This week has surely been a strange one for the wolf known as 2302-OR. A lean 68-pound yearling with shaggy black fur and amber eyes, she had been a member of the Five Points Pack, which makes its home in the mountains of northeastern Oregon. But on Sunday, Dec. 17, her world changed: First, she was knocked out by a tranquilizer dart fired by a biologist in a helicopter, then inspected by veterinarians and fitted with a GPS collar. Her brother, 2303-OR, received the same treatment, as did three other wolves from different Oregon packs — some 421 pounds of Canis lupus altogether.
The adventure didn’t end there: The next day, the canines, now packed into crates, were flown to western Colorado in a single-engine plane and trucked to a remote state-owned corner of Grand County. One by one, the doors to their crates were eased open by their human caretakers, and the carnivores trotted out into a landscape covered in brown grass, patchy snow, and pinyon-juniper forest — the first five wolves released under Colorado’s ambitious, voter-led reintroduction program.
“For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado,” Gov. Jared Polis, who attended the release, announced in a statement. “The shared efforts to reintroduce wolves are just getting started.”
The release of 2302-OR and her fellows was the culmination of a process that began in November 2020, when Colorado’s voters narrowly passed Proposition 114. The ballot measure, advanced by a conservation group called the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, required the state to reintroduce wolves by the end of 2023. The election broadly pitted voters on the state’s eastern Front Range against residents of the Western Slope, where the wolves would be released. In the end, 50.9% of the electorate said yes to wolves — and to the first voter-mandated wolf reintroduction in U.S. history.
Wolf 2303-OR is one of five gray wolves released by Colorado Parks and Wildlife onto public land in Grand County, Colorado on Monday, December 18, 2023. Jerry Neal/Colorado Parks and Wildlife
Once the measure passed, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the state’s wildlife management agency, was tasked with crafting the reintroduction plan. A panel of experts provided technical advice, while a diverse Stakeholder Advisory Group met 15 times over more than a year to hash out the details and make recommendations to the state.
“There was some real humanity and bridge-building that took place between individuals, and therefore between fields — ranchers and conservationists, scientists and outfitters,” said Brian Kurzel, Rocky Mountains regional director for the National Wildlife Federation and a member of the advisory group. “We all changed a little bit, in terms of understanding the challenges that other people are facing.”
Among other things, Proposition 114 requires “fair compensation” for ranchers who lose domesticated animals to wolves, so the stakeholder group spent much of its time defining that term. In the end, the state agreed to pay ranchers up to $15,000 per head for wolf-slain livestock, and — provided the ranchers have used tools like range riders, electrified fences and flashing LED lights to keep wolves away from livestock— to compensate them for up to seven missing calves or sheep for every confirmed depredation. (Ranchers who don’t use such wolf deterrents can claim up to five missing animals.) According to the Denver Post, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has also hired several staffers to manage wolf conflicts and “stockpiled stashes of wolf-deterrence supplies,” including cracker shells and propane cannons, near the release sites.
Wolves are responsible for just 1% of the unwanted livestock deaths in other Rocky Mountain states. But depredation, though rare, is still a fact of life in wolf country — and Colorado is already wolf country. For decades, Wyoming’s permissive wolf-hunting policies kept the canids from successfully dispersing into neighboring Colorado. In early 2020, though, Colorado Parks and Wildlife confirmed that a pack had set up shop in Moffat County, in the state’s northwest corner. Around the same time, wolves also recolonized the valley of North Park, where they later preyed on cattle and sheep.
But even as the two packs were getting settled, hunters started luring individual wolves back across the border into Wyoming, where they’re categorized as vermin, so they could be shot — legally. Today, wolves still persist in North Park, but the Moffat County pack appears to have vanished, fueling conservationists’ contention that wolves will never successfully establish themselves in Colorado without active reintroduction efforts.
The legal status of the state’s reintroduced wolves wasn’t settled until early December, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed the animals “a nonessential experimental population” under Section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act — a decision that, among other things, allows landowners to kill wolves that are caught attacking livestock. But that didn’t do much to assuage most ranchers’ concerns, and last week, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and the Gunnison County Stockgrowers’ Association sued to block the wolf releases, arguing that the Fish and Wildlife Service should have conducted further review of the reintroduction. A U.S. District Court judge rejected the ranchers’ motion, however, ruling that halting the process would run “contrary to the public interest.”
Colorado Governor Jared Polis releases one of the Oregon wolves. Jerry Neal/Colorado Parks and Wildlife
Now that paws are on the ground, what’s next for Colorado’s wolves? According to the terms of its management plan, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is expected to release somewhere between 30 and 50 wolves over the next three to five years, closely monitoring the animals to see whether they survive and reproduce in the state. Should biologists count at least 150 wolves during two consecutive annual surveys, or 200 in any single year, wolves, currently classified as a state endangered species, will be considered recovered — and Colorado will officially host a healthy wolf population for the first time since the 1940s, when trappers exterminated the carnivores to make way for livestock.
Many wolf aficionados relish the prospect of a revitalized population for ecological reasons. “Wolves as apex predators are really important for the environment,” Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober, a rare pro-wolf rancher, said shortly before the reintroduction. “We have a resident elk herd; they don’t go anywhere anymore. They’re just not moving. In the long run, a lot of elk will be killed by wolves, but I think the herd will be healthier” — along with, perhaps, the land itself.
In theory, 2302-OR and her new packmates should do well in the state: Colorado possesses bountiful habitat, the world’s largest elk population, and a legislature and governor that are much wolf-friendlier than those in other Rocky Mountain states. And few creatures are hardier than Canis lupus, once the world’s most widely distributed terrestrial mammal. The gray wolf, the legendary Colorado naturalist Enos Mills wrote, possesses “strong jaws, tireless muscles, keen scent” and “exceedingly nimble wits,” all requisite to endure the “severe struggle for existence” that comes with being a carnivore in a hostile world. In other words, Colorado’s wolves are well-equipped to thrive — assuming, of course, that their human hosts can figure out how to adapt to their presence.
Ben Goldfarb is a High Country News correspondent and the author of Crossings: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, funded by the BAND Foundation.
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