The Colorado Sun originally published this story on Sept. 9, 2024. It was updated on Sept. 10, 2024.
State wildlife managers captured a wolf pack that was killing livestock in northern Colorado and relocated the two adults and four pups to “a secure enclosure with limited human interaction,” state officials announced Monday afternoon.
The male adult wolf died four days after it was captured, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said the wolf had “deep puncture wounds” on its hind leg, which they said was unrelated to its capture. The wolf’s body weight was almost 30% lower than it was when it was released in December, when it weighed 104 pounds, CPW said, and it died despite receiving antibiotics for an infection.
Wildlife officials said it was “unlikely the wolf would have survived for very long in the wild” and that they would conduct a third-party necropsy, with results expected in 45 to 60 days. CPW director Jeff Davis said had the male survived, it would have been in captivity permanently because of its predation history. Biologists still are assessing whether the captured female can be released, CPW deputy director Reid DeWalt said.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the operation used foothold traps and required five capture and relocations of wolves. Only two pups were captured at the same time. They are all members of the Copper Creek pack, which was feeding on cattle and sheep primarily on a single rancher’s land for months in Grand County near Kremmling.
The wolves are being held in a temporary enclosure and being fed carnivore logs, carcasses from roadkill or other ungulates.
After examining the wolves, the agency said the four pups, which are still primarily dependent on adults for food, “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 depredation incidents in Grand County.
Wildlife officials said they plan to spend time assessing the health of the female and her four pups and at some point “release them into the wild together so they can contribute to wolf restoration in Colorado.”
Biologists won’t release them until they are large enough to wear adult-sized tracking collars, likely sometime in December or January, they said. That could happen with the next round of wolves brought to Colorado from another state.
DeWalt said the agency is looking for new territory, thick with ungulates and “not too close to livestock.”
The two adult wolves in the pack were brought to Colorado from Oregon just 10 months ago, part of a voter-passed wolf reintroduction plan that is now under even more scrutiny after a second relocation. The female and male wolves, which were the first of the introduced wolves known to have pups, were among 10 released in western Colorado in December.
CPW began capturing the wolves Aug. 22 and withheld details about the operation until Monday. The decision to remove them came after the agency denied a request by rancher Conway Ferrell to take lethal action to protect his livestock.
Wildlife officials said they could not remove only the male wolf, which they believed was responsible for killing cattle and sheep, because it would affect the survival of the entire pack.
The agency’s wolf restoration plan says that it will not relocate wolves with a history of killing livestock “into the wild within Colorado.”
“The plan also calls for flexibility,” CPW Director Jeff Davis said in a news release, “and it may not at times account for every unique situation the agency and our experts encounter.” The agency consulted wildlife biologists, veterinarians, federal partners and ranchers to create a “plan to deal with this unique situation that’s in the best interest of the wolves and Grand County producers,” he said.
The female wolf was the first captured first and was in good body condition, CPW said. Wildlife biologists then captured the male wolf, followed by the four pups. The pups were all captured from Friday through Sunday and are underweight but healthy, the agency said.
But Delaney Rudy, Colorado director of Western Watersheds Project, said the group is “devastated by the news of the dead father wolf, and must be sure that in the future, Colorado’s wolves are not set up for conflict and therefore removal. Tools for nonlethal coexistence have been provided cost-free to ranchers along the way, and wolves should not have to pay the price for producers’ refusal to implement them.”
In April, the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association sent the first of three letters to CPW asking for help protecting their livestock from the adults in what would become the Copper Creek pack, which were denning on federal land near Ferrell’s ranch. But Tim Ritschard, president of the Middle Park Stock Growers Association, said CPW officials told him they wouldn’t kill the male “because they were afraid of den failure.”
In an April 24 letter, Ferrell requested a permit that gives the permit holder authority to kill wolves if they are chronically killing livestock and hazing has not worked. In its response, CPW said Ferrell’s situation didn’t meet the criteria needed for the permit and that he could have avoided some of the livestock losses if he had accepted help sooner from the Colorado Department of Agriculture and employed more nonlethal mitigation techniques.
The state’s wolf reintroduction plan says relocating wolves that are killing livestock “has little technical merit.” It’s unclear exactly when Colorado Parks and Wildlife decided to remove the problem wolves and who made the call.
Three of the four pups that are part of the Copper Creek pack were captured on video in August playing in a rain puddle as an adult wolf watched nearby. Davis said the agency is looking at the same general area the pups were removed from, “the northern release oval,” to release them back into when they are ready.
Scientists who have studied wolf translocations after livestock conflicts say it rarely goes well for young wolves that rely on their parents to hunt. A University of Montana study found that more relocated wolves died and survivors often killed livestock in their new locations. Of the 88 translocated wolves in the 2005 study, 58 died after the trapping and moving, which is a lower survival rate than wolves that were native to Montana.
Colorado voters narrowly passed the wolf reintroduction plan, called Proposition 114, in November 2020. The ballot measure passed mainly by urban voters directed state wildlife officials to begin reintroducing gray wolves by the end of 2023.
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.
Davis said continuing with the wolf restoration plan is important because although it may sound counterintuitive, “having more animals on the landscape allows greater management flexibility moving forward and as we get packs established, that’s a lot easier to manage than individuals roaming around on the landscape because those animal packs will protect territories.”
Ritschard said the stockgrowers association “strongly encourages CPW not to release the pups” back into the wild. “Mom’s a proven killer. We believe the pups have been a part of sheep killing and possibly calf killing. All they’d be doing is kicking the can down the road, and we’re going to be removing these wolves eventually. Keeping them in captivity would probably be the best idea right now.”
The male wolf from the Copper Creek pack is the second to die of Colorado’s 10 introduced wolves. A male gray wolf found dead in Larimer County in April had puncture wounds in its skull that suggest it was killed by a mountain lion.
