Colorado has another official wolf pack, making that four packs that have successfully reproduced this year.
The latest confirmed family group is in Eagle County and has been named the Piney Ridge Pack, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said Wednesday.
The other packs, with an average litter size of four to six pups, are One Ear in Jackson County, Three Creeks in Rio Blanco County, and Copper Creek, the first pack to form in the state after wolves were reintroduced in 2023. Members of that pack killed livestock in Grand County. Most of the pack was captured and relocated to Pitkin County.
The agency’s wolf program manager, Eric Odell, said in a news release that CPW is continuing to monitor the four packs and attempting to count the pups. The information, including a minimum count of the state’s entire wolf population, will come out in CPW’s annual report in the spring, he said.
“Detection of pups in late spring or early summer is inherently challenging, because of their use of remote habitats in dense cover, secretive nature of very young animals, and time potentially underground,” Odell said.
Confirmation of another pack is good news for the wolf program in Colorado because studies have found that established packs have higher survival rates compared with lone wolves.
Pack formation also leads to wolves establishing a territory instead of roaming around the state, Odell said. After packs form territories, wildlife managers can prioritize where to focus conflict mitigation efforts to protect livestock, such as scare devices and fladry that flaps on fencelines.
“We are still working from a modest amount of data in Colorado — due to the relatively new nature of our wolf population as well as its small size — but so far we are seeing a clear pattern of wolves in packs surviving longer than wolves that are not in packs,” Brenna Cassidy, CPW’s wolf monitoring and data coordinator said in a news release.
Of the 10 wolves that died between April 1, 2025, and March 30, 2026, seven were “dispersed” and three were part of packs, she said.
Wildlife officials encouraged people who believe they’ve seen a wolf to submit a wolf-sighting form on CPW’s website. Photo and video collection of wolves to track their movements “will become increasingly important as the population of uncollared wolves grows through successful reproduction and natural immigration into Colorado,” the agency said.