Inside the release of 5 wolves in Eagle County as 15 new predators land in Colorado

It’s extremely quiet. Only the slight shifting of boots in the snow, rustling of jackets and the occasional plane humming overhead breaks through the silence. The night is cold, still and dark. The moon has yet to rise, and only the shapes and shadows of the bushes and trees on the landscape are visible, along with five large aluminum crates. 

After around 20 minutes, following some coaxing from Colorado Parks and Wildlife staffers, a large female wolf emerges from a crate into the night. 

A darker shade of gray, she is nearly impossible to spot until several headlamps illuminate her as she glances back toward a group of 10 Parks and Wildlife staff. Just as quickly as she is spotted, she disappears into the trees. 

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Paws on the ground

The wolf is the first of five British Columbia wolves released in Eagle County just after 7 p.m. on Thursday. She is also likely part of a mother-daughter pair released alongside two other females and one male.

The five wolves are the final group to be released in northwest Colorado this month as part of the state’s ongoing efforts to reestablish a population of gray wolves. 

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Parks and Wildlife officials captured a total of 15 wolves in British Columbia to release in Eagle and Pitkin counties. The three releases took place on Jan. 12, 14 and 16. The group of 15 includes seven females and eight males.

Parks and Wildlife also released the five wolves from the Copper Creek pack that had been held in captivity since September. The pack includes one adult female and four 9-month-old pups. 

The 15 wolves from British Columbia and the Copper Creek pack join nine wolves that Parks and Wildlife officials are monitoring in Colorado (seven surviving wolves from the 2023 release, a fifth pup from the Copper Creek pack and one wolf that came to Colorado naturally).

The agency’s second release operation in just over a year was shrouded in mystery, rumors and misinformation as well as growing unease from ranchers as Parks and Wildlife seeks to establish a self-sustaining population of wolves as mandated by Colorado voters in 2020. 

What happens at a release? 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife began the capture of wolves from British Columbia on Friday, Jan. 10. Over the next week, Parks and Wildlife staff transferred the 15 wolves to Colorado via three flights flown by Grand Junction nonprofit LightHawk Conservation Flying.

Reports of the first flight on Sunday, Jan. 12, surfaced on the Colorado Wolf Tracker Facebook page as group members tracked a LightHawk plane landing at the Eagle County Regional Airport in Gypsum. 

Once captured, each wolf was given treatments for internal and external parasites. They were vaccinated against rabies, canine distemper virus, canine adenovirus, canine parainfluenza virus and canine parvovirus in Canada. All received GPS collars. Then, the animals were flown to Colorado and monitored continuously by the agency’s veterinarian. 

Wolves are transported in large crates and are generally very quiet besides shifting positions and chewing provided ice blocks for hydration, according to Rachael Gonzales, Parks and Wildlife’s public information officer for the northwest region. 

There are no federal quarantine requirements for reintroduction of wolves, according to Parks and Wildlife. 

Once at the release site, Parks and Wildlife staff set the animals free in a choreographed manner. Several staffers likened it to a dance. The releases are spaced apart by about five or 10 minutes. Regardless of how much planning goes into the release, it’s the animal that has the final say on when it decides to bolt out of the crate, bringing an element of unpredictability to the process.  

Of the five released Thursday, only one took off nearly immediately once the crate was opened. The others took differing amounts of coaxing, with staff safely moving the crate around and sometimes shining light from behind to show the animals the door was open.   

“They have been through a lot between being captured in B.C., sedated, and transported via helicopter to the base where they were evaluated, collared, and placed in a crate and then flown to Colorado where they were trucked to the release site,” Gonzales said. “Some animals left the crates immediately upon the door being opened and some took their time to adjust to the surroundings.” 

No matter how long it took to coax them out, all the wolves glanced backward toward the 10 Parks and Wildlife staff standing by and monitoring the wolves upon their release. One stopped to sniff the ground. The staff — which included district and regional wildlife managers, terrestrial biologists, the agency wildlife veterinarian, members of its communications team, a photographer and videographer — are looking to make sure they’re healthy. 

“We’ll observe them for the first 5, 10 seconds to make sure their postures are correct, that all legs are functional, that their gait is correct — walking, running, etc. — and we’ll record that stuff, and that’s what we use as a biological checkmark to make sure that was a healthy animal that hit the landscape,” said Matt Yamashita, the regional wildlife manager for Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties.  

Cloaked in secrecy 

Many precautions — including only giving the address to a select number of staff members and agency trucks attempting to avoid detection on the way to the site — were taken in the name of balancing the “safety of staff and the animals with the level and timing of information provided during this complex wildlife operation,” Gonzales said. 

While all the releases occurred at night, Gonzales clarified that this was due to the operations’ logistics, including the length of the flight. 

“Before the wolves could leave B.C., they had to go through customs, where the appropriate permits and inspections were conducted,” Gonzales said. “Similar procedures were followed in Colorado before crates could be taken off the plane. After completing these checks, crates were loaded onto transport vehicles, which often departed close to or after sunset, resulting in arrivals at the release locations during the dark.”

With the agency aware of concerns around transparency, it has “committed to collaboration and conversations with all stakeholders,” Gonzales said, listing the meetings with county commissioners, producers, and community members over the past year. 

Parks and Wildlife Deputy Director Reid DeWalt this month reported that members of the public followed agency personnel, made threats and staked out government offices. Gonzales added that “(Parks Wildlife) offices were watched and threatening social media posts and phone calls were received.” 

In addition to these, the agency has emphasized that “two of the 10 wolves reintroduced in 2023 have been illegally shot.”

These safety risks led to a decision not to share wolf release details while the operation was underway, Gonzales added.

It’s this level of secrecy, however, that has caused elected officials and members of the public to scrutinize Parks and Wildlife during the second round of releases. 

“Right now, I feel like I’m in the dark,” said Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, D-Glenwood Springs, in an interview with the Vail Daily on Thursday. “I don’t know how to support my community. I don’t know where to go for answers.”  

Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, told the Vail Daily there needs to be a balance between safety and transparency. While Parks and Wildlife staff deserve security to execute their job without incident, the public, as taxpayers, deserve “as much as is reasonably possible,” Roberts said.  

The first release of wolves in December 2023 was more publicized than all subsequent releases. It happened during the day with members of the press and Gov. Jared Polis standing around as the first five wolves from Oregon were released in Colorado. The release of the next five wolves was more discreet, with the agency sharing details of the final three drops in one announcement following their completion.   

This year, when Parks and Wildlife announced that the operations in British Columbia were underway, it provided few additional details. Instead, it opted to wait until the operations concluded.   

While the agency reported in November that sites in Eagle, Pitkin and Garfield counties would be considered for the 2025 releases, it did not release any other site details. The agency “considered any state-owned (land) and willing private landowners in Garfield, Eagle, and Pitkin Counties” that met the criteria outlined in its wolf management plan. 

“In the bigger picture, the location of a release site plays a relatively minor role in the overall process,” Gonzales said. “As with other animals that we relocate, the primary goal when identifying potential release locations for wolves is to ensure that these sites are in a larger landscape context that can adequately support the animals.”

Sen. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, said he and other Western Slope lawmakers learned that the operation was underway only an hour before the public release. Seeking more transparency from Parks and Wildlife, Caitlin wanted the agency to provide communities with the exact locations of wolf releases and where they were going. 

For ranchers, the lack of information added a degree of uncertainty and worry to an already stressful week. 

“It just encouraged our anxiety because we knew that the wolves came into Eagle County Airport, but we had no idea where they were going. We had no idea if they were coming here,” said Susan Nottingham, whose family has been ranching in Eagle County for over a century. “It’s just a high-anxiety situation with lots of rumors, so you don’t know what to believe or who to believe.”

Ginny Harrington, whose family runs a ranch in Carbondale and serves on the board for the Holy Cross Cattlemen’s Association, said she understood the difficult balance that Parks and Wildlife was trying to strike with transparency. 

“I understand why they don’t want to tell us exactly where, but I think it makes it more of a mess in the long run,” she said, adding that there’s a lot of angst on both sides. 

“We’re in that holding mode, which causes a lot of emotions to flare up,” Harrington added.

Was Colorado ready for more wolves? 

In addition to seeking information and transparency, ranchers and lawmakers have raised concerns over the agency’s preparedness. 

The releases started less than a week after the Parks and Wildlife Commission denied a petition from 26 organizations representing the ranching community. The petition asked the commission to temporarily pause wolf releases until more conflict minimization tools — range riding, site assessments and more — were fully funded and deployed. 

In the staff’s recommendation to deny the petition, it claimed to have addressed all seven requests. 

Harrington said it has been tough because all those items “are not really on the ground.” 

“Folks are just getting their site assessments done — there’s only a few done,” she said. “Without knowing where the wolves are, there’s none of these nonlethal mitigation items deployed.”

Nottingham had one word to describe how she was feeling on Friday: betrayed. 

“I think that (Parks and Wildlife) is just shoving these wolves down our throats,” Nottingham said. “They are in no way prepared to manage them. They are in no way prepared to help us protect our property. I’m just disgusted with the whole thing.” 

Nottingham said she’s seen the impact of wolves in Colorado since the first batch was released in 2023. 

“For the entire summer, my cattle were upset. They were stressed. They would not stay where they were supposed to be. They were breaking through fences,” she said, adding that the landscape and geography make it difficult to know whether they’ve had wolves killing livestock on their property. 

While Nottingham knows the agency has held meetings and met with ranchers, it’s not enough to curb the impacts.

“They can meet and talk until they’re blue in the face, but that really does not do anything to help us,” she said. 

Harrington and her husband, Tom, have been engaged throughout the creation of the wolf plan and during many of the wolf and county commissioner meetings since reintroduction began. However, there are still a lot of questions out there.

“How are wolves going to increase the losses we see? How is that going to impact the ability to keep ranching? When will we have these tools? Will we have them before calving season? Where are wolves going to go first? How do we help if it’s our neighbors or ourselves seeing impacts?” were among the questions Harrington listed. 

To help, the Harringtons have been working with their community, encouraging ranches to sign up for site assessments, getting information from ranchers who have directly dealt with wolves and sharing what they learn. 

“We’re trying to encourage folks to just take a deep breath and let’s try to work through this together,” Harrington said. “But it is very frustrating when we just don’t have the things on the ground yet to help us to be able to work through it.” 

Ranchers today are dealing with pressures from development, population increases and recreation pushing wildlife onto ranches, the presence of predators, scarcity of water resources, financial stress and more, she said.

“All of these things add up together. You think of blowing the house down, and it just takes that last little thing that pushes you over the top,” Harrington said. “It all leads back to: How do we keep these operations going, and how do we get the best outcomes we can in a difficult situation.”