Work to capture as many as 15 gray wolves to be released in Colorado began in British Columbia on Friday, two days after the state wildlife commission denied a petition by stockgrowers to pause the reintroduction program.
Locations in Garfield, Eagle and Pitkin counties are under consideration for the second wave of wolf translocation under Proposition 114, which in 2020 directed Colorado Parks and Wildlife to establish a viable population west of the Continental Divide. The first 10, from Oregon, were released in Summit and Grand counties in December 2023.
The capture and release operation operation could last as long as two weeks, a CPW spokesperson wrote in a news release Saturday at noon. The wolves will be examined near where they are captured to make sure they are healthy and uninjured. They will be outfitted with tracking collars and transported by plane and released as quickly as possible.
CPW is working with the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship in British Columbia. Gray wolves are not considered a species of conservation concern in British Columbia, which estimates their population between 5,300 and 11,600 animals throughout the province.
The wolves are being captured from an area where livestock is not present, CPW said, “so there are no concerns about reintroducing wolves that are from packs that are involved in situations of repeated livestock depredation.”
Depredation has been a major point of conflict in Colorado in the past year, escalating this summer when the male of a mated pair of wolves rearing five pups in Grand County repeatedly killed calves and sheep belonging to a single rancher. Stockgrowers in the region asked CPW to kill the animal, but the request was denied.
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Wildlife officials said killing the animal would have compromised the survival of what is now known as the Copper Creek pack and conflicted with the goals of the state reintroduction plan.
Instead, the adult wolves and four of their pups were captured (the fifth was left behind) and taken to a wildlife sanctuary. The male died soon after and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife necropsy determined the cause of death was a gunshot wound to its leg.
Gray wolves in Colorado are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, which means it’s illegal to harass, harm or kill them. The federal government and wolf advocates have offered a $100,000 reward pool for information leading to the person who shot the animal.
CPW has said that the surviving members of the Copper Creek pack will be returned to northwestern Colorado this month as part of the effort to develop a sustainable population of wolves.
Wolves were hunted to extirpation in Colorado in the 1940s. The first confirmed gray wolves in Colorado since then were a male and a female, wearing tracking collars from Wyoming, that produced a litter in 2021 in North Park.
The animals were blamed for cattle kills on a ranch near Walden, which sparked fierce conflict between ranchers and wildlife officials the ranchers said were slow to develop tools for dealing with wolves that were persistently feeding on livestock, including lethal controls.
Three years later, the state has developed a definition of “chronic depredation,” which was included in CPW’s new “Wolf-Livestock Conflict Minimization Program Producer Guide” released Wednesday. The guide also describes the situations in which a wolf may be killed after other management strategies are exhausted.