The custom-made aluminum cages have been welded.
Twenty radio collars are charged and ready.
At least ten release locations have been scouted and mapped.
Colorado says it’s ready to release its first batch of wolves and meet the demands of a 2020 ballot initiative where voters here said they wanted the animal back on the landscape.
Now all it needs is to convince another state to donate a few.
As the Dec. 31 deadline to reintroduce wolves to Colorado inches closer, we checked in on where things stand and found answers to some of questions you might have.
Where are the wolves coming from?
We don’t know yet.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife in May sent letters to Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington asking if they’d donate some of their wolves. Idaho quickly said no. Montana was “cool to the idea.”
Before Colorado could even ink those letters, Wyoming said no.
That leaves Oregon and Washington as the leading candidates.
Parks and Wildlife reported in late August that they were expecting to get an answer from Washington’s wildlife board sometime before the end of September.
The negotiations appear to be somewhat sensitive though.
After some of the state’s wildlife commissioners said they wanted to personally lobby people in Washington to donate the wolves, Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis told them last month that could be a bad idea and actually hurt the negotiations.
When will the wolves arrive?
If all goes according to plan, sometime between December 15 and Jan. 1. The people who will capture the wolves from another state need snow to fall first. The state wants to use helicopters to track and capture the wolves, so snow makes the animals more visible from the air.
They’ll be given a health exam, and if they pass (too many missing teeth or other health conditions could cause the state to reject the wolf for relocation), they’ll be put in an aluminum transport crate and released to their new home on the West Slope.
The plan is to capture and release 10-15 wolves from different packs each year and bring them to Colorado over the course of the next 3-5 years.
Where will the wolves be released?
Somewhere in the wilderness near Vail, Glenwood Springs or Aspen. The map below shows the preferred release area circled in green.
A secondary location is circled that includes wilderness areas around Montrose and Gunnison.
Wildlife officers have at least 10 spots mapped out for the first release of wolves this winter.
But the wolves aren’t expected to stay in this area.
In fact, studies have shown that wolves released in Yellowstone in the mid 1990s moved an average of 50 miles away from their release sites in a matter of months.
That’s why all of the release zones in Colorado are at least 60 miles from neighboring states and sovereign tribal lands in southwest Colorado.
The federal government says it will likely designate the wolves here as an experimental population. How does that affect things?
The pending ruling from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will make it legal for wildlife officers, and in some cases ranchers, to kill or relocate wolves if they become too much of an issue for livestock or elk.
Colorado says it views lethal force as a last resort, but they say having that flexibility to kill or relocate a wolf is key.
The fear of wolves attacking and killing livestock and working animals has been one of the biggest points of contention in recent years as the state prepares to reintroduce the species.
KUNC talked to a Wyoming wolf expert in 2020 about what that state has been experiencing.
They said the number of livestock killed by wolves has “ebbed and flowed over the years.”
But a wildlife official said they’ve been able to bring the numbers down by getting creative using non-lethal tactics.
They even started using those big inflatable tube men that you see outside car dealerships to scare wolves away from herds of livestock.
How else is the state preparing for wolves?
The state is busy hiring brand new positions to help track and manage the wolf population when it gets here.
The new hires include a wolf biologist who has spent years studying them in Yellowstone.
I heard there were already wolves in Colorado. What are they up to?
There have been 16 confirmed wolf sightings in Colorado since 2001. The state says it typically gets at least 100 reports of wolves each year.
In 2021, pups were observed with a pair of wolves in Jackson County in Northwest Colorado. There have been reports that some of these pups have since ventured across the border into Wyoming and were legally shot and killed. However, a state law in Wyoming makes it difficult to confirm the reports because details about the killings are not released.
What happens if the state doesn’t get wolves before the December deadline?
Parks and Wildlife says it can still capture and release wolves all the way through the middle of March.
I want to learn more. Where can I find the full reintroduction plan.
The 261-page document, complete with more information about management tactics, previous studies and other wolf details, is available here.
