Colorado Parks and Wildlife hosted a meeting with area livestock producers Wednesday to answer questions and listen to concerns over the state’s wolf reintroduction effort.

Packed into a room at the Steamboat Springs Community Center, ranchers heard from CPW staff about how they should go about receiving compensation for animals taken by wolves and learned about various conflict mitigation strategies recommended by the wildlife agency.

Fourth-generation Routt County rancher Patrick Stanko said it was “encouraging” that CPW staff in attendance, including the agency’s director, Jeff Davis, were willing to listen to the ranching community’s concerns. But Stanko noted the future of the reintroduction effort still includes many unanswered questions about how the project will affect local livestock.

Since CPW began releasing a set of 10 wolves transported from Oregon on Dec. 18, there have been no reported depredation cases involving the animals attacking livestock — but that streak is one both the ranchers and CPW staff know will not last forever.

“Nobody knows what is going to happen, and it’s not a matter of if it is going to happen, it’s a matter of eventually something is going to happen,” Stanko said. “You can’t say there is not going to be depredation, there may not be a lot of depredations but for the person that the depredation happens to — it’s a big deal.”

CPW Wolf Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell said, overall, the reintroduction effort involving capturing the 10 wolves in Oregon and relocating them to Colorado to be released in Summit County was a successful one.

“We put the animals in really good spots, and they have done really well,” Odell said. “We have not had any depredations on livestock in the last two-and-a-half months, since we did the reintroductions, and that is a bit of a surprise, and it is something we are pleased about. We are prepared for when that conflict happens, but not to have any in the first few months is great.”

Odell explained the wildlife agency has received reports from livestock producers over elk carcasses found on their property, adding that staff are “intentionally not going to do much inspection of that because we don’t want to push those animals off of that and potentially create conflict.”

In the absence of reported conflict livestock depredations, Odell said the agency is “presuming they are preying on ungulates, which is great, that is what we want them to be doing.”

Odell noted that Colorado’s wildlife agency has set goals for a successful wolf reintroduction: If their number reaches 50, the state would down-list the endangered species to a “threatened” status. Should the numbers reach 200, the wolves would be down-listed to a “non-game status.”

Odell said that the wildlife agency hopes elk, deer and moose will be the primary prey for wolves, but the impact on the local ungulate herds would likely need to be considered more closely should the state’s wolf population expand successfully.

“If it gets to the point where there are major impacts (on the elk), we will look at that through our license setting process throughout the game seasons — whether it comes to that remains to be seen,” Odell said. “It is something we are aware of, but it will be a while before we see any impact.”

A far more immediate concern for CPW and local ranchers than the impact on local elk herds is the threat wolves pose to livestock.

CPW Area Manager Kris Middledorf said a major challenge for the agency is to “maintain relationships with our landowners and our partners across Western Colorado — they provide a tremendous amount of habitat for wildlife where they thrive and they have been our partners for decades.”

“We know it’s a stressful situation for them, and for us, and we really want to walk through this together and be successful and be partners down the road as well,” he added.

The CPW area manager explained how he receives daily reports from agency biologists on wolf locations drawn from collars secured to the animals that provide GPS coordinates every four hours.

The agency does not share specific data point information with landowners, but Middledorf said CPW is “giving them a general idea of where those animals have been” and that staff are doing their best to provide information around the tools and strategies that can be used should wolves encroach on their herds.

At the Wednesday evening meeting, CPW staff explained a range of options for ranchers to use to help mitigate wolf-livestock conflicts, including deploying scare devices like propane cannons, attaching flags to electrified wire and utilizing herd-tending dogs.

“I have heard it all 100 times,” said Jackson County rancher Dave Gittleson after the meeting.

Gittleson’s family ranch was the site of a confirmed wolf kill in December when the livestock producers lost a calf to a wolf — the seventh confirmed wolf kill on the property in two years.

Since 2021, the wolf and one other that took the calf has been responsible for 20 killed or injured animals in the area, Gittleson said, adding “there’s probably a lot more that are not getting confirmed at all.”

The two wolves that have preyed on Gittleson’s livestock are all that remain of a pack largely decimated by hunters in Wyoming in 2022 after three of the animals crossed into the state from Colorado. Wyoming laws allow wolves to be taken without a license at any time of the year.

When it comes to the conflict mitigation strategies recommended by CPW, Gittleson said they have tried pretty much everything they can.

The ranchers installed the flags and stationed a human to watch for the wolves, but the strategy only worked for about a month. Gittleson said a propane cannon would probably work, but the device doesn’t operate in cold temperatures. The family also investigated the use of dogs to protect their animals, but the ranch’s large open landscape was not conducive to the strategy, they were told.

“Everything they are pushing for, non-lethal, they tried at our place,” Gittleson said. “Different packs of wolves do different things, some things will work on others that don’t work on the ones that we have dealt with … The only time we got a long reprieve from the wolves was when the three got shot in Wyoming.”

With the mitigation options exhausted, Gittleson said they asked CPW to use lethal measures against the wolf after its latest kill in December.

Under a rule, known as 10j, wolves can be killed in Colorado by ranchers if they are actively preying on their animals. The ranchers can also request CPW perform the kill, which Gittleson said they did Dec. 13 because the wolves “only come at night and they are not easy to get.”

CPW declined to use the lethal measure against the wolf, Gittleson said, adding, “their reason was the pack dynamics had changed” as a result of the hunters’ kills in Wyoming.

“Just because the pack dynamic changed, his behavior hasn’t changed,” Gittleson said, adding the wolf continues to hang around the ranch on a weekly basis. “We see his tracks, he comes through at night, we have like 200-some cows and some nights he will come and circle the whole cow herd and you can tell the cows are wound up because of it.”

This article was updated. The wolves were released in Summit County. The wolves were killed by hunters in Wyoming in 2022