Colorado wildlife officials have given up on capturing a fifth wolf pup that was left behind in Grand County when the rest of its pack was relocated last month.
The operation to find the pup was suspended Thursday because of declining temperatures that make it unsafe to move the animal, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said Friday.
Wildlife officials saw the gray wolf pup on game cameras in September and tried for 19 nights to capture the pup, which they believe is the seventh member of the Copper Creek pack, CPW said. Still, they will continue to watch the game cameras and look for evidence of the pup, which is about six months old, they said.
At that age, the pup can hunt small animals, including rabbits and squirrels, the state agency said. However, ranchers in northern Colorado said that they continued to lose livestock to wolves even after the capture in September of the adult male, adult female and four other pups.
CPW revealed Sept. 9 that the agency had captured the wolf pack that was linked to multiple livestock deaths, bringing the two adults and four pups to “a secure enclosure with limited human interaction.” The male adult wolf died four days after it was captured, and had a low body weight and “deep puncture wounds” on its hind leg, which CPW said was unrelated to its capture.
Biologists used foothold traps to capture the pack, which was feeding on cattle and sheep primarily on a single rancher’s land for months in Grand County near Kremmling. In September, the agency said the four pups were dependent on adults for food and “are not effective hunters of anything larger than a rabbit or squirrel,” and that there is no evidence that they were involved in any of the livestock attacks in Grand County.
The state’s plan is to release the adult female and the four pups back into the wild in December or January, around the same time Colorado plans to release its next batch of wolves as part of its wolf reintroduction plan.
The two adult wolves in the pack, which were the first of the introduced wolves known to have pups, were among 10 released in western Colorado in December.
The first five wolves were released Dec. 18 north of Interstate 70 on state land in Grand County. Another five were released Dec. 23 in Grand and Summit counties, also north of I-70. The state’s nearly 300-page reintroduction plan calls for the release of 30 to 50 wolves in total over three to five years. Colorado Parks and Wildlife said it aims to capture 10-15 wild wolves per year through trapping, darting or net gunning in the fall or winter, releasing them in Colorado from December-March.
CPW asked hunters or anyone else in the woods in Grand and Summit counties to report any potential sightings of the pup to the agency’s Hot Sulphur Springs office at 970-725-6200.