More gray wolves are on the ground on the Western Slope. Colorado Parks and Wildlife completed the second round of wolf releases over the weekend. This time, they came from Canada. “The second year, as you know, of the gray wolf releases concluded on Saturday. We now have 29 gray wolves on our landscape,” said Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) director Jeff Davis during a press conference on Monday, January 20.
CPW just finished the second round of gray wolf releases into the state last weekend despite wide-ranging resistance to another go. The wolves released included eight females and seven males from British Columbia, Canada, and the five members of the original Copper Creek Pack. Davis pointed out that the total includes the nine non-reintroduced wolves already in Colorado.
Many have said this second release will be a replay of the first one, which Garfield County Commissioner Perry Will called a “train wreck” at a December public meeting. “I think we've had a real bad experience in Grand County. I think everyone admits that was a bad experience, and we're fixing to have another bad experience,” he said.
But, CPW director Jeff Davis said on Monday that the naysayers are wrong. “Will there be new things that we have to work together to grapple with and get through? Yeah, we will,” he explained. “But the fact that we have the staff capacity, we have a strong partnership with [Colorado Department of Agriculture], we've gotten strong partnerships with NGOs, [Natural Resource Conservation Service], the wildlife services, like, this is a whole new ball game with the programs that we've put in place and the additional capacity we're going to have on the landscape.”
Last weekend’s release of Canadian wolves occurred in Pitkin and Eagle counties but CPW is closely guarding the details about where the shipping crates were opened. When asked if the agency might go ahead with a National Environmental Policy Act - or NEPA - review that would allow for releases on public lands, Davis said no. “My experience with NEPA is we’d be talking a minimum of two more years, probably at least 1 to 2 million more dollars, and, quite frankly, when you pencil out the plan saying we’ll do releases for three to five years, by the time we get done with NEPA, we’re done with the releases. So, the math doesn’t work out for that to be a smart investment in time and financial resources.”
Also on Monday, Garfield County Commissioners approved a letter to Governor Polis, the Parks and Wildlife Commission, and Davis calling for a permanent pause in further gray wolf releases in the state.
Commissioner Will supported the part of the letter stating that current release sites are radically different from what was originally presented in Proposition 114, which was passed by Colorado voters in 2020. “Well, we did get pinched down,” he said. “First, it was the West Slope, right? Prop 114 was West Slope, and all of a sudden, we’re nicked down to right here on us, and that’s not what people voted on.”
But Davis said release sites are still west of the Continental Divide, which was what voters approved. CPW Wolf Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell agreed. “It’s gotten a little bit more focused from what it says in the statute to release wolves in the very northwest corner of the state,” he said. “But that wouldn’t be a wise use of our resources, so that’s why we’re not doing that.”
CPW staff shared anecdotes at the press conference about working up north and what it was like to capture wolves in the Canadian wilds.
Jennifer Psyllakis, Assistant Deputy Minister with the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, said the entire process was a good example of international cooperation. ”Setting things up to learn as we go, British Columbia really felt that it was a shared opportunity to learn more about wildlife management and it was very aligned with our objectives that we had for wolves in a particular area,” she said.
You can find wolf location maps and information about wolf sightings, livestock predation and more at the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website.
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