Wolfage: CPW Tries Again with British Columbian Wolves

"Fladry" deters wolves, they say. (USA Today).

Previous wolfage: "Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves"

With the bad wolves, the re-captured "Copper Creek Pack," now detained in an undisclosed location, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is releasing good wolves on the Western Slope.  (See UPDATE below, however.)

Captured somewhere in British Columbia somewhere, they never eat beef or mutton and reliably vote for the Liberals. 

On dit.*

According to CPW's  Instagram feed,

"The wolves will be captured and transported in crates to Colorado, collared, and released as soon as possible once they arrive at select sites in Garfield, Eagle and/or Pitkin counties. We plan to release 10-15 wolves on the Western Slope per year, for 3-5 years, as outlined in our Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan."https://www.instagram.com/coparkswildlife/

An apparently erroneous report on the Colorado Politics website led to one Pitkin County landowner being visited by camo'd up armed "sightseeers," reports the Aspen Times.   

When asked to leave, they parked on a county road behind a bush just off the property, where they remained for part of the afternoon, according to the owner. 

“This is putting the safety of my family, the livestock, the wolves, all in jeopardy, and all of the allegations were false,” the owner said of the Colorado Politics article published on Tuesday. Two of the ranch owners asked the publication to redact the article when they read it on Thursday morning, which the publication did.

Social media played its part, the article said.

But rumors continued after the new year. Apart from [Facebook group] Colorado Wolf Tracker, the Roaring Fork Swap Facebook page circulated information about the ranch family members, putting their names to the public, “adding fuel to the fire,” the owner said.

And an anonymous source claimed they witnessed Colorado Parks and Wildlife trucks and trailers driving toward the ranch, further strengthening the rumors.

 Colorado Public News rounded up the political side on Jan. 14:

Political tensions have started to boil over amid the lack of official details. The state wildlife commission denied a petition from agriculture organizations last week seeking to pause the reintroduction program. Meanwhile, another livestock group submitted a draft ballot measure to repeal the program, and state and federal elected officials have flexed their political muscles and threatened to take action to protect rural communities.

Colorado Politics did publish another piece on wolf reintroduction on January 8, written by members of the "wolf-livestock coexistence working group," which stated,

Important signs of progress in achieving coexistence are emerging. To date, 50 ranch vulnerability assessments have been completed or are in the process of being completed. Sixty-eight people have expressed interest in becoming range riders. Dozens of guard dogs have been placed on ranches. Turbo fladry and electric fencing have been deployed successfully on numerous ranches. CDA is providing grants for range riding and carcass management. And CPW and CDA are holding coexistence and stockmanship workshops in potentially affected counties. The ad hoc group is still divided as to whether the landscape will have enough coverage with site assessments before the release of wolves from British Columbia.

 "Fladry" are flapping plastic ribbons placed along pasture boundaries. How they deter long-legged hard-running carnivores, I do not yet understand.

UPDATE: On Jan 19, CPW said the 2025 wolf release was completed. Fifteen wolves from BC plus the five survivors of the Copper Creek Pack were released in Eagle and Pitkin counties. They think the Copper Creek wolves can somehow stop "depredating" livestock:

This agency decision to re-release the Copper Creek animals considered multiple factors, including the health of the animals, the timing of the B.C. releases this year and the potential proximity to new wolves on the landscape. This strategy gives the animals the best chance for survival, advancing Colorado’s gray wolf restoration efforts. 

"As I said at the time, options in the case of the Copper Creek Pack were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward. The male adult wolf was involved in multiple depredations. 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,” said [CPW director Jeff] Davis.

The capture of the pack was a management action that was taken to change the behavior of the animals to reduce depredations and could further impact the adult female's behavior moving forward.

* Since the wolves are Canadian, I am required to sprinkle in some French. Translation: "They say."

The Last Big Beetle-Killed Pine

Early January 2024: the blue stain of the
tree-killing fungus is all over the big pine's sapwood

My wife told me she could feel that big pine hit the ground from our house, maybe 200 yards away. 

I had had my eye on it as a firewood source for several years, and because I had been more the Grasshopper than the Ant during late 2024, I needed more wood now. And there it stood, dead for several years, another victim of the Mountain Pine Beetle and its hitchhiker, the blue-stain fungus.

The Mountain Pine Beetle is always present somewhere in the Rockies. (And in the Black Hills, where Dad, then a USFS district ranger, supervised several essentially useless spraying campaigns in the early 1960 —but that is what he was told to do.) It hits ponderosa pine in patches and lodgepole pines in huge swathes. Anyone who travels in Summit, Gunnison, Conejos or other counties where lodgepole grows has seen the mountain sides covered with dead trees.

Lodgepole pine killed by pine beetle fungus. (Colorado State Forest Service)

Meanwhile I was seeing  beetle (actually fungus)-killed ponderosa pines in little clusters. Some were right near the driveway. One fell on a power line (fortunately "de-energized," i.e. turned off). Since they were close by and mostly uphill, felling and bucking and moving the wood was fairly simple. Some were farther away, up the ridge, but I was not going to push any more road into the "back 20" than the previous owners had done, and helicopter-logging is a little too pricey.

Ponderosa pine killed by pine beetle-carried fungus
and left for the birds.

I left a couple of big ones standing because I realize that cavity-nesting birds need some dead trees. That means that woodpeckers need to make holes while looking for bugs, and then the nuthatches etc. can enlarge them.

The dead pine pictured is up back from the guest cabin. Flickers (which are woodpeckers) are always attacking its cedar siding, so I hoped that having a nice dead tree would attract them away. Results have been . . . mixed. Apparently "natural" is not always better. But I will leave it there until it falls over

When I look around, I don't see any more new beetle-killed pines. Maybe the infestation has run its course — for now. Future firewood planing will have to take a different course.

This big tree was about a century old, which places its start to when someone named William Funderbunk owned this land, apparently part of a little ranch that was never too successful. He must have had other income as well. There were others before and after him.

The original homestead claim was "proved up" in 1879, and according to the abstract of title, the land was sold for taxes a couple of times in the 1940s, when not being used for collateral on loans, until 1958, when an enterprising Arizona couple purchased 26 acres with foothills home sites in mind.

That's the history of the land in a stack of 46 little papers, fastidiously typed out and held together with a brass fastener. It covers 84 years, 1879–1963. We bought it decades later from the middle-aged daughter of that1963 purchaser. Back then, this tree was still growing up on the mountainside.

Maybe a century is a pretty good run for a pine in this arid setting. As I swing the splitting maul, I will think about its life.

Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves

A suitably logo'd Governor Polis releases a wolf in December 2023.

An odd news release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife popped up in my inbox last week. Having worked as a newspaper reporter, I am pretty good at translating Bureaucratese into English, so I will give this one a try. It involves a "memorandum of understanding" between CPW and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which is headquartered in Ignacio, La Plata County.

Headline: Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Southern Ute Indian Tribe Announce MOU on Gray Wolf Restoration

Original: CPW and the Tribe are committed to operating on a basis of a government-to-government relationship that simultaneously recognizes and respects Tribal sovereignty. The MOU also states that CPW and the Tribe will work together to provide a process to minimize conflicts, memorialize a process for information sharing on gray wolf reintroductions throughout the State and confirm the Tribe’s intent to participate in the State’s program to provide fair and timely compensation to the Tribe or Tribal Members for any losses of livestock proven to be caused by gray wolves.

Translation: We, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, do not want any wolves near our livestock operations, and if you release them here, we will pull out the  "sovereignty card" and see you in court.

Wasn't that easy?

They cannot play the sovereignty card, but two Western Slope counties, Rio Blanco (2021) and Montrose (2021), had previously passed "no wolf reintroduction" resolutions. In November 2024, CPW said that Rio Blanco Co. had been removed from the list "due to the limited number of state-owned sites that adhered to the criteria in the plan and their proximity to livestock, elevating the risk of conflict, as well as the potential impact to elk and deer herds recovering from the severe winter of 2022-23."

In the memorandum, CPW agreed not to release wolves within 60 miles of tribal land boundaries nor within the "Brunot area," 3.7 million acres of the San Juan Mountains of SW Colorado where the Utes retain hunting rights. So they probably won't be trotting through downtown Ignacio.

In other news, someone had shot and wounded one of the original ten wolves released in Grand County.  This was one of the "bad wolves" that were released and then re-captured in August 2024

At the time, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the wolf died four days after its capture and had “deep puncture wounds” on its hind leg that were unrelated to the capture.  The wolf’s body weight was almost 30% lower than it was when it was released in December 2023, when it weighed 104 pounds, CPW said, and it died despite receiving antibiotics for an infection. 

Now, a necropsy has determined the wolf died as a result of a gunshot wound, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday [Dec. 26, 2024]. The federal agency said it was seeking information “regarding the illegal killing of a gray wolf in Grand County” and offering a reward. . . .

The Copper Creek wolf was one of three of the 10 reintroduced wolves that have died. Another died in Grand County in September [2024] and was discovered by wildlife officials after its collar sent a “mortality signal.” A necropsy later determined that the wolf likely died from a fight with another wolf, and that it had a healed gunshot wound on its leg, according to federal officials. 

The first of the reintroduced wolves to die, also a male, was likely killed by a mountain lion, CPW said. It was found dead in Larimer County in April [2024] and had puncture wounds to its skull.

And to end the year, Governor Polis said that the whole wolf-reintroduction program would have been a lot cheaper if it had not been for those damn ranchers. Misinformation!

What Polis said at a political meeting on Dec. 3, 2024, "was Colorado will continue gray wolf restoration because it is the will of the voters, and that CPW wouldn’t have had to to go Canada for the next round of wolves 'if ranchers wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, don’t get them from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho.’"

Actually, as the Colorado Sun there reported, it was the state agencies in Wyoming and Idaho that refused to supply Colorado with wolves. Sadly, "Polis hates rural Colorado" has become a journalistic trope in the past couple of years.