Colorado Parks and Wildlife says all six of the wolves in the Copper Creek Pack have been captured after livestock depredations in Grand County. The adult male wolf was injured and in poor health when biologists found him and eventually died.
In a press conference on September 9, officials said the pups and the adult female will be held at a CPW facility until plans are made for their re-release.
CPW officials say this time of year is very difficult for wild wolves, because their natural prey is at its fittest. And it’s even harder for individual wolves that don’t hunt in a pack.
Holding the Copper Creek female and the pups during this time will allow wildlife managers to make sure they’re getting the nutrients they need and to monitor their health.
During the press conference, CPW director Jeff Davis said the timing also works out with the pups’ development: this is about the time where they’d be learning to hunt.
“And what we didn’t want to see is the pups going out on hunts with adults where they may have been keying in on livestock as opposed to natural prey,” he said.
Currently, the pups’ teeth are too small to allow them to hunt anything bigger than a rabbit or squirrel.
Davis said they will be working with landowners and elected officials in possible release areas, before the pack gets back into the wild.
The agency also confirmed plans to release more wolves this winter and hopes that there will be even more breeding and packs in the following spring.
Davis also responded to rumors that Colorado lawmakers were working on a bill that would pause future wolf releases in Colorado, due to those livestock depredations.
He said no lawmakers had come to him with the proposal, though he’d heard rumors about it.
Davis said even though it may seem counterintuitive, packs are easier for wildlife officials to manage than a bunch of individual wolves roaming the landscape.
“Packs will protect territories, so we’ll know which animals are more directly involved with any sort of wolf-livestock conflict, and they’ll be able to more effectively take down natural prey.”
He said that such a bill from lawmakers could lead to the current wolf population decreasing further, and could put the whole reintroduction effort at risk. Davis said he would rather work more closely with the ranching community to do more education, outreach and deployment of non-lethal tools, like site vulnerability assessments.
“Working with ranchers to create plans up front,” he said. “So they're proactively saying, ‘here's where your type of operation is likely to see vulnerabilities, and here's the type of non-lethal techniques that we believe will be most effective in dealing with those conflicts should they arise.’”
