Before we learn about today’s animal, we have some very exciting news about our state fish, the Greenback Cutthroat Trout (newsletter #64). This fish was once considered extinct and after a ten year extensive effort to restore it, they have been found naturally reproducing in Herman Gulch!
We also have some exciting news about one of our most endangered species, featured in newsletter #53, the Black Footed Ferret. Thirty of them were released into the wild in southern Colorado last Wednesday, and there’s some great video of it!
Today’s animal is the Gray Wolf, and it has taken me a long time to write because there’s so much to say!
Also, I am very very bad at drawing wolves!! I made so many bad drawings of this wolf before arriving at one I felt I could even share in the newsletter. And I’m not even particularly happy with this one, I just wanted to move on to the next animal.
The Gray Wolf! Once native to Colorado, exterminated by European settlers, and now returning to Colorado thanks to a highly controversial ballot initiative. I’ve been reading a book called Awakening Spirits: Wolves in the Southern Rockies which talks extensively about the laws and aid from the federal government that led to the last wolf in Colorado being killed in 1945 by a hunter in Conejos County (south-central Colorado, bordering New Mexico). Wolves, once the most widely distributed mammal in North America, had become confined to a few populations in northern Mexico (the red wolf), some in Canada, and a small population in northern Minnesota. In 1973, wolves came under protection from the Endangered Species Act, and have slowly repopulated the northern Rockies in the United States. In 2004, a female wolf walked over 500 miles from Yellowstone National Park only to be killed by a car on I-70 in Clear Creek County, Colorado, just west of Denver. Although the story ended in tragedy, it was also exciting – this was the first time a wolf was confirmed to be in the state since 1945! In the years since, wolves seem to have moved into northern Colorado in small numbers, notably in the area around State Forest State Park.
In 2020, Colorado voters approved an initiative to formally reintroduce wolves into the state by the end of 2023. The vote was acrimonious in some rural areas, with ranching advocates – the main people against wolf reintroduction in the state – saying that the majority of the yes votes came from the urban centers of the Front Range, where wolf reintroduction would have the least economic impact. However, it is important to remember that ranching is only 0.63% of Colorado’s economy. Colorado’s dry landscape is actually not conducive to raising cattle and sheep in a competitive globalized market, and cattle ranching in particular is destructive of Colorado’s natural environment. Also wolves don’t kill very much livestock.
It is fascinating how much misinformation there is in popular American culture about wolves. For example, many people have a misconception about wolf pack structure and the idea of there being “alpha” wolves, when in fact most wolf packs consist of a mated pair and their offspring (in North America, the average wolf pack size is eight individuals). Another popular misconception is that wolves kill more prey than they need to eat. Although they do occasionally have “surplus kills” this is often done in late winter, when caching food is important, and other animals benefit from eating those kills if the wolves do not.
Indigenous North Americans have very different cultural relationships with wolves than people of European descent. As one article on the topic states, “All Plains tribes examined closely have stories that describe wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that directly taught or showed humans how to hunt”. That article also discusses the common scientific theory that dogs evolved from wolves who hung around human camps waiting for scraps, and how Native American traditions offer a different idea of how dog domestication occurred – with a more reciprocal relationship between humans and wolves.
It's not set in Colorado, but I highly, highly recommend watching Never Cry Wolf, about addressing misconceptions about wolf behavior, based on a book of the same name, recommended to me originally by a dear friend of the newsletter.
And if you DO see a wolf in Colorado, help out by filling out this form for Colorado Parks and Wildlife!
