DENVER — A gray wolf brought to Colorado from Canada as part of the second round of reintroductions was killed by Wildlife Services in Wyoming after it was found at a property where multiple sheep had been killed earlier that day, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed Thursday morning.
CPW said its biologists received a mortality alert from the collar of a male wolf on March 16. It had died in north-central Wyoming.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) in Wyoming had been conducting work to mitigate livestock depredation after multiple livestock losses in the state, CPW added, but said they could not otherwise comment on wildlife operations outside Colorado. Denver7 reached out to APHIS, and a spokesperson explained that Wildlife Services responded to a sheep predation on March 15 on private land.
"Evidence consistent with wolf depredation was observed at the site, including wolf tracks, struggle sites, carcasses with premortem hemorrhaging, and bite marks consistent with known wolf predations," she told us. "In total, five adult sheep were killed by an adult wolf, including one sheep that was heavily fed upon. Late March 15, Wildlife Services removed a wolf at the predation location. Closer examination showed the wolf had a collar from Colorado Parks and Wildlife."
Wyoming Game and Fish returned the deceased wolf, as well as its GPS collar, to CPW, she said. A CPW spokesperson said the collar can be refurbished for future use, and that the "agencies agreed to have CPW take possession of the deceased animal because it was a wolf released by CPW during our 2025 reintroduction effort. CPW staff will examine the animal for research and educational purposes."
The 15 wolves brought to Colorado from Canada came from an area where there is no overlap between wolves and livestock, CPW has reiterated. This was a focus for the second round of reintroductions after hearing concerns from the public in the wake of the first reintroduction in December 2023. However, when wolves share the landscape with livestock, some sort of conflict is expected, the agency added.
CPW stressed that wolves travel long distances in search of food or mates.
As of late February, the concentration of gray wolves in Colorado remained in Grand, Summit, Eagle and Pitkin counties, though two have wandered west near the Utah border, CPW said previously. No other wolf releases are planned for 2025.
In 2024, several Colorado ranchers requested that the state remove or kill a wolf or wolves in the Copper Creek Pack that were involved in multiple depredations in Middle Park and Grand County. The adult female had been denning with new pups while the adult male hunted, CPW said. Without the male providing food, the pack would have likely died, which would have been a large blow to the wolf reintroduction program.
CPW Director Jeff Davis said on Aug. 27 that CPW's options were therefore limited.
"Removing the male at that time, while he was the sole source of food and the female was denning, would likely have been fatal to the pups and counter to the restoration mandate," Davis explained last summer.
This past January, following the second round of reintroductions in January, Davis explained that what happened with the Copper Creek Pack "was kind of the perfect storm."
“We can look back at the depredation history and clearly identify depredations with the male in particular, especially when the female was in the den and in the early parts of the rearing of the pups," he said. "And we didn't have quick or immediate access to try to alter those behaviors, right?”
The adult female and four of her pups from the wolf pack were captured last summer and held at a large and undisclosed location. The adult male was also captured, but died shortly afterward. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it had a gunshot wound, and called its death an "illegal killing," as gray wolves in Colorado are protected by the Endangered Species Act, and it is illegal to kill them without federal authorization. That case remains under investigation.
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CPW keeps a list of confirmed wolf depredations on a public document, and 2024 ended with 17 incidents and 27 killed or seriously injured livestock. The agency has confirmed one wolf kill in early February in Jackson County, but no other wolf depredations in Colorado this year as of this story's publishing time.
CPW and its partners, which include the Colorado Department of Agriculture, USDA's Wildlife Services, Colorado State University Extension and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, are working to teach Colorado livestock producers about the state's conflict minimization guide, and the resources available to them to keep wolves away from their livestock. The guide was published in early January.
You can read it at this link or in the embedded document below.
One of these tools is range riders. As of mid-February, nine people who applied to become a range rider in Colorado — a task that involves long days and nights understanding livestock and protecting them from predators, like wolves — have accepted offers from the state.
These resources can help minimize the conflicts with livestock, and therefore could impact the number and amount of depredation claims submitted each year, a CPW spokesperson told Denver7 in late February. Around that same time, the CPW Commission approved two high-value claims filed by Colorado ranchers after wolf depredations on livestock in 2024.
You can hear directly from those two ranchers in the video below.
The number of known wolves in Colorado is as follows:
- 7 wolves surviving from the original 10 that were released in December 2023
- Five wolf pups born in the spring of 2024
- 14 wolves surviving from the 15 that were released in January 2025
- Two wolves that moved south from Wyoming several years ago (both collared)
- One uncollared wolf that was last known to be in northwest Moffatt County
- Possible, but unconfirmed, wolf in the Browns Park area
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
Want to learn more about Colorado's wolf reintroduction? You can explore the timeline below, which outlines all of Denver7's coverage since the very beginning. The timeline starts with our most recent story.