Conservation groups say it’s finally time to bring gray wolves back to Colorado, but federal agencies say they will have to come off the endangered species list first.
The grass was just starting to green up on the hillsides near Kremmling this spring when a hunter looked down the end of his scope and took a long-range shot at what he thought was a coyote. When he got closer to the canine he’d felled, he realized he’d taken down something else: a 90-pound male wolf that had wandered more than 500 miles from Montana.
The only wolves we can confirm we’ve had in Colorado are the dead ones—the female from Yellowstone that died on Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs in 2004, another female from Yellowstone in 2009 that was poisoned by a now-banned substance used to kill wolves and coyotes that attack sheep, and Echo, the wolf named by schoolchildren, possibly passed through the state on her way to becoming the first wolf seen near the Grand Canyon in more than a century, before she, too, was shot by a coyote hunter.
There are reported sightings, and suspicions, and hunters’ online forums propagating their own words of wisdom for how to handle it if you spot a wolf: Shoot, shovel and shut up. But will the pressure from conservation groups, and reintroduced wolves themselves, increase so much that wolves will once again thrive in the state?
The Challenge of Recovery
For a decade, Colorado has carried a plan to protect and manage conflicts with wolves that was drafted, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the idea that inevitably as the wolf population re-established in Yellowstone spread throughout the West, some of the animals would find their way to Colorado. But given the management practices allowed in neighboring states that call for culling the number of wolves down from more than 1,000 to under 200, it seems unlikely. So conservation groups have shifted gears to a more pro-active approach, launching campaigns to see wolves deliberately reintroduced to Colorado.
“If we just wait until they wander in from the northern Rockies, or from New Mexico or Arizona, I don’t think it’s going to happen over several lifetimes,” says Delia Malone, with Sierra Club, which has targeted its outreach and organizing efforts on those often most-vocal opponents of wolves: ranchers and hunters.
They’re coordinating informational meetings for experts in reducing wolf attacks on cattle, and encouraging Colorado residents to contact Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which manages the elk and deer herds and issues hunting tags, to express support for wolves.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesperson Matt Robbins responds, “It is a very delicate conversation, and we don’t have much to say about it at this point.”
WildEarth Guardians is coordinating “wolf pack” meetings in Denver, Boulder, Vail and Pueblo to build support for wolf recovery, and pack members are encouraged to write letters to public officials, in addition to hosting wolf-themed art exhibitions and wolf dances, hanging wolf silhouettes around town and painting faces (there’s a how-to guide online).
“Inspiration comes in all different shapes and sizes,” says John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians. “The challenge of wolf recovery is fundamentally one about political will and population support, so you start with education, information and hopefully a good dose of inspiration and turn that towards political targets, and for us right now it’s Colorado’s two U.S. Senators. … These are political decisions, and so political leaders are the ones who need to be the target.”
Building the Base
There’s no telling how long it would take to drive this campaign to fruition, however.
“We’re at the very beginning of a multi-year process to build the base,” Horning says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of people don’t even know that wolves don’t exist in Colorado, that they were more or less exterminated. We’ve got a lot of base-building to do and that’s going to take at least the next couple years.”
But seeing wolves along the entire spine of the Rocky Mountains has long been a goal for the agency, Horning says. The southern portion is covered by Mexican wolves, which were reintroduced to Arizona and New Mexico in 1998; the north, by gray wolves from Canada’s and Yellowstone’s populations that now roam Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and, just recently, into California. Colorado is a last hold-out, and has room and prey enough to support, by some estimates more than 1,000 wolves (though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cautions this number may no longer be relevant).
If there were a congressional workaround, it wouldn’t be the first time. Congressional riders pulled wolves off the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is the agency charged with administering the Endangered Species Act, which means weathering pressure from both sides of a long-controversial issue. It’s made clear that it’s ready to get out of the business of managing gray wolves.
“The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is not to have wolves everywhere they ever were in North America,it’s to have enough wolves to have a viable population that’s self sustaining so you no longer have any threat of extinction,” says Mike Jimenez, USFWS northern Rocky Mountain wolf coordinator.
Accordingly, the USFWS has been trying to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list and hand management off to states, but that move has been tangled up both in the court system, and in the peer review process for the science involved. The Endangered Species Act specifically states that endangered species must be managed using the “best available science,” and the proposal to separate the listing for wolves, which includes both gray and Mexican wolves, subsequently underwent peer review.
While taxonomy and genetics are newer fields that tend to see diverging opinions, the last peer review of the USFWS’s proposal unanimously concluded the agency wasn’t using the best available science. Jimenez says they’ll look for additional opinions.
To hear the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tell it, the endangered species protections wildlife conservation groups have been trying to preserve for the species are the source of the very red tape that would tie Colorado’s hands, should state wildlife officials want to bring wolves back. Were wolves delisted, Colorado would take charge of management of any wolves in the state, and it would be up to Colorado and other states in the West to decide to reintroduce wolves.
“We can’t do anything until the current status changes,” says Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Robbins. That doesn’t mean the agency necessarily wants to craft a plan, just that delisting would, at the very least, be likely to prompt a review of the possibility, he says.
THE MEXICAN SOLUTION
The thing is, there’s already a plan drafted and put forward to the federal government that would bring wolves back into Colorado. In 2010, the USFWS assembled a team to revise the plan for Mexican wolf recovery. The scientists on that team told the Service that a viable population of Mexican wolves would consist of three populations, of no fewer than 200 wolves each, spread over three areas in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
Those recommendations were presented to the stakeholders, including representatives from each of the states concerned, and cattlemen’s and sportsmen’s groups. They were not well received.
“Those folks were generally opposed and shocked at the number of wolves that would be required, 750, but you can imagine that spread over the parts of three states, that really is not very many animals on the landscape,” says David Parsons, who was hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990 to oversee the Mexican wolf program and was on the team to draft the new recovery plan. The USFWS has been sued by a number of environmental group for failing to manage Mexican wolves in a way that provides the species real recovery; they’re classified as a non-essential population, and therefore some of the Mexican wolves reintroduced are captured or killed each year to manage conflicts with ranchers.
Because of those lawsuits, Fish and Wildlife Service staff largely decline to comment on the status of Mexican wolf recovery plans and intentions, but via email, public affairs specialist Jeff Humphrey said, “At present we don’t have a Mexican wolf recovery plan that includes recovery goals. … A Mexican wolf recovery team will need to assess (among other things) the actual gray wolf subspecies (or transition zone between Rocky Mountain gray wolf and Mexican wolf) that occurred historically in southern Colorado to determine the geographical appropriateness of Mexican wolf recovery efforts in Colorado.”
In other words, there’s no reason to assume they’ll use the existing recommendations. Public input doesn’t often seem to move the bar, but lawsuits do. A lawsuit propelled Mexican wolf recovery from theory to practice in the 1980s, and a lawsuit stopped wolf hunts in Wyoming when the state set a target population of wolves at 100. The courts are one way of working around a volatile issue: a defendant gets to tell one half of stakeholders that they’re simply doing what the court required.
After more than three decades of working on wolf recovery, Jimenez, with USFWS, says, the lessons have been in how to balance wolves and human wants.
“We learned that opinions are very, very strong, and they don’t change with time very much and those are the things that the states are going to have to deal with now that they’re managing the wolves,” he says. “The good news is you can manage them, you can recover them, you can bring them back but it’s a real exercise in compromise and respecting opposing sides.”
Elizabeth Miller has been covering environmental issues for Boulder Weekly since 2011.
