Colorado’s lone wolf has left the state and headed back north where her quest for a mate has a better chance at success.
The latest information from the wolf’s GPS tracking collar, taken earlier this month, showed that after a brief stint in Eagle County, the female wolf had wandered into south-central Wyoming. The wolf came to Colorado after a 1,000-mile trek from Montana, north of Yellowstone National Park. Wolves were eradicated in Colorado some 70 years ago.
Biologists had predicted the wolf might head back north, where wolf populations have established themselves.
“It’s not that surprising,” said Carolyn Sime, wolf program coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which has been tracking the wolf’s movements. “If she finds no other wolves, she may be heading back to an area where there are wolves. They’re a pack-living animal. They’re not solitary animals.”
Known as 341F (she was misidentified previously by the Colorado Division of Wildlife as 314F), the 18-month-old female was a member of the Mill Creek pack, which lives between the towns of Gardiner and Livingston. She was collared by wildlife officials as part of a research program with the University of Montana to improve wolf monitoring techniques. Biologists say she strayed from her pack in late September in search of a mate.
Satellite data detailed an epic journey through some of the West’s wildest places. She crossed Yellowstone, wandered through western Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest and headed into southeastern Idaho and northeastern Utah before ending up in northern Eagle County.
Native wolf populations in Colorado were wiped out by the late 1930s. The last record of a native wolf killed in Colorado was in 1943.
In June 2004, a radio-collared wolf from Yellowstone was found killed by a passing motorist on Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs.
In 2007, video footage captured what appeared to be a wolf near Walden, in northern Colorado, but it was not wearing a radio collar. The DOW has received numerous unconfirmed reports each year of sightings of what people believe are wolves.
It’s possible other wolves have wandered into the state and may be here now, said DOW spokesman Randy Hampton, because most wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone don’t have collars that allow them to be tracked. They’re most likely solitary wanderers like this one, he said.
“We have no reason to believe that there is a pack currently in Colorado,” he said. “If a pack establishes, there are certain things you might start to see in terms of killings of deer, elk, potentially livestock. We haven’t seen that, so to our knowledge there are no packs in Colorado. Could there be other wolves in Colorado? Certainly.”
A 2004 Colorado wolf management plan allows wolves to roam freely in the state unless they come into conflict with people or livestock, but the state has no plans to reintroduce them.
The Obama administration announced earlier this month that it was upholding the Bush administration’s decision to remove the wolf from the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho, finding that the animal had adequately recovered there. It kept the wolf on the list in Wyoming, where officials faulted the state for failing to come up with a plan to adequately protect wolves.
Wolf advocates saw the Montana wolf’s arrival in Colorado as an indicator that wolves may, slowly, start to reestablish themselves here in their own.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see wolf pups in the state within five years,” said Michael Robinson, conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, which favors a Colorado recovery plan to encourage wolves’ return, including a possible reintroduction plan for remote places like the Flat Tops north of Glenwood Springs or the San Juans in southwest Colorado.
dfrey@aspendailynews.com
