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 restore a permanent population of the predators to the state.
It was the first release in a program initiated by Colorado residents, who narrowly voted in a 2020 referendum to return wolves to the state.
The referendum had sent Colorado wildlife officials scrambling to find wolves that could be captured, transported and released before a deadline of Dec. 31. It also reignited longstanding tensions between cattle ranchers, livestock farmers and hunters, who see the wolves as a threat, and conservationists, who point to their potential ecological benefits.
“Wolves have become kind of symbolic of these deeper identity based debates: How should we be using public land?” said Becky Niemiec, director of the Animal-Human Policy Center at Colorado State University. “People have a really strong emotional and cultural connection to wolves as a species.”
The presence, or absence, of apex predators like wolves at the top of any food chain causes ripple effects through an ecosystem. Though it is difficult to predict what the reintroduction will mean for Colorado because ecosystems are so complex, research in Yellowstone National Park has shown that wolves can help to restore balance by controlling elk and deer populations.
While wolves kill a very small percentage of livestock, a few have wandered into Colorado from neighboring states in past years and killed or injured farm animals.
Philip Anderson, a rancher and former president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association who lobbied against the 2020 ballot measure, said he had lost three lambs to a wolf attack in mid-November. “We know that the law has been passed because that’s what the population of Colorado wants,” he said. “But it’s not what the ranchers really want. We would like to be able to continue our business without having another apex predator.”
Over the past six months, Idaho, Wyoming and other states with wolf packs in residence had declined to help Colorado with its restoration plan, with some officials in those states citing the chances that the predators would simply wander out of Colorado.
There is no way to prevent such migration. While Colorado’s new wolves were released at least 60 miles from any state border, the animals could roam far in search of suitable hunting and pack territory, said Eric Odell, the wolf conservation manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
In October, Colorado finally reached an agreement with Oregon to take wolves from that state’s population, setting off a logistical dash to locate, capture and transport the animals before the deadline set by the referendum.
After a federal permit for the wolf reintroduction went into effect on Dec. 8, trained personnel from Colorado Parks and Wildlife fanned out across the forests of Oregon. Then, on Sunday, spotters in a slow-flying plane identified and began tracking several wolves, communicating information to a separate team in a helicopter that tranquilized them from the air.
Five wolves — two juvenile females, two juvenile males and an adult male — with a mix of black and gray coats were examined, tested, crated and collared, and then flown to Colorado by volunteer pilots.
The collars, designed to withstand to the biting and roughhousing 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, have offspring, and, over the long term, how they reshape the ecosystem.
Critically, the collars will also send a mortality signal if sensors determine that the wolves might have died. Shooting the wolves is prohibited by law unless they are actively attacking livestock or pose an imminent 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 wander into Wyoming, where wolves are classified as predatory animals, they can be legally shot and killed by hunters in most parts of the state.)
Because of that possibility, and because there’s no guarantee that wolves will settle and breed within the state, Mr. Odell said that wildlife officials planned to introduce about 10 wolves per year for the next three to five years. The hope is that they will breed and that new packs will disperse into new territories, making the population self-sustaining and bringing wolves back to the state permanently.
Mr. Anderson said he had resigned himself to the return of the wolf. He has worked with officials at Colorado Parks and Wildlife to advocate for ranchers and he said he planned to continue to do so. “If the wolves are coming through and managing what they are supposed to, the deer and the elk, that’s fine,” he said.
But if the same wolves attack his livestock again, the wolf reintroduction plan gives him permission to kill them. And that’s what he said he is prepared to do.
