Colorado wildlife officials show patience with depredating Copper Creek wolfpack
Colorado Parks and Wildlife lethally removed a yearling member of the pack May 29. Since the removal, there have been no confirmed wolf depredations but several unconfirmed depredations and continued conflict on the same ranches for which the pack member was removed, agency staff reported at a special meeting July 7 focused on management options regarding the Copper Creek pack.
The state wildlife agency desired to take a wait-and-see posture before removing any other pack members, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis told the agency's commission at the meeting.
Davis said the agency promised the ranchers it will continue to spend resources — namely range riders around the clock — to keep the wolves from cattle on the McCabe and Lost Marbles ranches near Basalt, where a series of confirmed wolf depredations have taken place this spring.
"There might be a need for additional actions taken, both nonlethal and potentially lethal," Davis told the commission. "My experience is that's rarely full pack removal, that's usually incremental. Those removals are intended to modify pack behavior. There is data out there that suggest we may not have modified that pack behavior enough."
The data Davis presumably referenced is a thermal imaging video taken on one of the impacted ranches showing wolves chasing cattle and trying to separate a calf from its mother.
You can watch that video below.
Tai Jacober, a Pitkin County rancher and commission member, told commissioners and state wildlife staff that after range riders took a break from riding on the McCabe Ranch the night of July 3, the rancher, Brad Day, found his cattle scattered over other ranches in the area the next morning and had to retrieve them.
'This is a situation where we put these on the landscape, we recaptured them, knowing they were depredating, we let them out and they are behaving the same way they werel as before," Jacober said. "There's a limited amount of resources out there. At what point are we going to realize certain individuals are not worth all of the resources compared to the population we have to take care of?"
Jacober made a motion at the commission's regular meeting in June to remove the Copper Creek pack. The motion was ruled out of order but prompted the special July 7 meeting.
The Copper Creek pack has had seven confirmed depredations in Pitkin County this year after being implicated in the vast majority of the 18 confirmed depredations in Grand County last year. That prompted the state wildlife agency to capture pack members last fall and hold the breeding female and four pups at a facility until rereleasing them in January near the Lost Marbles and McCabe ranches, which went against the state's recovery plan of not rereleasing known depredating wolves.
The pack's breeding male was also captured but was in poor condition when it was trapped and died days later. The state wildlife agency was unable to capture a fifth pup belonging to the pack.
The agency confirmed at the July 7 meeting that the Copper Creek female, collar number 2312, and a wolf captured in British Columbia, 2305, had a litter of pups this spring. Lost Marbles and McCabe ranchers have said the den is near their cattle herds.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has poured resources into keeping the Copper Creek pack from more depredations in recent weeks, telling commissioners three to five range riders are riding the ranches and five of its nine wildlife damage specialists have worked with the ranches.
Several commissioners who spoke at the meeting agreed with Colorado Parks and Wildlife's plan to give the conflict time to work itself out.
Commissioner Jay Tutchton said removing the entire pack could jeopardize the state's federal 10(j) rule that allows lethal removal of depredating wolves in certain situations.
"If we were start killing wolves for which we had no evidence or insufficient evidence that they had been involved in depredations, I think we would violate the 10(j) rule," Tutchton said. "That rule gives us flexibility to kill wolves involved in depredations but a bunch of puppies in a den, I do not think that's in line with the 10(j) rule."
Commissioner Jack Murphy applauded the agency's handling of a difficult situation while learning as it goes along with implementing the state's wolf recovery plan that calls for releasing 10 to 15 wolves for three to five years in an effort to establish a self-sustaining wolf population.
'We don't have to kill everything, there are ways of dealing with things in a nonlethal way," Murphy said. "A lot on all sides need to relax a little bit and allow this to kind of play out. I feel for the ranchers that are having problems. Yes, it's a tough situation. Change is always difficult. I live in the city and I'm having to put up with traffic and that gets on my nerves, too."
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado officials are hesitant to kill another Copper Creek wolf
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