to do with where CPW can source wolves.
Rather, “it is purely about post-release wolf management” in that “it replaces normal Endangered Species Act protections with customized protections to provide greater regulatory flexibility and discretion in managing the reintroduced species to encourage recovery in collaboration with partners, especially private landowners,” he said.
The rule also applies only to gray wolves found in the wild within the boundary of the Colorado nonessential experimental population area (as seen on page 23 of the 10(j) rule language), he added. And because it “simply changes wolves’ legal status in Colorado, it does not, by its nature, apply to capture activities elsewhere.”
Mike Phillips was heavily involved with the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction in the 1990s and has advised CPW on the Colorado program. He said the block by Nesvik makes no sense if his mandate as Fish and Wildlife director is to advance Colorado’s wolf recovery under the Endangered Species Act.
“It doesn’t say ‘proceed with recovery if you want to,’” Phillips said. “It says, clearly, ‘it’s mandatory.’ So if the gray wolf is listed as endangered in Colorado, the Fish and Wildlife Service is on the hook for advanced recovery.”
What’s more, “if Colorado is doing all of the heavy lifting” by sourcing “top-shelf wolves” from British Columbia, he said, “why in the world wouldn’t the federal government just continue to say, ‘oh gee, this is really good. We’ve got to get this done until we’re told we don’t have to get this done, and we should continue to go out of our way to help Colorado put paws on the ground’ instead of standing in their way?”
And he said he believes the Fish and Wildlife Service is putting up roadblocks because “they fell into a political trap. You could only conclude the director isn’t really worried about wolf recovery, because if he was, he’d be going out of his way to take the path of least resistance, which is to enable Colorado to put in place a population that could count against federal recovery criteria sooner rather than later.”
Many wolf advocates worry reintroduction opponents will continue to create reasons to pause the state’s effort until CPW meets criteria for successful coexistence the agency says it’s already fulfilling.
The criteria were detailed in a petition submitted to the Parks and Wildlife commission last November by 26 ranching and rural groups. The commission rejected it in January because the state was already working on these things.
Phillips said the decree laid down by the Fish and Wildlife Service “is a clear example they’ve been captured by the antiwolf crowd that is hoping for enough of a delay that the next administration in Colorado won’t be so sympathetic to gray wolves, and, more importantly, so sympathetic to the will of Colorado voters.”
Coloradans will vote on a new governor in 2026. Greg Lopez, who served as a U.S. Representative for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District for six months in 2024, is running. He sent a letter to Nesvik alerting him to the alleged violations of the 10 (j) rule.
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Exceptions for the capture of wolves may be granted by the federal government, as Phillips claimed, but Lopez said Colorado never filed an amended permit to include capturing wolves in Canada in the Federal Register. CPW has said it coordinated with USFWS throughout the gray wolf reintroduction effort and has complied with all applicable federal and state laws.
Perkins, the CPW spokesperson, told The Colorado Sun that pausing reintroduction now “would introduce long-term costs and complications that far outweigh any short-term logistical or political benefit. A consistent, science-based release schedule as outlined in the Wolf Restoration and Management Plan is not only a commitment to ecological success, but to public transparency, stakeholder confidence, and long-term conflict reduction.”
“Delaying wolf releases, even by a single year, poses significant ecological, genetic and social risks,” he added. “This would also be a divergence from the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan which calls for the translocation of 10 to 15 wolves every year for three to five years with a goal of translocating 30 to 50 wolves.”