Colorado’s top wildlife official Monday defended a decision to move a wolf that had attacked livestock in Grand County to Pitkin County with her pack and indicated the wolves would not be moved again — or killed — to protect livestock grazing a quarter-mile from the den in Old Snowmass anytime soon.
Every single day, Colorado Parks and Wildlife director Jeff Davis questions his decision to move Colorado’s first established wolf pack — the Copper Creek pack — out of captivity, where they’d been living since September, to the Capitol Creek Valley, around 3 miles from Carbondale. But he told members of the Colorado legislature’s Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee that he did it “because if we’re not making progress towards restoration,” the agency could put Colorado’s wolf reintroduction in jeopardy.
“That was the first breeding pack from our relocations,” he told Western Slope lawmakers including Sen. Dylan Roberts, Rep. Julie McCluskie, Sen. Marc Catlin, Rep. Matt Soper and Rep. Matthew Martinez.
“We learned a lot. We learned about needing prompt response time,” and “early and often engagement in the use of nonlethal management techniques,” he said. “When we started seeing Copper Creek wolf-livestock conflicts, we needed effectively trained riders and lots of things that, essentially, we were missing. And I’ve said this publicly, that was the perfect storm no one could have predicted would play out that way.”
A gray wolf dashes into leafless shrubs. It is one of 20 wolves released in January 2025, 15 of which were translocated from British Columbia (Colorado Parks and Wildlife photo)But he added that those early mistakes “led to a lot of important things,” like attention to seven stipulations included in a petition a group of ranchers, local leaders and Western Slope advocacy groups gave the agency in November, saying they needed them met or the CPW commission should pause the reintroduction program.
“We’ve built a range rider program,” Davis continued. “Does it need to probably continue to grow? Do we need to get more experience on the ground? Yeah, and we will.”
The agency didn’t have a definition of chronic depredation at the time attacks in Grand County were playing out in 2024. “Now we have a definition of chronic depredation,” he added. “And we’ve actually utilized lethal management when it was very obvious,” he said, referring to the killing in late May of one of the wolves from the relocated pack that was preying on livestock in Capitol Creek Valley.
But Catlin, whose district includes Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin counties, was dissatisfied.
“You mentioned that it was a perfect storm, and those of us here in Colorado recognize perfect storms,” Catlin told Davis. “But one of the things that happens in a perfect storm is that it shuts off after a while. We go back to sunshine, happiness, moving forward with our lives. But this perfect storm is sitting right there in that basin, continuing to draw power from the problems that are going on. And the two ranches that are out there are at the end of their rope in a lot of ways.”
Catlin was referring to ranches run by Brad Day and Mike Cerveny.
He wanted to know if there is something that can be done right away “that will alleviate some of the pressure that is on those two cow herds…reasonably quickly, that can take some of the pressure off of those outfits to where they think they could live with this. Is there something we can do right away?”
“I think the answer is yes,” Davis said, “and I think part of the response is we have two range riders in there, rotating through day and night operations.” He told the ranchers those riders will stay a month or longer. And he said the response the ranchers gave him was “we can sleep at night knowing your folks are going to be up there.’”
Davis added that under rules in Colorado’s wolf management plan, the agency has 30 days after shooting a yearling wolf from the Copper Creek pack that killed two calves and one cow over Memorial Day weekend to see if lethal removal “alters the pack’s behavior or the individuals in the pack’s behavior.”
And, referencing a new litter of puppies the adult female of the Copper Creek pack had after breeding with a wolf from British Columbia, he said, “we’re mindful those animals are of an age that they can only travel 1 or 2 miles max on their own” but “as those critters get a little bit older … if we have to go incremental in lethal removals, that is what we will do.”
$2.2 million over budget
Another major sticking point in the hearing was the wildlife agency’s annual wolf reintroduction budget, which CPW has overspent by $2 million twice since the program started.
Roberts grilled Davis on the matter, saying he was comparing the cost to what the state ballot guide, known as the blue book, which educates voters on ballot initiatives before an election, “told every voter” it would cost.
The blue book, which is created by nonpartisan legislative staff, said as reintroduction ramped up, the cost would be about $800,000 per year, he said. But in the most recent fiscal year — July 2024 through June — “we’re over $3 million, so $2.2 million over budget and $2 million over what the voters of Colorado were told this was going to cost.”
Roberts acknowledged a significant portion of this year’s budget went to ranchers and producers to help get them conflict mitigation tools and compensate them for livestock lost to wolves — including $580,000 paid to two ranchers in Grand County in January — “but that’s also money in the state of Colorado, in the current budget situation, that is not going to fixing potholes in roads, it’s not going to classrooms across the state, it’s not going to people who are losing their health care and many who are about to lose their health care,” he said.
Three wolves scatter in a snow-covered field during Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s capture efforts in British Columbia that began on Jan. 12, 2025. (Colorado Parks and Wildlife photo).“And that’s just with 10 wolves reintroduced the first year, and 15 reintroduced the second, and with illusions that we’re going to go up to Canada and get 15 more wolves, and they’re all going to have pups. So $3 million is going to be $10 million in a couple years. And it’s money that, because it is a state statute, because it was passed by the voters, we have to spend.”
Davis acknowledged Roberts’ concern but added he wasn’t sure CPW “could have articulated in a better fashion” that the blue book figure was speculation or “the fact that there was Prop 114, the blue book, the vote, the statute and the plan.”
And he pointed out that while Colorado has one of the most comprehensive plans in the U.S. when it comes to compensating ranchers for lost livestock, the agency is trying “to cut costs wisely … to be mindful of that.”
Nonlethal mitigation and lethal removal
Reid DeWalt, CPW’s deputy director, updated the committee on nonlethal mitigation work the agency did during its most reporting period — much of it paid for by nongovernmental organizations and wolf advocacy groups.
DeWalt said they deployed 80 scare devices, 16.5 miles of fladry and 10 range riders to ranches on the Western Slope; they issued 14 permits allowed to injure but not kill wolves; investigated and facilitated the deployment of additional nonlethal tools and methods; and hired 10 wildlife damage specialists to respond as rapidly as possible to suspected wolf attacks.
They’ve conducted 210 assessments of ranches to determine the kind of nonlethal mitigation tools a rancher needs since January, he added. And Dustin Shiflett, nonlethal conflict reduction program manager for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, said the agencies have given presentations on carcass management best practices to 700 individuals since the start of the year.
But the conversation kept turning back to lethal control, likely because of the Copper Creek pack.
DeWalt said wolves that chronically depredate — kill three or more livestock within a 30-day period — could be removed through lethal control either by the agency or a livestock producer who catches them in the act.
Davis makes that determination in coordination with appropriate division staff and after consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service due to the wolves’ status as federally endangered species, DeWalt added. If the division concludes lethal removal is appropriate, they or federal agents will kill the depredating wolf or wolves, targeting the ones responsible for the depredations “to the best of sense possible.”
The goal is to minimize the number of wolves that must be lethally removed, change the pack behavior to reduce the potential for future depredation and use the fastest, safest, most humane and most cost effective methods available,” DeWalt said.
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