Five flying wolves and one tight deadline: a predator returns to Colorado

Nearly a century after government-sponsored programs eliminated wolves from Colorado, wildlife officials on Monday released five of the animals onto public land northwest of Denver in an effort to re-establish a permanent population of the predators in the state.

It was the first release in a program initiated by Colorado residents, who narrowly voted to return wolves to the state in a 2020 referendum.

The referendum had sent Colorado wildlife officials scrambling to find wolves that could be captured, transported and released before the Dec. 31 deadline. It also reignited long-standing tensions between ranchers, ranchers and hunters, who see wolves as a threat. conservationists, who point to their potential ecological benefits.

“Wolves have become a kind of symbol of these deeper, identity-based debates: How should we use public lands?” said Becky Niemiec, director of the Animal-Human Policy Center at Colorado State University. “People have a very strong emotional and cultural bond with wolves as a species.”

The presence or absence of top predators like wolves at the top of any food chain causes ripple effects in an ecosystem. While it is difficult to predict what the reintroduction will mean for Colorado because its ecosystems are so complex, research in Yellowstone National Park has shown that wolves can help restore balance by controlling elk and deer populations.

While wolves kill a very small percentage Among the livestock, some have entered Colorado from neighboring states in recent years, killing or injuring farm animals.

Philip Anderson, a rancher and former president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association who lobbied against the 2020 ballot measure, said he lost three lambs to a wolf attack in mid-November. “We know the law passed because that is what the people of Colorado want,” he said. ‘But that’s not what the farmers really want. We would like to be able to continue our business without having another top predator.”

Over the past six months, Idaho, Wyoming and other states with wolf packs had refused to help Colorado with its recovery plan, with some officials in those states citing the chances that the predators would simply leave Colorado.

There is no way to prevent such a migration. While Colorado’s new wolves were released at least 60 miles from a state line, the animals could roam far in search of suitable hunting and pack territory, said Eric Odell, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf conservation manager.

In October, Colorado finally reached an agreement with Oregon to remove wolves from that state’s population, setting in motion a logistical effort to locate, capture and transport the animals before the deadline set by the referendum.

After a federal permit for wolf reintroduction went into effect on December 8, trained personnel from Colorado Parks and Wildlife spread across Oregon’s forests. Then, on Sunday, spotters in a slow-flying plane identified several wolves and began tracking them, passing information to a separate team in a helicopter who tranquilized them from the air.

Five wolves – two young females, two young males and one adult male – with a mix of black and gray coats were examined, tested, crated and collared, then flown to Colorado by volunteer pilots.

The collars, designed to withstand the biting and rough behavior of what are essentially very large, very powerful dogs, will allow state officials and researchers to track the wolves’ movements. That information is expected to be invaluable in determining where they settle, hunt, produce offspring and, in the long term, how they reshape the ecosystem.

Crucially, the collars will also send out a death signal if sensors determine that the wolves may have died. Shooting the wolves is prohibited by law unless they are actively attacking livestock or posing an immediate danger to humans, but violence against the animals remains a real concern, Mr Odell said.

“That is a crime and it will be investigated,” he said. “Our law enforcement teams are very aware of that possibility.” (Should any of the new wolves enter Wyoming, where wolves are classified as predators, they can be legally shot and killed by hunters in most parts of the state.)

Because of that possibility, and because there is no guarantee that wolves will become established and breed in the state, Mr. Odell said conservationists plan to introduce about 10 wolves per year over the next three to five years. The hope is that they will reproduce and new packs will spread to new areas, causing the population to become self-sustaining and wolves to return to the state permanently.

Mr Anderson said he had resigned himself to the wolf’s return. He has worked with Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials to advocate for ranchers and said he plans to continue doing so. “If the wolves come through and do what they need to do, the deer and the elk, that’s fine,” he said.

But if the same wolves attack his livestock again, the wolf’s reintroduction plan gives him permission to kill them. And that’s what he said he was willing to do.