Wolves Ranged into 14 Colorado Counties Even as Petition to Halt Reintroduction Advances

Colorado’s reintroduced wolves are covering more territory each month, and March saw some of their biggest movements to date. At the same time, a citizen-led petition to halt the state’s wolf reintroduction program cleared its first hurdle Friday, when its final language was submitted to the secretary of state.

The latest wolf activity map, released by Colorado Parks and Wildlife yesterday, shows the state’s collared wolves exploring watersheds all across the Western Slope, from the Continental Divide over to Utah, and even down toward the Front Range into Clear Creek County. And those are just the movements recorded within the state. Last week, CPW announced that one of the reintroduced gray wolves had made it clear up to north-central Wyoming, where it was killed by federal officials during a predator control operation on March 15. 

That wolf, known as 2505-BC, was released just a couple months ago, and it had come from British Columbia, where it had no history of interactions with livestock, according to CPW. But when the wolf was removed by agents with USDA’s Wildlife Services, they reportedly found “five adult sheep [that] were killed by a wolf” at the site, “including one sheep that was heavily fed upon.”        

Although Colorado’s gray wolves don’t appear to have entered the far north- and southwest corners of the state just yet, their movement in March is still a significant expansion from the core areas west of the Divide where they were released by CPW. The first 10 wolves, which came from Oregon, were released in Grand and Summit Counties in December 2023. The more recent batch of 15 wolves came from B.C. and they were released (under the watchful eyes of many concerned ranchers) in Eagle and Pitkin Counties this January.

Four of those reintroduced wolves have already died — three of the Oregon wolves in addition to the B.C wolf killed March 15. Two of the Oregon-born wolves reportedly died of natural causes. Officials believe they were either killed by a mountain lion or another wolf. 

The third, 2309-OR, was well-known for being the sire of the state’s first known wolf pack, the Copper Creek pack. The male wolf had been involved in several depredation events on ranches in Grand County, however, and it died soon after CPW officials captured it along with the female and four pups. Necropsy results later revealed that 2309-OR had been shot beforehand, although federal authorities have yet to name any suspects in the illegal killing.

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The 21 surviving wolves are still wearing GPS collars. As are the four pups from the Copper Creek pack, which were re-released into the wild along with the pack’s female on Jan. 18. CPW has also collared two additional wolves that entered Colorado naturally in 2021 after migrating down from Wyoming. 

Those 27 gray wolves are the ones being tracked on the state’s wolf activity map, which is updated monthly to show the locations of those GPS collars over the previous 30 days. The map shows the watersheds where at least one GPS position was recorded, CPW points out, and a highlighted area showing wolf activity doesn’t necessarily mean that wolves are present throughout that entire watershed.

The number of wolves is also likely to grow in the coming months. Gray wolves are just now entering their breeding season, and the ones brought in from Oregon and B.C. have had plenty of time to form packs and establish pair bonds. CPW won’t be able to confirm any new packs until the early summer, when pups and family groups would be emerging from their dens. But the GPS collars can at least provide clues — as they did last April, when biologists noticed that one female’s collar had temporarily stopped uploading GPS coordinates. This led them to (correctly) assume that the Copper Creek female was pregnant and inside a den.

Petition to Halt Reintroduction Moves Forward

Not everyone is happy about the expansion of wolves, however, as Colorado’s reintroduction program has been mired in controversy from the very beginning. Some of the most outspoken critics have been ranchers, who’ve already lost dozens of animals to the predators, and big-game hunters and outfitters, who worry about the effects those wolves will have on deer and elk populations.

And with all this angst building around Colorado’s wolves, one group is trying to halt wolf reintroduction the same way it began: through a ballot initiative that would only require a simple majority vote to pass. (Prop 114, for those of you who don’t remember, passed by a slim margin of less than 51 percent in 2020, with nearly every county in western Colorado, where the wolves now live, voting against it.) The initiative would put the brakes on wolf reintroduction in Colorado by ending the program in 2026, removing the classification of gray wolves as “non-game” wildlife, and prohibiting any future importation of gray wolves into the state.

Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy filed the petition’s final language on March 21, and the group is now in the process of finalizing its title. The group will then have to obtain enough signatures (exactly 124,238, according to the Steamboat Pilot) in order for the initiative to be added to the November 2026 ballot.

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Interestingly, a number of livestock groups and other Colorado stakeholders have come out against the citizen initiative to end wolf reintroduction. These are some of the same groups and individuals who’ve criticized the current program, but they say CASWP’s initiative would only complicate things further and possibly make it harder for livestock producers and CPW to work together going forward. They’re also vehemently opposed to the way that wolf reintroduction was forced through by ballot initiative, and they’re trying to avoid that approach.

“We’re going to proceed,” CASWP campaign manager Patrick Davis told the Fence Post earlier this month when asked how he felt about the pushback on the initiative. “I am continuing to raise money from cattlemen around Colorado and taxpayers around Colorado and voters from around Colorado. People are signing up by the hundreds to circulate our petition.”