Coping strategies
Wolves are killing cattle in Colorado. Feeling cut off from wildlife officials, ranchers seek their own solution. Is paying them the answer?
Crystal River Ranch cows in a pasture in view of Mount Sopris in Carbondale on Wed., June 11. / Photo by Kelsey Brunner, special to The Colorado Sun
Only a few ranchers were expected to come to the meeting held in Chris Collins’ shop on the McCabe Ranch in Old Snowmass, which smelled of smoked venison sausages cooking on the grill, horses on jeans, and a mixture of sweat and anxiety.
They’d come on the evening of June 11, after the first day of the monthly Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting in Glenwood Springs, where wolves were not on the agenda. The omission shocked everyone, because of what had recently happened.
Over on the Lost Marbles Ranch, which borders the McCabe Ranch in a wide valley where the price of sprawling, remote ranches reflects their proximity to Aspen, the first wolf pack to form following the start of Colorado’s reintroduction program in December 2023 had established a new den. The adult female, released in the area in January, had given birth to her second litter after breeding with a wolf introduced during CPW’s second release, in January.
That half of these wolves were from the first Copper Creek pack – celebrated or reviled, depending on your perspective – wasn’t what mattered. It was their history, starting after the adult female was released in Grand County, with four other wolves from Oregon, in front of a handpicked crowd including Gov. Jared Polis, his husband, Marlon Reis, several CPW employees and, notably, no leaders or ranchers from Grand County. The next week, five more Oregon wolves were released in Summit County.
Colorado voters by a narrow margin directed CPW in 2020 to reintroduce wolves to the state. Two years of meetings followed, during which stakeholder groups worked to develop a plan they believed could lead to the successful development of a viable, self-sustaining wolf population while minimizing wolf-related conflicts. But from the start, there was trouble.
Some of the wolves brought from Oregon were known to have preyed on livestock, and releasing known attackers went against Colorado’s wolf management plan. Two of those wolves were released in Grand County. Not long after a reporter made the discovery about the livestock-eating wolves, a wolf released in Grand County and one in Summit County – neither known to have killed livestock in Oregon – paired up and started preying on nearly two dozen cattle and sheep on Grand County ranches.
A long, tense standoff between the ranchers and CPW leadership began. The ranchers wanted the male wolf killed, as is allowed under the state’s 10(j) permit that designates Colorado’s wolves, though on the federal endangered species list, an experimental population.
But CPW declined because the female was pregnant and the agency had yet to define the number of times a wolf could harass or kill livestock before wildlife officials could kill it.
Instead of killing any wolves, CPW trapped the adults and four of five puppies, by then known as the Copper Creek pack, and moved them to a wildlife sanctuary. Then, in mid-January, wildlife officials relocated the pack again, to private property in Old Snowmass, when CPW translocated 15 wolves from British Columbia to Eagle and Pitkin counties.
By February, ranchers say, local livestock started disappearing. On March 3 and 13, wolves killed two yearling heifers. Then, two months later, the reason the Old Snowmass ranchers were gathered happened. Over Memorial Day weekend, wolves from the pack killed two calves and severely injured one on a ranch in the Crystal Valley, near Carbondale, and the McCabe and Lost Marbles ranches in the Capitol Creek Valley. Range riders hired by CPW to keep watch over local herds responded, but they were sent to the wrong location and in not nearly enough time.
Wildlife officials ended up killing one of the wolves – a yearling Copper Creek male. But as had happened in Grand County the previous spring, Copper Creek wolves continued targeting cattle, and ranchers across Pitkin and Garfield counties feared the attacks would spread.
So they’d come together to try to figure out how to take their fate with the pack into their own hands. Note: It wasn’t the fate of the wolves.
At the June 11 meeting, killing the wolves wasn’t on the table. Instead, the ranchers were trying to get creative. The plan they came up with sounded preposterous: Ask someone – a wildlife group, a nongovernmental organization, a big celebrity or private individual worth millions – to pay them to accept and live with the wolves.
But given the situation at hand, every possible solution was on the table.
One of 15 gray wolves that was captured in British Columbia and released in Eagle and Garfield counties in January. The relocated Copper Creek pack was also released in January on private land in Old Snowmass./ Photo courtesy CPW