Wolf dies after Colorado Parks and Wildlife completes capture of pack tied to livestock killings

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has completed the operation to capture all six wolves from the Copper Creek Pack. Following the wolves’ capture, the pack’s adult male died. State officials are holding the adult female and four pups in captivity before making any decisions about releasing them back into the wild. 

The adult male was already injured when Parks and Wildlife captured him Friday, Aug. 30, and he had a history of preying on livestock in Grand County. 

The wolf had several injuries to his right hind leg, which were unrelated to the capture, according to a press release from the agency. His body weight was 30% lower than when he was released in Colorado in December, it adds. 

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While the biologists administered antibiotics to the wolf for an infection related to the leg injury, he died four days later on Tuesday, Sept. 3. Parks and Wildlife will be conducting a full necropsy to determine the source of the wolf’s injuries. According to the agency, it is unlikely the wolf would have survived much longer in the wild. 

The adult female was captured several days earlier on Saturday, Aug. 24. The first of the pups, a male, was captured Tuesday, Sept. 3. Two more male pups were captured the next day, with the fourth and final female pup captured Thursday, Sept. 5. 

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This is one more wolf pup that Parks and Wildlife had previously confirmed. After the capture, the agency reported it is “confident” there are no other pups. 

Following the wolves’ capture, the animals were all transported to a large enclosure — likely a wildlife sanctuary or rehabilitation center — where they can be monitored with limited human interaction. The location will not be disclosed, officials said.

Biologists from the agency were part of the capture and transport to monitor and assess the health of each of the animals. 

While it can be difficult to attribute livestock deaths to specific wolves, Jeff Davis, the director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife said in an interview with the Vail Daily that the agency knew the adult male was responsible for some of them. 

“The male was definitely involved in livestock depredations at a time where we know (the female wolf) was in the den with pups,” Davis said. “His destiny was more likely permanent captivity.”

The five other wolves were found to be healthy, even though the four pups are reportedly “underweight.”

While the wolves are being held for now, Parks and Wildlife is still planning to release the wolves into the wild. 

“There is no evidence that the four pups were involved in any of the livestock depredation incidents in Grand County,” reports Parks and Wildlife in a FAQ about the capture operation. “If it is determined that the pups can thrive, (Parks and Wildlife) plans to release them when they will be adult-sized and able to hunt on their own or together in a pack.”

Davis said that its biologists expect that the pups will be fully grown around mid-November or early-December. The wolves will be collared before release.

“We’re going to monitor them and promptly address any sort of conflicts if they arise with livestock,” Davis said. 

Currently, the pups are still dependent on adults for food. The agency reports that they still have baby teeth and “are not effective hunters of anything larger than a rabbit or squirrel.” 

Parks and Wildlife is less clear on its plans for the adult female that has been associated with the livestock killings.

“​​If (Parks and Wildlife) decides to re-release the adult female, she will be closely monitored,” it reports. 

With the Copper Creek capture and release, Davis said the ultimate goal is “to make sure that these pups have a second chance in the wild.” 

As such, whether or not the adult female is released may come down to “what’s going to give (the pups) the best chance to be successful.”

“The pups’ success in the wild is elevated the more time they have with an adult — and her in particular,” Davis added.  

Parks and Wildlife has yet to determine where they could be released, but it comes down to a few ​​key factors, Davis said.

“Part of that is making sure that they go into a space where they can’t just run right back,” Davis said. “The other part of that will be where we have healthy ungulate herds at that time of the year of the releases. And then where can we try to, to the best of our ability, avoid or minimize the potential conflicts with livestock producers.” 

The agency has indicated that elected officials and ranchers in the release location will be notified before any releases occur. 

Why Parks and Wildlife chose this course of action for the pack 

Since announcing its decision to capture and relocate the wolves, Parks and Wildlife has been criticized and questioned for choosing this course of action. 

For one, this contradicts recommendations and research from its 2022 wolf reintroduction and management plan. The plan states that Parks and Wildlife will not relocate wolves with depredation histories in the wild, adding that doing so is “viewed as translocating the problem along with the wolves.”

In a statement, Davis addressed this, emphasizing that “the plan also calls for flexibility.” 

“It may not at times account for every unique situation the agency and our experts encounter,” he added. 

Davis, in an interview on Monday, said that at this time when the male wolf was known to be “really hitting livestock, that would have been a time where, according to our plan, we would consider removal.”

However, the presence of the den this spring “made it complicated,” Davis said. 

“Removing the male at that time, while he was the sole source of food and the female was denning, would likely have been fatal to the pups and counter to the restoration mandate,” Davis stated in an emailed statement. 

A few things had changed by August when the agency made the decision to relocate the pack. It had previously denied a lethal action permit in July that had been requested by Middle Park stockgrowers in May. In its FAQ on the capture, Parks and Wildlife states that this denial was “focused on events occurring between April and mid-July.” 

Subsequent events — including one confirmed wolf depredation and one that was not confirmed — were what led the agency to the ultimate decision to capture the pack, Davis said.

“It’s complicated in being able to point to a particular animal as the culprit of a depredation event,” he said. “That’s why we’re trying to be somewhat flexible and open-minded about which one of those adults was actually involved or we think more likely was involved than not.”

Plus, the agency wanted to ensure that the pups did not grow old enough to learn this behavior from the adults.

“The ultimate goal of this whole thing is to — before they learned how to hunt and potentially be subjected to learning livestock behavior — we needed to get them out of there so that they would have a second chance in the wild to contribute to the restoration effort,” Davis said. 

This does not necessarily set a precedent for future incidents as Colorado continues its reintroduction effort. 

“Down the road, when we have larger packs with more adults, that would have been an entirely different decision space for us,” Davis said. “But given that he was essentially keeping her and those pups alive, it was a difficult decision.”

One of the criticisms Parks and Wildlife has received with the Copper Creek Pack specifically, is that the male was from the Wenaha Pack in Oregon, which was connected to confirmed kills. Colorado’s reintroduction plan required that wolves released in Colorado did not have a history of chronic depredation. 

After the male’s release in Colorado, Parks and Wildlife reported that the Wenhana Pack had not had depredations since that October — following the lethal removal of four wolves from that pack — and was related to “infrequent depredation events.”   

The adult female wolf was not part of a pack and had no known history of livestock killings, according to Parks and Wildlife.

Wildlife advocacy organizations have speculated that misuse or lack of use of nonlethal actions led to these depredations. 

In a letter shared by at least two wildlife advocacy nonprofits, Defenders of Wildlife and the Western Watersheds Project, Parks and Wildlife indicated that denial of a lethal take permit was done in part because producers in the area had not yet taken all courses of nonlethal mitigation available. 

The letter indicates that the applicants, whose names are redacted from the letter, “delayed using or refused to use other nonlethal techniques that could have prevented or minimized depredations.”

It later adds that “depredations declined significantly” after the applicants later deployed some of the nonlethal measures. 

Why these two wolves began killing livestock is unknown, Davis said. 

“We would all be speculating as to the why. To me, I describe this as the perfect storm,” he said. “All the other wolves that we let out in that release from Oregon, they wandered around as singles or doubles or triples, learning the landscape — understanding kind of their native prey behavior and distribution — and this particular pair just settled down right away and had pups.” 

At the end of the day, however, “this is all a behavioral issue that we’re trying to address,” Davis said.

The chosen course of action “gives us a good chance of getting in there and altering that behavior, especially for the pups,” he added. 

Part of preventing future chronic depredation by wolves includes defining the term or, as Davis put it “finalizing (Parks and Wildlife’s) lethal management criteria.”

To create this criterion, the agency formed an ad-hoc working group — made up of wildlife advocates, producers and experts — earlier this year. This group will bring forth its recommendations to the Parks and Wildlife Commission in October. 

The goal is to have this criterion finalized and in place before the Copper Creek animals are released, Davis said.