The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to know how Colorado Parks and Wildlife is implementing the rule that allowed them to bring wolves to Colorado, and this time they’re asking the public for answers.
Their request for information was published in the Federal Register Monday and has a June 5 deadline for public comment.
The notice arises out of the amount of money Colorado has paid ranchers for livestock deaths and associated losses by wolves, which has vastly exceeded the funds currently available under the state’s existing livestock compensation scheme in the 10(j) rule that allowed CPW to reintroduce wolves as a nonessential experimental population under the Endangered Species Act in 2023.
That rule gave the agency management flexibility including the legal, purposeful, and nonlethal deterring of wolves from livestock conflicts, and in some cases lethal action, which would be illegal for a strictly endangered species.
Since voter-mandated wolf reintroduction began in 2023, Colorado has paid ranchers $1.3 million in compensation claims. That includes more than $700,000 approved for claims made in 2025 and around $600,000 to 13 ranchers in the 2024-25 fiscal year.
Legislators just finished drafting the 2026 state budget with cuts to things like Medicaid, the Behavioral Health Administration and the Office of Sustainability to make up for a $1.5 billion shortfall. And CPW’s Wolf Depredation Compensation Fund has faced intense scrutiny because it receives about $350,000 annually from the state’s general fund and money from other sources unrelated to hunting and fishing license fees, including the Species Conservation Trust Fund and Colorado Nongame Conservation and Wildlife Restoration Cash Funds.
But Fish and Wildlife’s notice also mentions a memorandum of agreement the agency signed with CPW in order to “facilitate and enable active participation in wolf conservation and management by CPW personnel.”
Among the objectives CPW committed to were sharing information about reintroduction with partners and stakeholders including the public in a “timely … appropriate and necessary” manner, and fostering “transparent and effective communications regarding the goals and commitments under the MOA,’” according to the notice.
Brian Nesvik, Fish and Wildlife Service director, has called attention to this MOA before, first, when he sent CPW letter barring them from sourcing wolves they’d already agreed to get from British Columbia over claims of violations that proved to be untrue, and then when he demanded the CPW provide a full accounting of every wolf management action they had taken since the program began within 30 days of receipt of his letter or federal government would terminate the agreement that allows Colorado to manage its own wolves.
Another attempt to shut down reintroduction
Jim Pattiz, a conservationist, filmmaker and co-founder of the independent public lands reporting Substack More than Just Parks, says the new notice is Nesvik’s latest attempt to shut down Colorado’s wolf program. He even goes so far as to say Nesvik is using the Endangered Species Act as a “trap” to get the job done.
“To understand what’s happening here, you need to understand the legal mechanism they’re exploiting,” he wrote on the More than Just Parks website. Under the MOA CPW does not take ownership or authority over wolf reintroduction, rather it’s loaned to them, subject to conditions, he continued. “And now Nesvik is claiming Colorado violated those conditions — giving him the pretext to revoke the loan and seize control.”
And while the 10(j) framework was designed to help reintroduction succeed, “Nesvik is using conditions that were meant to facilitate wolf recovery as tripwires to justify killing it,” Pattiz wrote. “This RFI is how they build the administrative record to pull the trigger. Read the questions FWS is asking. Every single one is framed around livestock conflict.”
Tom Delehanty, an attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit dedicated to litigating environmental issues, only “partly agrees” with Pattiz’ assessment, however.
“I certainly agree that the RFI seems intended to build a record of grievances as pretext, by a bad faith actor (Mr. Nesvik), for interfering with Colorado’s management of wolves,” he wrote The Sun in an email.
“However, a critical piece that this story misses is the power of state law: the ESA explicitly allows state law to impose more restrictive protections than federal law, and those protections are not federally preempted. See 16 USC 1535(f) (“Any State law or regulation respecting the taking of an endangered species or threatened species may be more restrictive than the exemptions or permits provided for in this chapter [including a 10(j) rule] or in any regulation which implements this chapter but not less restrictive than the prohibitions so defined.”).
“So even if FWS took over management, Colorado law could prohibit FWS from undertaking any number of management activities, including killing wolves. Which raises the question: why on earth would FWS want to step into this management quagmire?”
Pattiz says it’s because Nesvik wants to “hand a win to the ranching industry.”
Gary Skiba, wildlife program manager at the San Juan Citizens Alliance environmental group, says the skirmish over wolves is the latest move by the Trump administration to pressure Colorado in negative ways.
And Mike Phillips, an expert in wolf reintroduction and the Endangered Species Act, has said if the Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to interfere with Colorado’s wolf reintroduction, it’s looney because the agency is “compelled, in a mandatory fashion, to advance wolf recovery.”
“The Endangered Species Act doesn’t say, proceed with recovery if you want to,” he added. “It’s not something the secretary gets to choose to do. And if the service is compelled to put more paws on the ground to advance recovery, the best place that work gets done is Western Colorado (where) the state’s doing all the heavy lifting. And you could only conclude that the current 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 to achieve recovery.”
Public comment coming
In an email Tuesday, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson told The Sun the service wants to hear from “ranchers, landowners, agencies, and other stakeholders” about their experiences with wolf management, livestock losses, and conflict prevention in order to “help federal and state partners better address challenges, reduce conflicts, and support both local communities and wildlife conservation.”
Based on pro- and anti-wolf groups’ reaction to the notice, they should expect a flood of comments. A recent statewide poll showed that 50% of likely 2026 voters supported suspending wolf reintroduction and 39% strongly opposed it, while 12% were unsure of how they felt.
The survey was conducted among 613 likely 2026 voters by New Bridge Strategy, a Republican pollster, and Aspect Strategic, a Democratic firm, from March 20 to March 25 on behalf of the nonpartisan Colorado Polling Institute. It had a 3.96 percentage point margin of error.
Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Foundation, said his group, which supports reintroduction, plans “a very robust response to this puzzling call for public comment” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and that collectively, conservation nonprofits are “taking a beat to fully digest the request” after which they’ll collaborate “on a thoughtful, legally sound response.”
Dan Gates, executive director of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management, which opposes so-called ballot box biology, says “there’ve been multiple conversations” about the notice and that “lots of people and organizations” are mobilizing.
And Luke Perkins, CPW spokesperson, said “as for what CPW can do at this moment, we are continuing to uphold our MOA with USFWS to serve as the designated agent for the management of gray wolves in Colorado and to work with producers on conflict minimization efforts and compensation claims. Directly related to the RFI, this is a request for public comment so we will be waiting for that comment period to close and for USFWS to communicate any next steps they would like CPW to take.”