Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated that Parks and Wildlife successfully captured 15 wolves in 16 days. The operation lasted six days, not 16.

This past week, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released a total of 20 gray wolves into Eagle and Pitkin counties — its second release season since voters mandated a statewide wolf reintroduction in 2020. 

Between Jan. 10 and Jan. 18, the wildlife agency brought 15 wolves from British Columbia and released the five members of the Copper Creek pack — one adult and four pups — that have been held in captivity since late August and early September. 

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This nearly triples the number of wolves in Colorado, bringing the total to 29. 

Jeff Davis, Parks and WIldlife’s director, said at a press conference on Monday, Jan. 20, that 2025 is going to be “dramatically different than the last year.”

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“Will there be new things that we have to work together to grapple with and get through? Yeah, but the fact that we have the staff capacity, we have strong partnerships … this is a whole new ballgame with the programs that we’ve put in place and the additional capacity we’re going to have on the landscape,” Davis said.

During Monday’s press conference, Davis and staff from Parks and Wildlife and the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship fielded questions from statewide reporters on the capture operations in Canada, release sites in Colorado and the Copper Creek pack. 

Inside the British Columbia operations

Work with the B.C. ministry has been ongoing since Parks and Wildlife in the fall announced the province as its next source. 

Jennifer Psyllakis, the assistant deputy minister of B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, said the ministry viewed it as a shared opportunity to learn more about wildlife management and contribute to each agency’s conservation objections. 

Supplying wolves to Colorado helped the province’s planned operation to implement “predator control measures to recover threatened caribou,” Psyllakis said. 

Successfully getting 15 wolves in six days was not just luck, but the result of months of work thinking through challenges and logistics to capture the animals, according to Eric Odell, Parks and Wildlife’s wolf conservation program manager. 

While in B.C., operations included using two helicopters — one to locate and one to transport — with staff from both countries’ agencies following collared wolves, targeting known habitats and looking for tracks. Once immobilized and captured, the wolves were screened for major injuries and illnesses before being transported to temporary pens where they were held until flying to Colorado. All animals were vaccinated, treated and monitored once there. 

While Colorado’s plan holds that wolves would not be transported that were involved in chronic depredation situations, this was a non-factor with these wolves. 

“The wolves in British Columbia do not overlap with livestock,” Odell said. “Which isn’t to say that those wolves will not get involved in depredation. They will in time. Where wolves and livestock share the landscape, there will be depredation.”

Odell reported that somewhere around five wolves did not meet the other necessary criteria — which included being too young, or in one case having a glazed-over eye — and were never transported to the temporary pen. 

One wolf died during the operations after being transported to the pen. A necropsy performed by the Canadian ministry showed it had a diseased liver and lungs that impacted its ability to metabolize the drugs administered. These factors contributed to its death, not the capture operations, according to Odell.  

In total, eight female and seven male wolves were brought to Colorado. 

Coming to Colorado

Parks and Wildlife — aided by Grand Junction wildlife flight nonprofit LightHawk — made three flights with wolves this last week, releasing wolves on Jan. 12, 14 and 16 in Eagle and Pitkin counties. All the releases were made at night, which the agency states is due to the timing of flights and operations, not secrecy reasons. 

Utilizing the release zones, requirements and criteria outlined in its wolf management plan, the agency had determined in November that this round of releases would occur in Eagle, Pitkin and/or Garfield counties. Parks and Wildlife was able to “avoid the need to go to Garfield release locations” by just selecting sites in Eagle and Pitkin counties. 

While wolf dropoffs have to occur on private or state land, the agency would not give any additional details — even as misinformation, criticism from elected officials and speculation swirled during the week of the releases. 

“We’re not going to disclose the release sites,” Davis said. “We may need them in the future. And we would do that out of protection for the landowners, managers, as well as the animals.”

Davis added that the agency is “not trying to be secretive.” 

“We have a responsibility to our staff and the safety of those animals, that’s always the balance in any sort of operation that we’re doing here. I would argue if the calls for increased violence or the security threats were reduced, that would be helpful,” he said, citing threats and stalking of Parks and Wildlife staff as well as the illegal poaching of two of Colorado’s reintroduced wolves.

In the bigger picture, the release site doesn’t matter too much, Odell noted.

“The place where the crate sits when the door is open is just a place for that to happen,” Odell said. “We don’t expect that the wolves will stay on a particular parcel of land for the duration of their life at all. They cross rivers, they cross highways, they cross mountain ranges. There’s nothing really that will stop that.”

The agency, since the releases, said it has had three or four reports of wolf tracks in Eagle and Pitkin counties, one unconfirmed report of a visual sighting and no depredations to date. 

Copper Creek pack 

While the agency confirmed that some of the releases occurred north of Interstate 70, the Copper Creek pack wolves were not among this group and were released south of the interstate.

The Copper Creek Pack was held in captivity for several months after being tied to multiple livestock deaths in Grand County. In deviating from its wolf management plan — which held it would not translocate known-depredating wolves to a different part of the state — Davis maintained the agency’s decision to relocate the Copper Creek pack represented a “unique situation” due to the involvement of the pups.

“It was really important to us — as kind of the first successfully breeding pack from our initial releases — (for the pack) to contribute to that sustainable population of wolves moving forward,” Davis said. 

Davis said that it was the pack’s adult male that was connected directly to livestock killings when the female was denning. It is “not biologically feasible or accurate” to say that the pups were capable of depredation before their capture, he added. 

The male wolf was extremely malnourished and had an infection when captured in late August. The wolf died in captivity days after its capture, with initial necropsy results from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determining that a gunshot wound was ultimately to blame for its death.

As the pack returns to the wild, “several things are different” from last year, Davis said. 

This includes that the agency is now conducting site assessments for ranchers to prevent wolves from killing livestock, rolling out a range rider program with the Colorado Department of Agriculture and helping ranchers use other nonlethal mitigation measures. Plus, the pack’s experience of being captured and having to “interact with humans in a very unsafe space again” will alter their behavior as they return to the wild this month,” Davis said. 

The agency also now has a definition for “chronic depredation” — which was ambiguous when the Copper Creek pack was first connected to the livestock deaths. Now, these wolves will be held to this definition, Davis said.

“We’ve handled these animals twice, and we have these other programs (to avoid and minimize livestock-wolf conflicts) that we’re going to try,” Davis said. “The goal isn’t to just kill wolves for killing wolves’ sake.” 

As the agency enters this second year, Davis asked for everyone — ranchers, Parks and Wildlife staff, the general public, wolf advocates — to lean in, work together and continue to learn and improve. 

Now is the time “to roll up our sleeves collectively to help support our ranching community and our rural communities, not just in the wolf restoration, but in maintaining a healthy and viable industry and rural communities in Colorado,” Davis said.

“I am confident that we will succeed in restoring the healthy, self-sustaining population of gray wolves in Colorado while at the same time supporting our agricultural communities and the vital role that they play in Colorado’s overall human health and well-being, economy, heritage and our conservation efforts.”