Ep. 918: Eric Odell, The Man who Ran Colorado’s Wolf Reintroduction

00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: And in my case, underwear.

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Listening todcast, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light build, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. Oh man, folks, we got a good one. Todave. I’ve been wanting to talk to this guy for a long time. I’m sure this is gonna get a lot of that. This episode is gonna get a lot of attention from people who follow wildlife politics and intrigue and everything. We’re speaking with Eric Odell, who is a veteran wildlife biologist who spent twenty years with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, serving as the states first wolf Conservation program manager. So back following the passage of Proposition one fourteen, which, as our guests will explain, basically brought on the Colorado wolf introduction, his position was created to execute on that directive. Beyond wolves, Eric led restoration efforts for other key Colorado carnivores, including Canada links, wolverines, blackfooted ferrets, earning a reputation among ranchers and conservationists alike for his pragmatic, field driven approach to wildlife management. And he retired on Friday. Retired on Friday. Now, I want to set this first question up, but I’m need to try to give a little background. You ranended up running the project that became the wildlife news story.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: Of not just a year, but of a couple of years.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: It became an international news story, right, It was a big national news story. Every person who feels that they have an opinion on natural resources management, wildlife management, every hunter, every rancher has expressed an opinion on the Colorado wolf re introduction. It was discussed, you know, like the biggest podcasts in the country being Joe Rogan experience, this issue was discussed, probably came up. I would guess scores of times man on the biggest podcast in the country, Like it’s a thing. It remains a thing. It was a thing. Tell tell people how it became, how it came to be that one day they they I don’t know who they are. You can explain who they are. That They’re like like, Eric, this is your baby. Yeah, bring wolves back to Colorado.

00:03:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, it’s a it’s a long story, but the short of it is wolves were reintroduced in the state because of a ballot initiative and most recently, the whole interest of reintroduction of wolves to Colorado goes back a long time, and early in the nineteen eighties people were thinking about what would wolf reintroduction before Yellowstone, before Idaho, and for a variety of reasons, that never happened. And so then starting about twenty nineteen, there was a group that started to collect signatures and understanding that there’s this way in Colorado that you can get an initiative on the ballot for the voters to go. If you get enough signatures on these petitions, it will go to the voters to make that decision. And so that’s what happened, and they collected enough signatures two hundred thousand some signatures of people throughout the state to say should this be on the ballot, And in November twenty.

00:03:55
Speaker 1: I want, as you do this is great, keep going, but if you don’t mind as you do this, if you can just check in on on your individual where like, I mean, are you like watching this, yeah, this ballid thing. Are you watching this knowing this is going to become a thing of that’s going to impact my personal world and my family?

00:04:16
Speaker 2: Sure? Yeah, for sure. So you knew you saw that before before the wolf, before all this.

00:04:21
Speaker 3: I’ve been involved with the agency for a bunch of years, like you said, working on a bunch of other projects, other non game, non hunted carnivore species, so primarily focused on links and wolverine potential for wolverine reintroduction. Been involved with Mexican wolf recovery planning efforts as well. And so the whole idea that if if this comes up, if this passes as a as a ballot initiative, then it becomes my responsibility. And so you had a weakling that this was going to be a major player, and so.

00:04:49
Speaker 1: Please keep doing the timeline. I just wanted to know at what point you saw it and then like, oh.

00:04:55
Speaker 2: No, it was this is interesting.

00:04:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was it was election night that we knew that it was going to happen, right, and so so yeah, so leading up to this, there’s there’s you know, this is not a state led effort, right, this is not the agency saying hey, we want to reintroduce wolves. This is the citizens and groups saying, hey, should should this become an issue that the voters make a decision on first time that any any kind of ballot initiative to look at any kind of reintroduction, much less wolf for introduction. And the first time that wolf introduction would be put in the state’s hands. Right when it was done in Yellowstone, that was park service. When it was done in Central Idaho, that was through the tribes and through the state to do that, or through the tribes to do that.

00:05:29
Speaker 2: Sorry, not through the state.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: And so this was this was unique, right, and so they got enough signatures twenty nineteen, very different time, right before COVID, before you know, all these different kind of things that were happening. November twenty twenty presidential election. Anticipating a big turnout, There’s been a lot of polling going into into the election to say, what’s what’s the likelihood that this initiative is going to pass, like they do with all kind of political efforts, and you know, initially was expected this was going to pass overwhelmingly sixty percent.

00:05:57
Speaker 2: Seventy that’s how it was polling. Yeah, it was.

00:05:59
Speaker 1: Pulling way positive I knew at the time, I’d kind of forgot. Yeah, so what it was, it was it was expected to have a wider margin.

00:06:06
Speaker 3: For sure, and and and so you know it. And as the state, we’re we were limited in terms of what we could or couldn’t say. But just by statute, as you know, we can’t take a position on a ballot initiative as a state agency, we we didn’t produce a lot of materials or or you know, we didn’t get involved to try to influence the decision one way or the other by by statute, by policy and so.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: But but explain that little bit to me. Yeah, who.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: Who was supposed to sort of opine?

00:06:42
Speaker 2: Right? Who? Who would who was like?

00:06:44
Speaker 1: Who was who was doing who was doing the role of saying here’s what that would look like? Ye, just politicians and private individuals, private individuals, private and you guys were said, you guys were you guys had as a state And I get it.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: I’m not questioning about it.

00:06:58
Speaker 1: I get it. Like it was stay out of this, that’s right, and it not by choice the department. That’s the Department’s directive.

00:07:04
Speaker 2: That that statute. That’s what we can’t get it. You cannot say as a department.

00:07:08
Speaker 1: We think blank, right, that’s right, and so well then I’ve seen people break that, Yeah, maybe so, maybe so.

00:07:14
Speaker 2: Not in this case. In other cases I’ve seen people break it. Yeah, and it may be specific to Colorado. I don’t I’m not familiar with the other states and how it works there.

00:07:21
Speaker 3: But yeah, so we were we were limited in terms of what we could say, what we could do, and how we could say. This is you know, wolves could or couldn’t that. These will be the conflicts, these will be the challenges. He will be the opportunities. We didn’t We didn’t have that opportunity to say those kinds of things.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: And so so.

00:07:37
Speaker 3: We watch essentially sitting on the sidelines watching how you know, the the those that were supportive of Proposers one fourteen, those that were opposed to Proposes one fourteen. We saw lots of television ads, We saw lots of billboards on the highways and vote no, vote yes, all all of that kind of stuff that you would expect leading into an election. And election night, term comes up, and and you know, the group of us that within the agency or texting back and forth, it looks like it’s as results are starting to roll in, and sure enough that the story is well told that it passed just barely fifty one to forty nine percent, And it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s fifty one to forty nine or eighty twenty. It still passes.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: Say I forgive you if you don’t want to answer this. Yeah, Like I get it. The first one is easy questions, two questions. The first one is you know it’s a presidential election too, Was you was more of your mind space the wolf question than the president question?

00:08:33
Speaker 2: But for sure it was more more directly impactful. Right.

00:08:37
Speaker 1: That’s like when you’re talking about election results, most people think like, oh, who’s going to be the president?

00:08:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you’re thinking, is the wolf thing passed? And it’s got a lot of attention, like looking at the media, I mean it was. It was a big deal in Colorado at that time. It was like you say, it got all kinds of attention locally, it got all kinds of attention nationally and even internationally, and so yeah, it it became a really really big deal.

00:08:57
Speaker 1: So the second part of that, and I totally get it if you don’t even want to say, but did you have a hope.

00:09:05
Speaker 2: You know, I don’t really want to say how I voted on it or what my thoughts were on it. I think that it’s respect that.

00:09:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s it’s a it’s a unique way to make a decision. What I’ll say is that it’s a very unique way to make a political decision on a unique way to to to pose that question to the voters. Should this be something for for the state agency that’s that’s full of professional WILDLFE finalsyges.

00:09:26
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the next morning, you guys wake up and.

00:09:30
Speaker 3: Probably just one fourteen passes, right, and so then it’s like, wow, well, now now what do we do. We’d given some thought to it, like we had, we had some some plans within the agency, you know, kind of sketched out plans as so what do we what if? And we had scenarios about if this passes, if this doesn’t pass. But you know, it’s the other unique thing about this is that at this point in time, wolves were federally listed in Colorado. So they’re they’re not even in What that means is that they’re they’re listed under the Endangered Species Act. And so when a species, regardless of whether it’s wolves or grouse or whatever species it is. When species is listed under the Endangered Species Act, federally, Fish and Wildlife Service has management authority for that, so our federal partners have that.

00:10:08
Speaker 2: And here it is that we’re.

00:10:10
Speaker 3: Now being tasked with this reintroduction of a species that native to the state historically, and we don’t have the direct management authority, so we’ve got to work with Fish and Wildlife Service on this process too. And so yeah, so we have all of these different scenarios laid out as to what could happen if this does pass, if this doesn’t pass, and sure enough it did, and then we began the process to think about, well, how do we how do we execute what the statute now says?

00:10:36
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, there’s a little bit of confusion on that. Yeah, I’m sure you know it by heart. Can you say what the statute said? Because the statute wasn’t Colorado needs to immediately release wolves into Colorado.

00:10:50
Speaker 2: It was something different and more confusing it was.

00:10:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was it said a lot, but fundamentally what it said is that we needed to do reintroduce wolves west of the Continental Divide, right the Continental divides that north south line in the state, Pacific and Atlantic watersheds had to release wolves west of the Continental Divide. We had to develop a plan. We had to do that. How would we do that. We had to develop a method for compensating landowners that were experiencing conflict. We had to develop some recovery goals, state recovery goals, so not only federally listed species, but also it’s also a state listed species. We didn’t develop any kind of federal recovery goals as for the Fish and Wilfe Service to do. Our role was to develop the state recovery goals and then we had to do what it says is take the steps necessary to begin reintroductions by December thirty first, twenty twenty three, Right, so November I forget fourth or fifth, twenty twenty till December thirty first, twenty twenty three, a little bit over three years to do all of that, develop a plan, and develop all the compensation programs, all of those different kinds of things.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: So it was very prescriptive.

00:11:49
Speaker 3: It was very prescriptive. Yeah, I mean it was prescriptive in the sense that it said this is what you have to do. It didn’t say this is how you’re going to do it right. That became our role, our responsibility as the state, and so it wasn’t something that they said, you will reintroduce this many wolves, these locations, those kinds of things that became the process that we then developed, our staff myself primarily leading the development of what we call our Wolf Restoration and Conservation and Restoration Plan or some wolf frustration Management plan is what it’s called. And so that’s what we’ve put together. And there’s a long process to do that right. We began pretty much immediately after the ballot initiative passed. We can talk more about that. That process, but involved the public, involved tribes, involved, stakeholder groups, involved technical groups, really to try to put together what’s the best way to do this. You know, this is a task, this is what you have to do. You have to reintroduce wolves and you have to address these these points. But how are you going to do that? And so lots and lots of meetings, lots of discussions about these are the kinds of things that need to be incorporated into what’s going to be a good management plan. Knowing that we’re not going to get it right exactly the first time. There’s going to be you know, this is the plan for twenty twenty to twenty twenty three and beyond, and at some point we’re gonna have to revise this plan as things go on.

00:13:00
Speaker 1: And so help me understand what prevented you guys from being smart asses and saying.

00:13:07
Speaker 2: Okay, we’ll put two out.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, because part of the statute said that we have to develop a self sustaining wolf population.

00:13:13
Speaker 2: Right, so there is an aspect to a spelled out right.

00:13:17
Speaker 3: So I didn’t I didn’t elaborate on that, but yeah, we can’t. We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t just say okay, here’s one wolf. We’ve we’ve reintroduced wolves. We were two wolves we’ve re introduced.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: It was to find enough that everyone knew what.

00:13:28
Speaker 3: It meant, that’s right, Yeah, it’s yeah. I mean it was a serious effort and and you know it was state law. It is state law, remains state law, and so that’s what you know, that’s what drives what we do as as an agency is the state laws. We have to abide by that. And so you know, we took that very seriously. But you know, took that respond.

00:13:44
Speaker 1: And at what point did they create because you you. What was your job on the election night? What was your job title?

00:13:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a species conservation program manager, right, so more general working on all these other species that that we’ve talked about links, wolverine and otters.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: And then what day did they come and go forget all that you’re the wolf guy.

00:14:02
Speaker 3: Oh it was, I mean it kind of became so for a while I was doing both. I was trying to do all the species conservation program stuff and the wolf stuff, and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that you couldn’t do both.

00:14:15
Speaker 2: It really was.

00:14:16
Speaker 3: That was two separate jobs, both really high demand jobs. And so then I moved into the wolf job. That was a new job that was created, a new position that was created, and I’ve moved into that, and then we’ve since backfilled that position to do all the other.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: It seems to me that.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: If you’d have gone out and done a call for applications to come run Colorado’s wolf for introduction reintroduction, you would have had a boatload of applicants.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: We might have. Yeah, we might have.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: Well, I mean were you were you dying to get it?

00:14:47
Speaker 2: Like? Did you want it?

00:14:48
Speaker 1: You know?

00:14:48
Speaker 3: I look forward to the challenge. I thought it was you work in wildlife conservation. I’ve been there for twenty at that point, twenty twenty years, twenty four years, Wow, twenty years, I guess at that point. And yeah, I mean, here’s this opportunity to do something pretty historic, pretty you know, kind of setting a legacy for the work that this agency is going to do.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: And yeah, I was excited to take it on.

00:15:10
Speaker 1: And did you know that you were going to become like I don’t want to draw too much for parallel, but you were going to become like this foucy like character that all of a sudden everybody was going to have an opinion about.

00:15:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:15:21
Speaker 3: I tried to avoid that. I tried to make it not about me. I tried to make it about the program and the agency and apparently yeah, yeah, I mean I wanted this to be, you know, the success of the program, and this is.

00:15:34
Speaker 1: The success of the ages, but you decided you wanted to keep low profile.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean I wanted to do the job, and I wanted to do it well.

00:15:40
Speaker 1: And you know, I think that it’s and it isn’t just me that that did the job either, Like it I’ve gotten a lot of attention for it, I’ve gotten my name has been associated with it a lot, and I and I take a lot of pride in that I did that well and.

00:15:52
Speaker 2: You had gotten threats and stuff too.

00:15:54
Speaker 3: Though well, it was there was times where it was it was very tense. We would have meetings at our commission meetings. We had discussions about you if things go south, this is what you do, and that kind of stuff. Nothing ever personal.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: But was it nothing personal?

00:16:06
Speaker 1: Do you feel I don’t want I don’t want to dwell on it’s too long, but I just want to kind of understand for you personally. Do you feel that the public understanding was there that like, you’re a guy, you have a job, this is coming from the voters, and you’re there to execute on the job, not that you’re some not that you were the one that was like, hey I got an idea. Yeah, like that was understood.

00:16:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, we made I made any time I had the opportunity to talk about this in front of a stock you know, a producer group, or or even the the Wolf Advocates or our commission, or just to the general public, it was it was, you know, we made the effort to say we’re doing this, We’re in and we’re going to do a good job at this, and we’re doing it because probably there’s one fourteen.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: In accordance with the law.

00:16:51
Speaker 3: This is what we have to do, right, I mean, this is and so you know, we did not, and I think in some ways that helped us. You know, if we go into these to these small slope communities and say, hey, we’re the agency we want to reintroduce wolves, that’s not that’s not a winning of conversation, right if we say, hey, state loss is that we have to do this. And in fact, this was a major point that the chair of our commission at the point was saying, is that, you know, even though the vote was carried on carried largely by the Front Range counties, right the population centers for Colorado Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs Pueblo, that vast majority. And remember that the initiative said that we’ll reintroduce wolves west of the Continental Divide, very much the rural part of Colorado. Her statement was, we want to do this with the west slope and not to the west slope. And that was that rang really really true, right, we we really wanted to incorporate their opinions, and you know, it’s we have to look for positive outcomes. We can’t just say it’s a terrible idea, we’re not going to do it. It’s a good idea, and.

00:17:47
Speaker 2: We have to do it. We have to find someone right exactly.

00:17:50
Speaker 3: And so so working with the West Slope, trying to find understand what their concerns were, understand how we can address what they want to see in wolf frustration, what kind of considering again federally listed species, how do we manage this federally listed species that has, you know, certain prohibitions, and how do you do work on that? And and we found really good tools to do that kind of stuff. And so yeah, it was it was a long long process. And having that back to your question, like being able to say this isn’t an agency initiative, this is an agency.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: We’re driven to do this by state law, by the voters.

00:18:23
Speaker 1: That was very helpful for us to be able to do that during the So you had a three year roughly a three year window to get this on the ground between election night and wolves around the ground, roughly three years. I felt in watching this play out, it was very interesting to me that during that three years, like something totally unprecedented happened in wild wolves on their own four feet walked into Colorado.

00:18:53
Speaker 2: That’s right out of Wyoming. Well and even before election night that had happened.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: Okay before okay, yeah, And I get, like, I totally get that the piece of legislation that passed did not contemplate that that occurrence.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: Didn’t effect it didn’t negate it.

00:19:07
Speaker 1: It wasn’t written in that like all, this doesn’t matter if a wolf walks in on its own four feet.

00:19:12
Speaker 2: Right, but it complicated stuff. Yeah, yeah, can you speak to that?

00:19:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was so so two different things happened to two different scenarios happened. One was in extreme northwest Colorado, Moffatt County, right truly right on the board of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, right in that that little tri state area. We found a carcass or our field staff found a carcass of an elk that had been killed by by wolves. Wolf tracks were there, Wolf Scott was there. We collected that wolf scat ran some genetics on it and discovered that it was not just a wolf, but it was several several different wolves that were related, right, so, meaning that there had been some reproduction there had been a wolf den someplace nobody ever.

00:19:50
Speaker 1: Held far into Colorado’s.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: Miles not not far at all.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: So it’s it’s it’s very likely that this this pack of wolves, and it was a pack because they were flirting with the border, right, it was learning with those three borders somewhere Idahome or sorry you talk Wyoming, Colorado and never heard, never saw those wolves again. We get reports from them from time to time. We would see individuals and then those wolves in Wyoming.

00:20:13
Speaker 2: Wolves are not.

00:20:14
Speaker 3: Federally relisted, right, they’re under state management, and especially in that predator zone, they can be shot at any time. And that’s what happened ultimately to those wolves. And so though you know that’s one scenario that Maffitt kntay scenario in North Park, we had a black female wolf. We get these reports from time to time and a very clear photo of a lot of the times those come back as like a German shepherd or malamet or something. Right, somebody mistakes it clearly not a wolf. This was clearly was a wolf, black canid. You see a caller on her talk to my colleague in Wyoming, got the radio frequency for her and started to monitor her from the air and we were flying for her. Just a lone female, a lone female, right, and so this was one was this I think spring of twenty nineteen is when this happened. That fall, and so as we’re leading up into a lot of the ballot initiative stuff in twenty let’s see twenty twenty one, Towards towards the end of twenty twenty, we saw a gray male or another gray animal with her, and so then in early twenty twenty one we captured that animal, put a collar on him, and so that was the first time. So this is twenty twenty one, right after the ballot initiative, and put a collar on him, and they paired bread and reproduce and produce the first litter of pups.

00:21:32
Speaker 2: Do you feel that those two wolves knew each other? No, I don’t think they did. I think they came. So it was they came to freak like a freak deal.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: There’s possibly at that time two wolves in the state of Colorado and they found each other.

00:21:44
Speaker 3: I think that’s right. And we had had other wolves that had come down from the Yellowstone System from from Montana, Idahayoming, and they’ve come into that that same general area. So there’s some way I don’t know how the wolf see, how it sees the landscape, but that that general area, that North Park areas where they had come. We had reports from them from I think two thousand and seven that we had individual wolves and so, yeah, certainly, from time to time, wolves are going to naturally migrate into the state and it’s a gauntlet. Now you’re getting through southern Wyoming is tough for a wolf, but it happens, right, and they’ve done that, and so those wolves that reproduced in North Park called them the North Park Pack. That was the first time that we had had a documented reproduction of wolves in eighty plus years. And then the same kind of thing happened. They go up into Wyoming and they can get shot there at any time, and so there’s still a few members of that pack that remain. But for the most part, that pack didn’t persist long fizzled. Yeah, understand.

00:22:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again it just it had no bearing on what you needed to do, right.

00:22:44
Speaker 3: It wasn’t enough, right. Yeah, So a few individuals from from time to time is exciting from a wolf restoration perspective, but it’s not. It doesn’t meet the letter of the law in terms of what the ballot and this one, she says, when.

00:22:59
Speaker 1: You guys had to I know that there became this this big issue about well, how let’s say a fellow wants some wolves, how do you go get them? Yeah, the legislation didn’t contemplate this, No can you can you explain like I mean, just like the whole basics of the questions like okay, we need some yeah, and they’re not here.

00:23:23
Speaker 2: Where do you get them from?

00:23:24
Speaker 1: Like how do you get them? How do you ask? Like who do you approach?

00:23:28
Speaker 2: You know?

00:23:28
Speaker 3: What are the conversations like yeah, so well there, I mean, there’s a lot of there’s a much longer story to the development of the planet and how we came up with what the what we needed to do to get restoration to happen. I think one thing that’s really important that that doesn’t get told enough is that there’s because of this federal status, because they’re they’re federally listed as endangered. What that means fundamentally is that take is prohibited, and take means a bunch of different things legally, and there’s been some new new kind of.

00:23:53
Speaker 2: Interpretations as to what that means.

00:23:55
Speaker 3: But fundamentally means that you can’t kill an animal. You can’t you can’t chase, harm, harass an animal. And I want to explain because you alluded to something really quick. We’ve covered this on the news show. Is like, I can’t remember what year. Some years back, the language of the Endangered Species Act around take was interpreted to mean, let’s say there’s an endangered swallow and it only nests on a cliff. So you’d be like, well, you can’t take a swallow, but they would they define that to be, well, you can’t destroy the cliff, because that’s tantamount to taking a swallow. And now they’ve now the current administration is trying to walk back some of that language and more narrowly defined take meaning if you kill it, if you destroy a bird’s nest, did you take a bird?

00:24:47
Speaker 2: Right?

00:24:47
Speaker 1: Right, It’s just like a philosophical question as much as anything.

00:24:51
Speaker 3: Because because there’s the take has has habitat implications, right, and so for wolves that’s not really all that And that doesn’t really mean that much for wolves because wolves are have tech generalists, they’ll they’ll live wherever. But what what we learned in all of these conversations that we had with other states that are managing wolves. We had many, many meetings with the current state managers, state widlife managers that are dealing with wolves. They say, you have to have some kind of tools. You have to have the ability to haze and harassed wolves that are not behaving in ways that are good right, that are that are getting into livestock conflict, and in some cases even even kill wolves. And we’ve done that as a state agency. And so within that, within that confines, within that that status.

00:25:30
Speaker 2: Of a federally listed species.

00:25:31
Speaker 3: What we developed was called a TENJ rule or what the Fish and Wildlife Service developed, and that’s something that they’ve used for many different species, not just wolves, but it allows take in certain circumstances.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: That’s the that’s the experimental populace or something like that.

00:25:44
Speaker 3: So it’s called the non essential experimental population. And so that was that was really important. And there’s we spent a lot of money and took and did this on a very accelerated timeframe to get all of those federal rule making processes in place. It has to get published in the Federal Register and get all public comment on their CPW. Color Parks and Wildlife paid for the consultants to write that that those NEPA documents, the the E A and the I S for that work. Uh And and it was done on a really accelerated time frame because it had to be in place prior to wolves being reintroduced. And fundamentally, what the TENJ rule does is that it relaxes those take prohibitions. It allows wolves to be chased and harmed and rubber buckshot those and in certain circumstances, even Lethally managed Lethally removed and so that was really important that that we did that, and because if he didn’t, then we’re reintroducing federally endangered wolves with no management tools at all. Right, And so that’s that’s a really challenging situation.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: That’s where you when you were pursuing that experimental thing that gave greater management latitude, were you at risk of of lawsuits from from from wildlife advocacy groups?

00:26:55
Speaker 2: You know?

00:26:55
Speaker 1: I think were they were? They were they understanding that that would be necessary.

00:26:59
Speaker 3: For the most I mean, it’s it’s hard to generalize, right, there’s there’s a whole as much as there’s a whole spectrum of hunters, and there’s a whole spectrum of ranchers.

00:27:06
Speaker 2: There’s a whole.

00:27:06
Speaker 3: Spectrum of wolf advocate type groups too. Some wolf advocates were absolutely opposed to the idea of the TENJ rule of the experiment non essential experimental rule. Some understood that, yeah, this is this is how you’re going to buy some tolerance. This is if you have this ability, then you’re you’re going to have, you know, some legal ways to manage those challenging situations that are bound to arise that was pursuing. That was a decision of the department. Was it was totally a CPW decision. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, it wasn’t our decision it was. It wasn’t our doing it was. It’s a federal rule making process, and so the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: So it was the lad the way to do it.

00:27:42
Speaker 3: It was the only way to do it right. And so they Fish and Wildlife Service had to be a partner in this. And and through that process that we developed an MoU that gives a memorandum of understanding that gives us a status called designated Agent. So it allows us as the state wildlife Management agency, to manage wolves in the state. And so what it did, what that TENJ rule do us is. It defines that geographic barrier says from north to southeast to west. Within Colorado, any wolf that’s there, whether we reintroduced it or a wolf that that comes in from from the north, will be considered part of that non essential experimental population. And so that allows that that management flexibility for for all wolves in the state. It’s you know, there’s no.

00:28:20
Speaker 1: Didn’t need to find out who came from where.

00:28:22
Speaker 3: No, exactly, as long as it’s within the state borders, we can treat it as a as a member of that population.

00:28:28
Speaker 1: That not so those so those wolves that came in from Wyoming, yep, like doing this all of a sudden, their status would change.

00:28:36
Speaker 3: Right, well, even even without TENJA as soon as they crossed that state line in Wyoming, it’s a it’s a state managed species. It’s a it’s a I don’t know exactly what their.

00:28:44
Speaker 2: Status is, but their status within Colorado.

00:28:46
Speaker 3: Change, right And then they come into Colorado they’re federally endangered, but within Colorado now they’re considered part of that non essential experimental population. And so that was good, right, and so that’s as well. That was one of those things that we really needed to have in place. To to get some of that that buy in from from the states. So back to your question, how do you how do you ask for just.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: The following in the timeline were during this three year period when you’re working on this, I get this has to be true.

00:29:19
Speaker 2: Are there political figures or.

00:29:21
Speaker 1: Groups exploring some way to undo this for sure, to challenge this, to sabotage this was Did any of that ever come close?

00:29:32
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I don’t know that it ever came close, but it I mean, we had there were several lawsuits filed.

00:29:38
Speaker 2: There was a there was a federal lawsuit.

00:29:39
Speaker 3: Filed the day that we’re driving out of the driveway to go to Oregon, which is where we sourced our wolves from the first time, that said that we hadn’t done the nep of process to do that TENJA rule properly and and so you know, they were they were trying to shut it down that the litigants in that side, we’re trying to shut down wolfree introduction because they they on a procedural no. And you know, we’re leaving, we’re going up to catch wolves to do this work, and our agency leadership said just keep going. Well, we’ll let you know if we we’ll give you a call if you need to turn around. And no we didn’t. I mean all got dismissed through the courts and all of that. So there’s there were a lot of no, there never was a delay.

00:30:19
Speaker 2: No.

00:30:20
Speaker 1: Okay, So now on my earlier question, how do you find one?

00:30:24
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:30:25
Speaker 3: So, so what our plan said is that we’re going to reinduce ten to fifteen wolves a year for three to five years. We passed that plan in May of twenty twenty three and presented it to our commission. This is kind of an interesting piece of it too, is that when we started this process, we told the Commission this is how as staff, we think we should develop this plan. And we’ll develop a stakeholder group, will develop a technical group. We’ll have a lot of public meetings, We’ll have tribal consultations, we’ll have a lot of commission meetings to hear that input and ultimately put all that together developed a plan. And our commission’s a broad, broad based group too, a lot of diff representations of hunters and outfitters and ranching communities at large members and so it parks and we’re now Parks and Wildlife Agency. So we’ve got some of that representation in there too. When it came to vote on the plan, the Commission gave us unanimous approval, and which doesn’t necessarily mean that the Commission is all in favor of wolf free introduction. There were certainly members of that commission that were not supportive of wolf fre introduction.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: But to me, what that said is that we did a good process. The process of.

00:31:24
Speaker 3: Developed that plan was thorough and complete and really evaluated a lot of different perspectives in that and that was important, I think, to have that in there. So here it is May of twenty twenty three. The statute says by December of twenty twenty three, we got seven months to get wolves on the ground. We had a new director that came in right at that time too, and one of the first things he did was write letters to his counterparts to the other agency directors in Idahoma on Tana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon. Oregan Department of Fish and Wildlife was the first agency that responded positively that said that yeah, we’d be a partner with you on this. That began that process of developing logistics of how do you how do you do that? How do you catch wolves? And transport and release.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: If you if you get into the heads of the agencies that said no, okay, yeah, the states have said no, you can’t have our wolves. Uh. Some of these states are not under leadership that wants more wolves.

00:32:25
Speaker 2: Right.

00:32:26
Speaker 1: What I didn’t get is if someone says, hey, you know these wolves that you guys are somewhat uncomfortable with some some political figures in these states are uncomfortable with these wolves presence, I would like some.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: One one might think.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: They would go have all you want, take them, yeah, but they but they were instead were like no, yeah, like what was the game being played there?

00:32:48
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:32:48
Speaker 3: I mean, and these were discussions that happened at the director’s level. I think what I mean from from Wyoming perspective as an example, in order for us to take wolves from Wyoming, we would have had to take them from northern Wyoming and release them in northern Colorado. Very likely they would go into southern Wyoming, and the director of Wyoming probably was very smartly said I don’t want to create a problem in southern Wyloma.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: Right, And so you’re, yeah, you’re going to create potentially like a big population and then it’s going to be you’re gonna be dealing from the south.

00:33:15
Speaker 3: Right, and so so that was Wyoming’s rationale. Idaho Montana were the other two states that really have robust wolf populations, big wolf populations, and they both said no. They very explicitly said no. I think largely for political reasons. I think that there was some influence that they had heard that they did not want. You know, that some entities within Colorado didn’t want to have wolves, and so they had made contact and communications and that that kind of convinced them from a political perspective that, yeah, we don’t really want to partner on this, despite the fact that we’ve got very large wolf populations.

00:33:47
Speaker 1: And yeah, I read it like I kind of read it like what you’re saying is I read it as a way it was a way to express disapproval. Yeah, with how this happened, right in my way of expressing disapproval is to deny, to deny you this thing that I’m not.

00:34:03
Speaker 2: Really happy to have anyway.

00:34:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, right right, Yeah, And so then so Oregon, Oregon and Washington, and the other piece of it too is that we had to get wolves from federally delisted areas right because of and it’s a lot it’s not that interesting story. But the fact of the matter is that they had in order to take wolves from a listed area where they’re federally listed, you have to do more NEPA work, you know, more more of that EI s and in environmental impact statement and environmental assessments to look at what the impacts of those populations are going to be. And so that that took a lot of those areas out of consideration. So wolves are federally delisted Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and throughout those states, and in the eastern portions of Montana or sorry of Washington and Oregon, and so so that was it was really those five states that initially we had that those conversations with and Oregon, like I say, said yes, you can come and and and at that time they said you can take ten wolves. We don’t want you to take any breeding pairs, none of the breeders of the packs, but you can take uh, you know, essentially the the earlings of of the packs. We did not want to take pops, you know. And so there’s there’s a lot of different considerations for what makes a good candidate, what kind of wolves do we want to take down to Colorado?

00:35:16
Speaker 1: What of this what of this story that we Well, first I just want to revenue because when Montana did you know, when Yellstone did it, it was that they that they got stuck with these super wolves. Yeah, which is you know whatever pretend, but that they got stuck with these super wolves. And then the popular narrative that I hear not from officialdom, but I just hear is that you guys got stuck Colorado got stuck with the cattle killers.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: Is there There’s not truth to it.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: No, it’s when you when you hear that, you’re like, I don’t get where that came from.

00:35:53
Speaker 3: I get where it came from, but I get where it came from. I mean it came from the fact that where wolves and livestock over lap, there’s going to be conflict.

00:36:01
Speaker 2: Right.

00:36:01
Speaker 3: So there’s in an eastern Oregon, there’s a lot of livestock and there’s a lot of wolves too, and and and there’s history. You know, all of those packs have had some some involvement, some some not good involvement with with livestock. And so that was part of our criteria is that you know, not only do we want yearlings, we didn’t want this super young. We didn’t want the super old wolves. We want something that’s going to contribute to this population and not be naive to know how to hunt. But we also weren’t going to take wolves from an area that was from a pack that was currently depredating in it in currently right and so and we did not. Fundamentally what that meant is that we didn’t want to take wolves from a pack where Oregon or Wildlife Services was doing Wolf Control Act action. There were a lot of scenarios where we had wolves available to us to capture. You know, they were they were in a geographically just a flat open area, not a treed area. They were on federal lands, but they were wolves that had been involved in very recent depredations. And so we passed on those. We said, no, we’re not we don’t want to take that, anticipating that that was going to be the kind of response that we would get is that we’re just bringing in these cattle killers. So we brought in wolves from packs that had had wolf livestock history, but nothing that was that was current, nothing that was active.

00:37:14
Speaker 1: And so that if your challenge had been if your challenge was to go find wolves that had never to go find wolves in the lower forty eight that had no history of cattle.

00:37:25
Speaker 2: You’d mentioned sol, there’s no way.

00:37:27
Speaker 3: I mean, well, I mean the only place is is the park Yellowstone, right, and that’s not an option for a bunch of different reasons. And so yeah, within the lower forty eight that that becomes it becomes nearly impossible to find wolves. And that’s a huge reason why we went to British Columbia in the next year in twenty twenty five.

00:37:45
Speaker 2: Did Oregon sell them to you, trade them to you?

00:37:47
Speaker 3: No, give them to you give them they they wildlife agencies do a lot of that kind of stuff where we we’ve given as one of the projects I was involved with Swift Fox. We took Swift Fox and put them up in North Dakota and on some of the tribal lands there. So it’s it’s there’s no sale, like, we’re not buying wolves were we. CPW paid all the helicopter contracts, We paid all of the all the fees, all the costs associated with capture and transport of wolves. But we didn’t there’s no exchange, no monetary exchange.

00:38:15
Speaker 2: For those captures. Yeah, how’d you guys do it? Uh?

00:38:18
Speaker 3: So we contracted all that out. We don’t do the capture work ourselves, but there are capture companies that that go out and uh dart from the air and and uh so Oregon was was great to cooperate with their Their wolf program manager was great. She she had a lot of information. She had been monitoring the wolves really intently for the last several years, and so she would tell us about which packs were available, which individuals were available. She knew which the which the breeders were and could comment on those based on code color and call our color and things like that. And so the gunner would go up, the helicopter would go up Dart Wolf and then they would bring those wolves to us and in the field and we would do what we do, measure them, weigh them, process and put callers on them.

00:38:59
Speaker 2: And how did you how did you transport them?

00:39:01
Speaker 3: They were transported in the from the from the field where they were captured to to where we were in the field.

00:39:06
Speaker 2: Was in the helicopter tranquilized?

00:39:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you want to put a wolf and a helicopter.

00:39:12
Speaker 2: That’s not what.

00:39:15
Speaker 3: They’re hobbled. They’ve they’re hobbled. They’ve got a muzzle on them, for sure. They’re in transport, but they’re out. Yeah, and then they’re never held anywhere though, right, So did you put did you put.

00:39:25
Speaker 1: Them in in in an enclosure in Colorado?

00:39:28
Speaker 3: No, So in Oregon they would be put in. Say we captured them on a Tuesday, they get worked up in the field that they get the color on and they do we do the blood draws, we do all the genetic samples, all that kind of stuff, put them in a crate, a large reinforced dog crate, and then they’re flown to Colorado. That that probably the next day is they’re held overnight in those crates and then flown the next morning and then released straight away just flat out yeah, hot release. Call that hard release versus a soft release, and and both work. You know, those are two different strategies as something that we really considered a lot.

00:40:02
Speaker 1: And so that some kind of wakes up and he’s just in a new spot. He’s in a new spot. Yeah, And so we would release them from Oregon. That they were transported three to five animals at a time, and so those animals would all be released together in the same place at the same time, and they knew each other. You weren’t mixing or remixing. They were mixed each other. Yeah, they were mixed. They weren’t necessarily all from the same pack. There’s probably some that that did come from the same pack. I’d have to look back it precise the relationships, but for the most part they were We wanted that genetic representation. We didn’t want them all to be you know, we didn’t move entire packs together. They were all individual animals from from separate packs. And really, I mean that’s kind of the way wolf biology works. As they get to a certain point, they disperse out of those packs and start to create new packs and become defend new territories, and so that’s kind of what we were trying to mimic in a somewhat artificial way, but to say, here’s here’s a yearling male a yearling female from neighboring or separate packs.

00:40:57
Speaker 2: Let’s see if that if that works, and in some cases it did.

00:40:59
Speaker 1: How’d you pick? How did you pick? And did you make it public where you were actually letting them go?

00:41:06
Speaker 3: So yeah, so we kind of made it public after the fact, Like, you know, this is a sensitive issue, right, We’ve got to protect got to protect the wolves. We’ve got to protect our staff too. There were threats that we were getting about, and who knows in some of the social media world how how real some of these threats really were, but that was definitely a concern. This is this is a this is you know, we’re again, this is the responsibility that we’re given. This is the task that we’re given by state law. And we got to make sure that everybody stay safe and the wolves themselves too. And so initially we were very secretive about timing locations all that kind of stuff. The wolves were released on state or private lands, and so we didn’t do it on federal lands. Kind of coming back, and this is a criticism that we got is that we took shortcuts that we didn’t do the NEPAL. We did not do the NEPA work on releasing on federal lands. If we were to release on for service lands b LM lands, we would have had to do more NEPO work, and that’s cost money.

00:42:02
Speaker 1: That’s funny because i mean, come on, you let like, if you let it go on, I mean you’re effectively letting it go on public land, whether you do or not.

00:42:09
Speaker 2: On federal land, they’re going to go right, They’re gon gonna move. Hey, stay on this guy’s place. Exactly.

00:42:14
Speaker 3: There’s never the expectation that you open the crate and the wolf is going to stay on that ten acres, one hundred acres, a thousand acres.

00:42:20
Speaker 2: These animals move, right. Did you put a collar on every one you let go?

00:42:23
Speaker 3: We did, Yeah, and not only just a caller, but a GPS caller, and so you know the technology has changed quite a bit, and so we have these callers on that allow us to get points and they they’re they’re not super frequent, you can change that, but these catch a point every four hours or so. And so really that the purpose of those callers isn’t to say, look, it’s going this this way, it’s going up this drainage and getting minute by minute kind of action on. It’s really just to say, this is the general area where the animal is. It’s still alive, it’s still doing this, it’s paired with this, and it’s traveling with this animal. Those those kinds of things, and so yeah, so they all have that that GPS caller on. There’s some risks with GPS callers. They’re they’re technologically a little bit more sensitive. They’re they’re they we’ve had some collar failures versus the more traditional the VHF callers, which is just the signal that you have to be either in the field or in a plane and you know with the receiver and getting those those signals and so so yeah, every wolf that we released had had a GPS collar on it. We will try to keep with what our plan says is that within each pack we’ll keep two callers active, one GPS and one VHF collar just for the longevity of it. These the callers last five six, seven years hopefully in best case scenario, which is about the life of a wolf. And so we don’t want to be replacing callers that much. Catching wolves, collaring them is it’s expensive. For one thing, it’s it’s it’s risky anytime you’re up in the helicopter. It’s risky to the people, is risky to the animals too, and so yeah, so so everything had had GPS collars on.

00:43:49
Speaker 2: But but back to it.

00:43:50
Speaker 3: We we did not release on federal lands, but new full well that that wolves would go.

00:43:54
Speaker 1: On to federal lands. Like you say, these these things move big distances. Tell me the numbers. So how many wolves you did and when?

00:44:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, so in year one, in December of twenty twenty three, we did ten animals from Oregon, and then fourteen months later January of twenty twenty five, we reintroduced fifteen animals from British Columbia, and then we had plans to do a third year of releases in January of twenty twenty six, we would have gone back to British Columbia. And British Columbia was great to work with. The staff there was awesome that we had great cooperation, great facilities to use there. It worked well for their programs. They were in a predator reduction mode for some of their caribou recovery efforts, and so that it gave them a positive spin to do some of their wolf work. And based on that criticism that we heard from the animals that we’d reintroduced from Oregon, there’s no overlap with livestock. Are there are no livestock in northern central northern British Columbia where we’re getting these animals from. And so it was, you know, we were addressing that concern that we had heard after year one that you know, you’re bringing in cattle killers, and we brought it wolves from British Columbia down and sure enough they’ve they’ve been involved in some depredation just because that’s just what that’s what predators do.

00:45:10
Speaker 1: When the ten hit the ground, the first ten, what were some of the most immediately what were some of the first things you saw in terms of distances before they settled, I mean, did they wake up and split?

00:45:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, so by the time they were released, they were out of the effect of drugs, right.

00:45:30
Speaker 2: So they’re in the crates.

00:45:32
Speaker 3: You open the crate and sometimes you’ll take a few minutes, a minute or two to get the gumption to leave the crate. Sometimes they would go right away. And so and they all, you know, in that first wave of five, I think we did five, and then we did two, and then we did three or something like. I don’t remember exactly the numbers on how exactly that worked, but they some animals moved big distances right away. Some animals stuck super close within five ten miles of thee these sites too, and so they would they just they were all in exploratory mode, right and some of them, I think we’re probably a little confused. I think they all probably were at least in some way or others confused about what they had just experienced, and and you’re just flown from from Oregon, driven in a truck, and then the crates are open and they’re in a different they’re in a different place. One of the things that we really wanted to kind of mimic is taking wolves from someplace that is ecologically pretty similar to Colorado. And so that that worked pretty well. There they’re in, you know, an elk dominated environment. We’ve got obviously huge ungulate populations in western Colorado, so that was good and they you know, some animals moved quite a bit and some some stuck pretty close.

00:46:44
Speaker 2: Uh. In that first year, we did have one one pair and they developed a.

00:46:49
Speaker 3: Litter of pups that produced a little of pups and started to defend a territory as well. So that was that was the first That was in the spring of twenty twenty four.

00:46:59
Speaker 1: What was the and I know you’re only getting a you’re only getting a ping on them every.

00:47:03
Speaker 2: Four four hours.

00:47:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, how long do you have a guess when they so they cut loose in Colorado? How many hours or days went by before one of them had a successful hunt?

00:47:16
Speaker 3: Got great question? So so we get pings every four hours. We don’t get a ping. We don’t get the result of that ping. Every we get one download a day, essentially, so we get to just to understand how that works. The I don’t that’s a great question. I don’t know how how long it was. I don’t think it was. Your wolves don’t eat every day, right, they don’t. They don’t need to have a kill every day. Probably within the first week that that we I don’t remember. We were really sensitive to to not wanting to go in when we would see a cluster of points. We didn’t want to go in on that because we didn’t want to scare them off of that and create conflict, push them off of that that kill of a deer or an elk or something like that.

00:47:53
Speaker 1: You’re not, Yeah, I imagine like there’s a temptation to go running over there to see what they’ve been doing. Every time you get like that, he’s in the same place for twelve hours. That’s right, you’re dining and go see what’s up. But you would just stay back.

00:48:04
Speaker 3: We would stay back and then we would go in afterwards. Right after that, when they’ve moved on, then you can go in. And we’ve got some great research that’s that’s happening right now, looking at that kind of looking at what what wolf diet looks like. And so that’s that’s how we’ll do that and go in and look for scatt and then you can can run some genetics on the scat.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: How many months went by before you had one kill a cow?

00:48:23
Speaker 3: Well, we had cal We actually had depredation from the North Park pac before we did reintroduction. We had had depredation in there. There was probably from the wolves that were released in Oregon. I’d have to look back. I don’t I don’t know for sure, but months, month, month or months?

00:48:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, what’s your take now that you’ve looked at this so carefully? We were talking about this the other day on the news show research around this question, but like, what’s.

00:48:52
Speaker 2: Your take on.

00:48:55
Speaker 1: The degree to which wolves are just opportunistic and remain opportunity stick versus they they hunt elk, they hunt moose. Those animals behave in a certain way. You might get it kicked to the head, right, they’re fast or whatever, and then you discover cattle and then and in the wolf’s mind, I don’t know that’s true or not. In the wolf’s mine, he’s like man, I just prefer to deal with cattle, like, do you do you see that switch?

00:49:24
Speaker 2: No, you don’t.

00:49:25
Speaker 3: In fact, I mean there were there in one of the first dens that we had in that North Park den, there was there were yearlings right in the field right right below the home site, right below where animals were, and you would see wolves walk right through the cattle. They would not touch the cattle at all. And so you know, I don’t I think that they It’s not as though they’re just bloodthirsty killers and we’ll kill whatever. So I think in those animals where we know that those animals were killing native ungulates too, and so so it’s I don’t think that they get that opportunistic feel. And I think that a cow is probably much easier to kill for a wolf.

00:50:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, But what I meant more, I didn’t do a good job asked a question.

00:50:06
Speaker 1: What I meant more is do you see that a pack or a pair or whatever will kill a cow and then do you see that they all of a sudden go like that’s what they focus on? Or will they kill a cow and not get hazed off it, just kill a cow and leave on their own and then go back to elk and deer. Yeah, and never visit another cow again. Or does it seem like once they do it, they’re headed down a path toward trouble?

00:50:39
Speaker 2: Good?

00:50:39
Speaker 3: Good question. I don’t think we have the resolution of data on that yet. And I think that I think that there are scenarios where they will find that situation that they will they will find a situation that’s easy eating, right, and they’ll they will stick with that. And I think that there’s other times that they will get involved with livestock depredations and then they’ll they’ll be gone and they won’t come back to livestock, meaning that they’re going off and eating something else. I know that that both those scenarios have happened. Whether they’re more inclined to do one or the other, I can’t say definitively. Yeah, that’s the way it works. So that’s not the way it works. I think that it’s it’s probably a mix. Wolves are all individuals, right, they do. They’re smart animals, they have personalities, they have different kind of traits, and that’s part of the reason that that TENJA is so important. If we can if we can document that wolves are getting into livestock and we’ve got range riders out there, We’ve got the producers themselves are out there paying attention. If we can see that that’s happening, and you can try to get involved and try to get some of that behavior modified. You can get in there and hit them with bean bags, hit them with cracker shells, hit them with you noises and different kinds of things that that kind of scare them away and let them know that that’s not the right thing to be doing. There’s there’s scenarios where that helps, and that can change their behavior, and that’s really good.

00:51:50
Speaker 2: That’s what we’re after.

00:51:51
Speaker 3: And so I wouldn’t say that, you know, once a wolf has a taste for livestock, that they won’t go back to I don’t think that that’s a true statement.

00:52:00
Speaker 1: What was the earliest time what was the first time you guys had to make a decision to go like basically do a recall on one year wolves. You know, yeah, where you’re like, all right, he’s he’s coming.

00:52:14
Speaker 2: Out right away, I mean right away.

00:52:17
Speaker 3: It was it was that that first spring, so spring of twenty four, we had this scenario where wolves were getting into a lot of livestock. This was right after we had had documented our first den. So lots of attention on this media attention, social attention on the wolf program has reinduced these wolves. We’ve got a documented breeding, we’ve got a documented den, and we’ve got documented depredations and repeated depredations.

00:52:41
Speaker 1: And those depredations were coming from that den site.

00:52:43
Speaker 2: Nearby, coming from that group.

00:52:44
Speaker 3: That group, Yeah, and that was the copper Crete pack, and that that pack has gotten a lot of attention for you know, a variety of largely for this whole whole effort. And so here we are, it faced with this really challenging scenario, and we have that TENJ rule in there to say that there are there situations where we can manage wolves. It was not an intention, I don’t think, to say from you know, from day one, we’re going to start doing lethal management of wolves.

00:53:08
Speaker 2: Right.

00:53:08
Speaker 3: We had we had had so much invested in this, so much uh work had gone into getting sourcing those wolves, transporting, releasing, and and to say we’re going to go and and and there was calls for us to you know, people were trying to get us to remove those wolves, remove the pups from from the pack. There were the two breeders and I believe there were four pups well were removed. We didn’t kill any of them, so I know, so this is a scenario where there were there were four There were actually were five pups in the Copper Creek pack. But what we ended up doing, because they’re kind of as the compromises, that we captured those animals from from that private land, moved them to a facility, held them there for a bit of time, and then release those released the Copper Creek packs. Those that remained. One of the breeder mail died. We were only able to capture four of the five pups. We didn’t realize that there was a fifth pup at the time. So the the breeding female and four and four pops ultimately were at that facility and then they were re released in January of twenty five into Colorado. Same into Colorado.

00:54:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, that had to get a lot of heat. It sure did.

00:54:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, it did, and and you know, part of it was some behavior modification work and they were released, they were re released in a different spot, you know, and so it definitely got some criticisms for sure for doing that.

00:54:23
Speaker 1: So what happened then, did they give up their cattle killing ways when you let them go to a second time.

00:54:28
Speaker 3: So the female then paired again with one of the British Columbia males and they had another den. It’s different, different part of western Colorado, and there have been some depredation issues with that pack.

00:54:39
Speaker 2: Still, what was the first lethal removal you had to do?

00:54:43
Speaker 3: The first lethal removal was part was actually I think part of that I can’t remember right off the top.

00:54:49
Speaker 2: I should know this. It was shortly.

00:54:54
Speaker 3: It was either in that pack, one of the one of the yearlings that was was part of that, or in another part of a state too.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: So what would be.

00:55:04
Speaker 1: What’s the decision making process or what are the sort of inputs on that one will catch yep, and we’ll try to dissuade it from wanting to do to be around people and let it go. That one we’re gonna remove. It’s gonna we’re gonna lethally.

00:55:20
Speaker 3: Remove that that well, to go back that capturing animals transport, you know, to to re release them in another place that we really don’t want to do that. That that whole effort that we did with Copper Creek, that that first spring, it was that was terrible.

00:55:33
Speaker 1: So that was learning.

00:55:34
Speaker 2: It was a huge learning experience, Like it was.

00:55:35
Speaker 3: It was a lot of work, it was a lot of there’s so many different challenges that that went into that that effort wasn’t good for anybody like it was. It was really challenging kind of thing. So that’s not standard protocol for us to do that, and so for us to to consider lethal management. We have a definition for what makes up We call it chronic depredation. If there’s three or more depredations by a pack or an individual and third days. So three confirmed depredations in thirty days, and there’s different level. You know, one is preponderance of evidence so more likely than not, and one is clear and convincing. Like we there’s there’s no room for doubt. A wolf killed that cheap lamb, cow, cattle, calf or whatever. So three three events in thirty days, and there’s there’s been some some use of non lethal, some kind of deterrence that the producer has done some of that. There’s the likelihood that that depredations are going to continue into the future, and also that there’s no attractives right, so that the producers have removed dead and other carcasses in the field too.

00:56:38
Speaker 2: And so there’s little there’s a little checklist.

00:56:39
Speaker 3: There’s a checklist, and that’s that’s form of formalized in our regulations and how we go about that and it’s it’s a process, and it’s a conversation that involves the local area staff that are our local game wardens, our district wildlife managers, are our area managers, our conflict team are even all the way up to our director. It’s it’s ultimately the director’s call is to win and how that happens.

00:57:01
Speaker 1: And if you have to do a lethal removal, is that are you contracting that out or were you guys doing it on your own?

00:57:08
Speaker 2: We do it on our own.

00:57:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, we we do it on our own, so from the air or no, from the ground, done from the ground, so that there’s there is a way that you know, if if the agency doesn’t have the resources to do it. We haven’t run into that situation. Every every lethal management situation that we’ve had, you.

00:57:26
Speaker 2: Never had to bring it. You never had a fist do it correct, right, It’s always been our own staff to do that. God it. Yeah. How many to date? How many to date have leath removals? Have there been? I think three?

00:57:37
Speaker 3: Or we just another one? I’m not full on the details of it. I think just this this last week too, So I think four.

00:57:44
Speaker 2: I think and.

00:57:45
Speaker 1: When you guys do a leath removal, I’m guessing you just get blown up by certain interests.

00:57:50
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.

00:57:51
Speaker 3: I mean, you can’t make everybody happy with any any kind of wolf management decision. You’re somebody is going to not agree with the decision that was made. And that’s a challenge. It’s just one of those things that you know, it’s just recognizing that it can’t win situation.

00:58:06
Speaker 2: Man.

00:58:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s hard, yeah, when uh, it’s hard.

00:58:10
Speaker 3: But what I say is that it’s important for us to be responsive, right, and I and I think that we’re we’re demonstrating that, like it’s.

00:58:16
Speaker 2: You mean, to not brush off criticism.

00:58:17
Speaker 3: Yeah right, I mean you have to ye own it, right, this is this is something that we did. This is something that we said what we’re going to do, right, That’s part of the plan. That’s part of why we have the TENJ in there. We’re in this situation right now where we’ve we’ve only had two years of reintroduction. We had we had anticipated a third year, and the wolf population will grow pretty quick. And as as it grows, then we can be much more flexible in our management and removing an animal an individual is you know, there there are some that would disagree with that that’s ever appropriate, but it becomes easier to do that in it in the long term picture, the big picture of what we’re trying to do is establish a self sustaining population that helps us, right, and so we’ve we’ve made the argument a lot that that getting packs established makes management a whole lot easier. When we’ve got individual wolves that are moving all around, and they truly are moving all around, it’s it’s really difficult to predict where that animal is, where it’s going to go, and so it’s truly needle in a haystack. Whereas when they’re in a pack, when they’re in defending a territory, they’re still moving big distances, but they’re moving in a much smaller geography, and so it becomes a way easier to deploy those tools.

00:59:21
Speaker 1: I can see, it gets easier to get your arms around the whole thing exactly eloyes.

00:59:25
Speaker 3: And and as that the number of the population size goes up. When when there are problems, it’s it’s a lot more palatable. I’m not gonna say a lot more palatable. But it’s more palatable to say we can we can remove animals that the population can sustain, that from from the conflict side of things, especially if that can reduce that conflict, you.

00:59:42
Speaker 1: Might not think of it as a problem.

00:59:44
Speaker 2: I do.

00:59:45
Speaker 1: But uh, have you had the problem in Colorado of celebrity wolves like we have in the greater Yellowstone area.

00:59:54
Speaker 2: We’ve we’ve worked to avoid that.

00:59:57
Speaker 1: We give day at the park man they core, Yeah, they love it.

01:00:01
Speaker 3: We we have I mean, we give our wolves a number. Right, there’s a four digit number. The first two numbers or the year that it was collared. The next two numbers are if it was male or female sequentially, right, so the first male captured in twenty twenty five would be twenty five oh one. Males get the odd numbers, females get the even numbers, and so so you have to have that right. You have to know individuals that you’re talking about. There have been campaigns some of the advocate groups tried, the wolf advocate groups tried to name have nameties, and we don’t want to do that. Right, we don’t get for any of the wildlife species that we do. There are some interesting behaviors and we’ve seen some of our animals make huge movements or and and you know, there there are very interesting things that we’re learning, but we’re really not into that.

01:00:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, that, like the wolf celebrity thing gets leveraged, right, it gets politically leveraged. Yeah, because then it becomes you wouldn’t want that to happen to old Betty, right, you know, and then that brings into this whole other conversation, makes it much more challenging. What was did there wind up? Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like I remember this. Did it wind up being that there was some legal problem with the Feds around the decision to get them from British Columbia.

01:01:13
Speaker 3: Well that’s their interpretation and the state has a different interpretation of it. And it all comes back to that TENJ rule, right, And so remember that that TENJ rule talks about how wolves are managed in the state north to southeast to west. We can that relaxes those tape prohibitions. Fish and WILDLFE Services interpretation on it is that the TENJ is explicit into where wolves can be sourced from and we don’t agree with that to us, and generally that the TENJ talks about management within that that geographic boundary, and so you know, we we we don’t feel like anything was violated by us going to British Columbia. We had all of the federal permits from there. There were federal importation permits that we had to get from Fishing and Wildlife Service, just like any any kind of wildlife that comes across international borders. We had to get site these permits in site convention of International Trade of Endangered Species. We had provincial permits, we had Environment Canada permits, we had our callor Department of Active So we were buttoned up like we we had everything we needed in place, and you know, all the way up until we got back from there in January of twenty five, we had planned to go back in January of twenty six, all the way up until October of twenty five leading up to it, that was our plan.

01:02:24
Speaker 2: And then we get the letter from the Fish wil Life Service telling.

01:02:26
Speaker 1: Us, well, don’t you feel that when they pointed that out that it was probably the result. I mean, however one feels about the reintroduction, but that bit them calling legal fault on getting them from BC was probably the result of someone saying I want you to go over every decision that was made and see if you can find me a problem.

01:02:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And then they got creative and found a problem.

01:02:59
Speaker 3: They found what they found what they thought to be a problem. We don’t think it was a problem.

01:03:03
Speaker 1: And then I’m saying, but they might even know they were being creative, right, No, I think that that’s true all time. Yeah, you’re like, dude, there’s got to be a problem, find me a problem, and to follow up similayers like I got.

01:03:13
Speaker 2: It well, and to follow up on that.

01:03:15
Speaker 3: Then after that, after we got that cease and desist letter, then we had had a wolf. We have we have agreements with other states Arizona, New Mexico. If a wolf goes into Arizona, New Mexico or Utah, those wolves can be recaptured and brought back into into Colorado. And that’s really long story, but that’s fundamentally to protect Mexican wolf recovery all the investment that’s happened there. And so that happened. We had one wolf that that went down in New Mexico. New Mexico captured it, transport transferred it to US. We re released that animal in Colorado.

01:03:42
Speaker 1: I I I don’t. I don’t want to get into names I have. I have some dear friends that that that are very invested in the Mexican Wolf yeah project, And I understand that this desire that there’s so much time and energy put into recovering the Mexican gray wolf in New Mexico and Arizona right in Mexico. Yeah, and that that bringing wolves from BC, or bringing wolves from Oregon and putting them into Colorado, and then they’re gonna go in and and and then by some definition, corrupt these lineages down there. Earlier, I used the word like something seeming academic. One would could look and say, well, historically wolves were present on the landscape from way into Mexico.

01:04:48
Speaker 2: To the Arctic. That’s true.

01:04:51
Speaker 1: And there wasn’t a line anywhere. It was all just bleeding in right there was, I mean there was there was lions here and there because of desert ecosystems. Saying like any of these populations, I don’t I can’t tell you this empirically, but I’m just assuming any of these populations is being infiltrated by individual animals coming from the north or south at any given time. Right, They’re not like fence there’s not walls divided.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: It’s not like there’s a wall that says, Okay, this wolf.

01:05:19
Speaker 1: Group is here, and then over the wall is the next wolf group and they don’t breed, they don’t interbreed. So so.

01:05:27
Speaker 2: What’s your take on that, Like, like, what’s.

01:05:30
Speaker 1: Up with wanting there to be aligne now where there probably wasn’t aligne historically.

01:05:35
Speaker 2: Is it just because of because of the politics.

01:05:38
Speaker 3: No, it’s not it. I mean, it’s scientific. There’s evidence, I mean. And so wolf taxonomy is super interesting to those that are interested in that kind of stuff. There’s been lots of different subspecies of wolves defined over time. Up to twenty five now there’s five different subspecies recognized. And throughout all that time, Mexican wolves canas Sloopa’s Bailee has been recognized as a separate subspecies, smaller. They’re just they’re different.

01:06:02
Speaker 1: And they had a barrier.

01:06:03
Speaker 3: The barrier between northern wolves and as far as south as Colorado and Utah and Arizona was a substantial desert, right, It’s it is not a great across.

01:06:12
Speaker 2: Do you feel that it functioned as a barrier.

01:06:15
Speaker 3: It must have because of because there is a different subspecies, something that moves so much. The idea of subspecies is that they they are isolated for long enough time, consistently enough there’s not this infiltration of other genes coming in that they develop another subspecies. And so that’s because Bailei can sloop as Bailey has been recognized as a subspecies for as long as it has always independent. There’s there’s there is some influx. Northern wolves can breed with with Mexican wolves, for sure, and so it’s happened. But they are also unique in their and there’s also the political side or the the the policy side of of it is that Mexican wolves are listed separately under in Dangers.

01:06:57
Speaker 1: That’s when I say, that’s what I say. I could see that someone might say, I can see that. A manager or a wildlife person might say. I get the point. Historically they were all over they’re not. Now we have different management practices in place, and for that reason and that reason alone, we don’t want them to mix because it’s going to cause confusion of management strategy. Like I’d accept that, but it does seem to me it’s like if what if what wolf advocates are striving for is restoration of the wolf. I feel like that would mean that they’re striving for a situation where there’s just like wolfness continuity wolfness running like running up and down the continent and they just move all over hell.

01:07:39
Speaker 3: And that in time, that might be the scenario. I’m not the geneticist to ask this question, but you know, there there may be a point in time when having Northern wolf genetics infiltrate, integrate with with Mexican.

01:07:50
Speaker 2: Will may make sense time when as appropriate.

01:07:52
Speaker 3: That that’s really like, what they’re doing is so intensive with Mexican wolf recovery. They’re they’re taking pups that are born in captivity and putting them in wild litters, which all requires incredible timing and incredible coordination with that like that, there’s huge efforts to do that. That that Mexican wolf population, just like a lot of these endangered species stories started with a really really small population, seven to ten animals something like that, and so there’s there’s genetic inbreeding concerns and they’re really very very deliberate about how that works. And so to have Northern wolf genes come into Mexican wolf population now would undo a lot of that really important that that’s happened, and so so that’s that’s an important thing, right, And so I think I mean that, and we got off on a little bit of sidetrack. But that’s why when that wolf came down into New Mexico, we have that that MoU to to kind of keep that from happening. The same thing, if if Mexican wolves come out of their experimental population area, then they’ll they’ll be captured by those states and brought back into that area.

01:08:51
Speaker 1: Let’s say they go, and let’s say it during the current administration. I’m gonna give you my viewpoint. I don’t it’s probably not your people.

01:09:00
Speaker 2: I don’t know. I’ll just tell you mine.

01:09:04
Speaker 1: From a wildlife from a wildlife conservation perspective, there’s not a ton.

01:09:12
Speaker 2: This is me talking like I want everybody know. This is me talking, not mister Odell.

01:09:17
Speaker 1: There’s not a ton that one can be hopeful like from a wildlife and conservation perspective under the current administration, there’s not like a bunch of guy could root for. But a thing I would root for is I would like to see lower forty eight wolves just delisted.

01:09:33
Speaker 2: Right, there’s a movement to do this, for sure. What would that mean for Colorado? It would it would mean.

01:09:41
Speaker 3: Well, fundamentally, what it means is that Fish Wildlife Services is no longer a partner, right, I mean they’re a stakeholder in it, but they’re not a man. They’re the MoU that we have that gives us designated agent. All of that kind of goes away. And if wolves are managed like many of the other wildlife species in the state, managed solely by the state age.

01:09:57
Speaker 1: But they’d be a state endangered what do you guys call your own in dangers?

01:10:00
Speaker 3: It would be stayed in dangered until we meet and our plan describes what those recovery goals, So it would be stayed in dangered until we meet the threshold, and then it would be downlisted to stay threatened, and then it becomes a non game when it is delisted.

01:10:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, but don’t you feel like this is a crystal ball and shit a little bit? Here is when we when we did the grizzlies and wolves and put them under in Danger Species Act protection federal, yes, a protection, and we came up with a recovery objective. There were a lot of players involved in that conversation that were not being honest brokers, Like there were people protectionists wolf advocates, grizzly advocates, absolute protectionists, like protectionists, absolutists that gave a verbal sign off on what recovery would look like, but then once recovery was achieved, they renegged, right, and now they sue and sue and sue to prevent delisting because they’re not really interested in the recovery question. They’re interested in protecting wolves from lethal removal.

01:11:16
Speaker 2: Or recreational harvest, right.

01:11:20
Speaker 1: And this is in these battles are taking place in states that are politically red or politically purple, Okay, I mean varying degrees of bluish Michigan Wisconsin or Michigan Wisconsin, Minnesota, right, And then you have like very red states Wyoming, Montana, Idaho. Then you go to like deep blue Colorado. It just seems to me that whatever was agreed to about recovery in Colorado is a lie. And that and that there are factions in Colorado that will never accept delisting or non game status. They will never accept it.

01:12:09
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, so there’s so a couple of things about that. One, there’s never been recovery federal recovery goals for Colorado, right, and so the recovery goals are are for other parts of the country, and so that there are not specific federal recovery goals for Colorado.

01:12:24
Speaker 1: There’s some in this I’m talking about in the event that that the Feds. I’m saying, like, hey, Fed’s DLST. Let’s play this out there like it’s if on if the Feds move, they delist lower forty eight yep, okay, remain state list and it’s what it state listed. What I’m saying is or you know, never mind all that. Let me just say, let me ask what I’m saying more bluntly. Can you picture in Colorado a situation where they are ever in where there is ever a world where they are issuing like wolf hunting tags like our issue in Idaho, in Wyoming and Montana, like we’re issued in Michigan, in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Like that ain’t happening. I mean, that’s my crystal ball.

01:13:10
Speaker 2: There’s a couple of things to that. Want.

01:13:11
Speaker 3: One is that the statue that the ballot initie of the statue that passed defines them as state endangered species and so so right now, and there’s some uncertainty is to how how much influence that has truly on the state status of them, we have another process.

01:13:29
Speaker 1: Because but so the ballot language didn’t spell out how they would become not state endangered.

01:13:35
Speaker 2: No, it’s definitionally state and endangered.

01:13:37
Speaker 3: Right, And so our plan, the plan that we wrote has criteria. If we meet fifty animals for four years, it gets downlisted to state threatened.

01:13:45
Speaker 2: If we’ll get to one hundred.

01:13:46
Speaker 3: And fifty animals for two years or two hundred animals, they become delisted and just have the non game status. Then if the Commission ever, a future commission ever, made the decision to change that status from non game to game, that’s that’s a decision down the road. And who’s to say whether that’s likely or I’ll say it’ll never happen. Maybe I don’t know. It’s not going to happen right now. And then I mean very clearly right now, it’s not every text.

01:14:10
Speaker 1: It would have to move to Colorado before that, not just not just a trick of all the Texans would have to go there.

01:14:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s it’s it’s not. I mean, we’re several years away, Like we just don’t know what it’s like to live. We know what it’s like to live with thirty two wolves, right that’s what we’ve got right now in the state. On our annual report that comes out of each spring, thirty two wolves was our account last year. What’s it looked like for three hundred wolves?

01:14:34
Speaker 2: What do you think? What do you think is the maximum? It’s a social question.

01:14:37
Speaker 1: What do you think is maximum? Well, let’s look at it. Let’s take the social out of it. Okay, let’s just look at let’s look at acres, yeah, and deer and elk. If you had to guess, no one’s gonna hold it to this. No, thousands, thousands, I get.

01:14:53
Speaker 2: We have the landscape with support thousands.

01:14:55
Speaker 3: We have a huge amount of public lands, wilderness areas, we have huge native ungi populations that we so biologically we could have thousands of wolves, but not thousands for a long time. No, I mean, that’s what I’m saying, is that it’s the socially.

01:15:11
Speaker 2: Social out of it.

01:15:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, let’s let’s explore non social for a minute. Yeah, like you have a ton of elk, maybe thousands is probably right. Well, you have a ton of elk maybe, yeah, because you don’t have many wolves, right right, I mean, what do you think is gonna So just leaving the social acceptance element out of it and just looking at like like let’s say Colorado could host a thousand or say a.

01:15:33
Speaker 2: Thousand or more wolves.

01:15:37
Speaker 1: In your mind, does that mean with your expertise, does that mean that it’s elk Heard stabilizes that fifty percent of current, it’s elk Kirk stabilizes that eighty percent of current?

01:15:50
Speaker 2: Like what is it?

01:15:50
Speaker 3: I don’t know, I don’t know what that but you gotta have it looks like I think, I mean, it’s wolves eat right in any predator eat, So there’s gonna be to day there’s going to be some impact to unget populations. But it’s in the Yellowstone. Wolves get credit or get blamed for all the effect on the Northern Range. And there’s so many different things that are happening at that point that it’s hard to say. You know, it’s impossible really to say that’s cause and effect because of the wolves. The elk populations went down. There’s so many other things that were happening at that point in time. The more wolves you have, the more prey they’re going to consume. That’s ther fact, right, What it looks like in time, I don’t, I don’t, I really don’t know. It is it would just be a guess to say, well, that was a.

01:16:33
Speaker 1: Job or is it nobody? Like in Colorado, is it nobody’s job to model out what it might look like for the deer and elk curd if there are two hundred wolves, five hundred wolves, a thousand wolves, like, no one’s curious about this.

01:16:53
Speaker 3: Curious for sure. We’re not at that point where we’re deep into that. I mean, I think we’re many years away, a decade from wond from about that. Well not I mean starting we’re starting to wonder about it, but we’re a decade away from the reality of that happening. And so in time we will get there. You know, we’re and I say we I’m not with the agency anymore, but it’s it’s yeah, I think that that’s that’s where we the agency will start to look and say, how how do we manage, yeah, for native on the populations, how do we manage for predator populations as well? Let’s bring in social Yeah, the social side of things. So I think that that’s that’s part of the reason that it’s an interesting question. But I don’t think it really matters fundamentally because socially, I don’t think that we can we can hold that that?

01:17:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it’s the non social thing was a fantastical experiment, right, Yeah, I get it.

01:17:42
Speaker 2: I get it.

01:17:44
Speaker 1: With social pressures, I mean, and I know you can’t put numbers to it, but like you got thirty six now, right, thirty two yeah, thirty two now considering that humans are here too, Yeah, and people are feeding the country and agricultural and interests right right, not to discredit.

01:18:01
Speaker 2: Them, but they know not at all.

01:18:03
Speaker 1: They have they have needs and they provide a service to people with producing food and all that.

01:18:08
Speaker 2: Like.

01:18:09
Speaker 1: So when you add that in, are you more comfortable with a with a with a spitballing and number As a retired guy.

01:18:19
Speaker 3: I mean half of that maybe maybe five hundred, five hundred to one thousand animals somewhere in there I think is a reasonable population.

01:18:28
Speaker 1: So it kind of someone said to you, if someone if someone from the future, from twenty years in the future came to you and said, mister Odell, there are five hundred wolves, and we’ve been at that for quite some time. We got about Colorado supports about five hundred wolves. You would you would think to yourself, well that’s more than I thought, or you’d think I thought it’d be more.

01:18:52
Speaker 3: No, I think that that’s probably you know, we we we never set an objective in the plan because we just didn’t know, Like, we just don’t know what it looks like. I think that that’s a reasonable number to have in Colorado. I mean, it’s it’s crowded. There’s a lot of people in Colorado. There’s a lot of people that recreate all year round there. It’s not the same as Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, where they’re you know here in Montana that it’s just much more rural, there’s a lower population density, and so there’s there are more people in Colorado. But you fly over it, you see the landscape, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of good wolf habitat, and so I don’t I don’t totally buy the argument that people say that Colorado is too crowded for wolves. I think that it’s we certainly have the capacity to have a self sustaining a fairly large I think, self sustaining wolf population in the state. What number that looks like, It’s too soon to tell, especially when you incorporate that that social metric into it, but I think it’s it’s probably in that five hundred to maybe two a thousand. I don’t know something like that.

01:19:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you review the whole thing in your mind, what do you what do you wish would have gone differently?

01:20:03
Speaker 3: You know, I think one of the things that we learned is is the communications and how to outreach, how to how to share information is is really really critical. And that’s one of the things all all different kinds of information, how especially from from day one, how we share information about how we’re doing the releases, where where that happens, and so, you know, we we took a very precautionary approach that that first year, and I don’t I don’t regret that at all. I think that that was very wise of us to do.

01:20:30
Speaker 1: When you say precautionary meaning undersharing or oversharped undersharing, we were very you know, likewise you’re quiet.

01:20:36
Speaker 2: We were quiet.

01:20:36
Speaker 3: We didn’t say where we were going to release animals, and we didn’t say when we only talked to people after the fact. And I think that that we learned from that that that was not acceptable and we needed to be a bit more uh you know, still protecting but of really sensitive details, but a little bit more open with.

01:20:52
Speaker 2: That kind of stuff.

01:20:53
Speaker 1: You feel like that maybe loss and that maybe cost you politically, not politically cost you publicly.

01:20:59
Speaker 2: I think so.

01:21:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. With voters, I think so. Stakeholders, I think so.

01:21:04
Speaker 3: And then you know, the communications about depredations, we’ve changed a lot of that.

01:21:09
Speaker 2: We’ve gotten a whole lot better at.

01:21:10
Speaker 1: That was there was there a tendency within the department to underrepresent depredations.

01:21:18
Speaker 2: No, not never.

01:21:19
Speaker 3: I mean we’ve we have a website on on our page, on our CPW website that that is very explicit.

01:21:26
Speaker 1: As soon as we get if it happened, it was just like, here’s the facts.

01:21:32
Speaker 2: I got it.

01:21:33
Speaker 3: I think one of the things that we could do better is that is the media communications. You look at the media, and the local media really emphasizes the negative, right they they local media, local, local, statewide media. That in Colorado, when we get when something happens about wolves or the personnel it gets, it gets talked about a lot in the sense of, well, here’s another chink in the armor of the wolf program. Here’s here’s another example of how the wolf program is failing. And it is not failing. The wolf program is doing well, and it even with my leaving of the program. I think that we’ve got a really good, strong staff that’s there. I think that we’ve got really good biologists, researchers, field staff that are able to address a lot of those concerns. But the media would have you believe otherwise, right, And so if we could be more proactive in that and tell the good stories and and and have the media tell those stories. And we’ve tried that. We’ve we’ve tried to reach out to some of the media and say, hey, look, I get it that this is what sells a lot of your ads, but there’s there’s other other sides to that too, And and some some have taken that opportunity and done well and told some of those those good stories.

01:22:39
Speaker 2: But still we struggle with that.

01:22:41
Speaker 1: Well because the people that the people that announce and amplify the missteps are the people that feel burned. Yeah, they want to find a problem, right right, Like if you’re just if you’re just like a lot of buddies of mine, they love to hunt out yep, and in other.

01:23:06
Speaker 2: Social circles to be people that like.

01:23:08
Speaker 1: They love to run cattle and they don’t like it, and they don’t like that it came from voters and they don’t like that. They feel those crammed down their throat by Denver yep right, And so yeah, when something negative happens, they’re going to be all over it because they want to amplify it as a way of expressing discontent or a way of hopefully subverting the whole thing because they feel it was an assault on them.

01:23:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean.

01:23:28
Speaker 3: One of the most poignant conversations I had was early early on in this process. It was at an open house that we had in Boulder, Colorado, very liberal part of the state, very much a pro wolf state, and we had a rancher come all the way from from Western Colorado. He brought his daughter to this, and not because they wanted to fight the whole thing.

01:23:49
Speaker 2: They just wanted to hear that perspective. And this rancher’s been.

01:23:51
Speaker 3: Very involved with this whole work, the wolf planning work has been great, really great to work with. And his daughter, I don’t know, twenty years old, twenty five years old. I got in conversation with her and she’s what she said to me is, I don’t I don’t care about wolves. I don’t care if they’re here, I don’t care if they’re not here. All I want to do is ranch That’s what’s important to me, and to me that’s stuck with me throughout for the last six years is like we have to figure out how to reintroduce wolves. We have to figure out how to develop and maintain a self sustaining population of wolves by the state law, and we have to work with the people of Colorado. We have to find the way to address those conflicts and to allow not the idea is not at all to keep ranching from happening, or to stop ranching from happening, or to stop hunting from happening, not at all. I think that that’s that’s a misconception that’s out there, is that wolves are just an avenue to make that happen, And that’s that’s not the case. That’s not the case at all.

01:24:44
Speaker 1: You’re out of it now, and you were never this. You were never the mouthpie, you were never meant to be the guy selling everybody on it. But I think that like if you’re curious and you say, you know, you have opinions about how news is shared, you have opinions about how the public is engaged. Like a hot tip that if I was going to offer your former colleagues. A hot tip is wolf advocates and protectionists have a bad habit of I never use this word, but they have a bad habit of gas lighting people to say so. When a guy says so, there’s gonna be a lot less ELK right, they don’t want to have that conversation.

01:25:33
Speaker 2: They’re reluctant to do it.

01:25:36
Speaker 1: I think that if they would come and say you’re right, man, you’re right, it ain’t gonna be like it is. Yeah, they can’t bring themselves to do it the same way they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge to a rancher, this shit’s gonna come kill your cows.

01:25:50
Speaker 2: They can’t bring themselves to do it. They act like he’s a dumb redneck.

01:25:54
Speaker 1: The hunter doesn’t understand the science right, And they cannot just say, buddy, I know it sucks for you. You’re losing a lot of these elk it’s gonna be harder for you to get an ELK tag.

01:26:06
Speaker 2: I get it, I understand. I don’t really care, but I understand you’re right. I’m doing what I’m gonna do anyways.

01:26:12
Speaker 1: But the fact that they cannot bring themselves to just say the truth bugs the shit out of people.

01:26:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, and I mean we tried to be straightforward.

01:26:22
Speaker 3: I mean I remember at the very beginning conversations that we had with the Commission, I said, wherever wolves and livestock share the landscape, there’s going to be conflict. It’s not it’s not as though they’re they’re doing all these great things for the environment, and it’s there’s no challenge to life.

01:26:38
Speaker 2: That’s going to be a challenge. That’s going to be true.

01:26:41
Speaker 1: The advocates and you’re I’m not saying you’re one of them, but the advocates and the absolutest protection is that’s the narrative they spin. And it infuriates people. And in some ways I think that a better strategy, or more harmonious strategy, or a strategy that would lead to a more harmonious disagreement would be a higher level of acknowledgment about certain realities. And again, just tell them you don’t care, but don’t tell them they’re wrong.

01:27:12
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I mean, it’s infuriates I can imagine being it, being it. I’m not a rancher, being in a rancher shoes and having a wolf. Advocates say this is you’re not right. You know, there’s nothing more intell them. You’re right, I don’t care.

01:27:27
Speaker 1: He would he would sleep better at night, or an el Connor is going to sleep better at night if you go you’re right, I don’t care. Yeah, you have to tell him that he’s wrong. Yeah, yeah, that’s a hot too. What uh when you left on Friday, you retired like you’re just some people. I mean you hit like retirement, that’s right.

01:27:47
Speaker 2: You don’t like storm out you know, No, it’s no, it’s totally totally my call.

01:27:51
Speaker 3: There’s no political influence. A lot of people ask about that. No, it’s his long career with the agency. Very satisfied, and it was just the right time to you. Did you because what you’ve been doing is so high profile? Man, did you did you go home one night and just like sleep? Like, what did it feel like to walk out the door?

01:28:08
Speaker 2: It feels good.

01:28:09
Speaker 3: Well, it’s kind of been a process and we’ve we’ve got, like I said, really great team in there. We’ve got a mac fill into that position, and so we’re you know it, it’s been a lot of work to get to that point. And you’re right, and once you’re done with it and you’re not thinking about it and you’re not. You don’t wake up and have an inbox full of emails about the latest conflict and all that that kind of stuff.

01:28:31
Speaker 1: It’s that’s nice, you know, And no, I want to I want viewers to understand I’m in no way drawing a parallel. I’m drawing a light parallel, but I’m not drawing a serious parallel between the war in Afghanistan and the Wolf Warren Colorado. But when we when we finally pulled out of Afghanistan. I have a friend that did many tours in Afghanistan. He lost friends in Afghanistan, Like he gave a significant part. I mean, he went in the military as a young guy and like came of age, yeah in Afghanistan. And we’ve finally pulled out of Afghanistan, and I text them, I’m like, what are you feeling right now?

01:29:04
Speaker 2: He said that we should have left a long time ago. Yeah, right, if which is not what I expect to hear from him.

01:29:10
Speaker 1: But if all of a sudden, there’s like some I know it can’t happen, or I know it won’t, but if all a sudd there’s some referendum, you know, when it comes to vault and they’re like scratch the whole thing and they send some helicopters out and yeah, all the wolves are gone.

01:29:24
Speaker 2: What would like, well, that would be that would be I wouldn’t want that. I would see that.

01:29:29
Speaker 3: I’ve got to be like, geez waste all that time exactly. I mean, there’s so much has been invested in. I mean, like I say, the conflict is there. Conflict is gonna happen, but it we can Also there’s there’s a lot of stories about wolves not getting into conflict. What what you hear about are are those scenarios where it’s not gone great. There’s a lot of scenarios where it has gone great that that aren’t getting that that story. So I don’t think it’s necessary. I think it’s I think it would be a bad idea to kill all the wolves that that we’ve introduced. I think that they’re they are doing what wolves do. I think part of what the Wildlife Agency does is not only managed for deer and el can trout and and game birds and waterfowl, but also for all of our non game species as well. And so this is a really important responsibility for for all state wildlife agencies, but for Coloradparks and wildlife. I think it’s an agency that’s really proud of of the work that that we’ve done there, and so I don’t I don’t think, you know, reversing what we’ve done is in the cards. I think wolves are wolves are going to find their way. They’re they’re going to do well, and the program, the program is going to do well, the species is going to do well, and and you know, the people of Colorado will do well with it as well. Like we will find ways to make that that whole all that that that challenges, that that go along with managing bears and lions and wolves, all all.

01:30:42
Speaker 2: That together is is part of it.

01:30:45
Speaker 1: And I think that we’ll we’ll get there and we’ll do a really good jobs the agency will. I went out of my way, not out of my way, but I was careful to articulate a perspective held by a lot of hunters that I know. But in all fairness, the perspective I was giving isn’t the full perspective. And there’s the thing I’ve always observed with people with my like, you know, my sort of community right of outdoorsmen and hunters, is no matter how anybody feels about wolf politics, I never meet anyone who isn’t really happy to see a wolf. You never talk to a guy who comes back and he’s like, da damn it, worst night could have had. So all wolf people come back and.

01:31:36
Speaker 2: They’re like, dude, I know we’re starting to hear that, right, And so it’s.

01:31:41
Speaker 1: So funny, is like, it’s like there’s in that way it doesn’t line up with It’s just one of those It’s just one of those contradictions that it doesn’t line up. And like, and no matter what someone’s stated view is, they hear it howl and they get happy. They see it and they get excited, and it’s like their their brain isn’t totally aligned on what they’re after. Yeah, like people struggle, right, No, I hate them or love I should.

01:32:09
Speaker 3: Hate these animals, I should be afraid of them, but in reality, it’s I mean, and that was very intentional. We we brought people to these releases, are you know, to see wolves within the agency that were somewhat skeptical of this, and let’s let’s get them exposed. Let’s let them see a wolf, handle a wolf, hear a wolf like any of the and then from the public we hear those reports too, Like I was camping, I was hunting. I heard, I heard the howls, and the people get excited about it. Right, it’s it is even for those like you say that, I feel like, for whatever reason they should should or shouldn’t love or hate these animals. There’s something there’s something pretty magical about it.

01:32:46
Speaker 1: Remember hearing it would have been ninety eight or ninety nine, nineteen ninety eight or nineteen ninety nine, hunting Elk bohunt Elk and.

01:32:56
Speaker 2: Not far from Yellowstone and thing king at dusk.

01:33:04
Speaker 1: It registered in my head that I was hearing a bugle, Like the second it started off ways was like it’s a bugle.

01:33:12
Speaker 2: I’m like, oh my god, it’s a howl, you know. Yeah, And that being like the first yeah, you know what I mean?

01:33:20
Speaker 3: People remember that, Yeah, the first time you hear a wolf, the first time, even maybe you don’t hear, maybe you don’t seem you see the track and on the trail and it’s it’s unmistakable and it’s you know, you understand there. And we even hear from hunters that are that are in some ways happy to be around wolves and say hey, I’m I’m hunting ungulates, I’m hunting elk or deer moose in an environment that has the component that you know, they added component of wolves to the system. And you know it’s not everybody that agrees with that perspective, but but we’ve heard that, I’ve heard that.

01:33:48
Speaker 2: It’s interesting.

01:33:51
Speaker 1: I keep saying, it’s just it’s just important to me that that again, I want to return.

01:33:56
Speaker 2: I don’t know why. I just feel very compelled to return to a point that I know will come.

01:34:01
Speaker 1: Is it’ll come if it’s like you said, it’s a successful program and they really take off and it gets to be where there’s hundreds and there’s like there’s gonna be a decline, there’s gonna be an elk decline. I’m wondering if they’re gonna tell people that.

01:34:16
Speaker 2: That’s not what it was.

01:34:19
Speaker 1: They’re gonna be like it was climate, it was you know what I mean, They’re gonna obfuscate it and they’re gonna tell them.

01:34:28
Speaker 2: That’s not really what happened. Yeah, it was other factors. I don’t know. I mean I think that we maybe it’s it’s hard to say how how the story will be. I’m telling you they’ll obfuscate it. It’ll be those other facts.

01:34:40
Speaker 1: It was climate, Yeah, it could be like there’s there’s so many things making your prediction. Hey, Nate, go to the get us on one of those prediction markets and put my bet down. But man, I appreciate you coming on and talking about it all.

01:34:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, appreciate the interest, dude.

01:34:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I look like like wildlife management, I mean it’s beautiful. So I mean it gets people routed. It’s like it’s complex, but just the thing in and of itself is gorgeous.

01:35:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s what we get into this field for, like we love it. It’s as biologists, this is this is so meaningful, kind of kind.

01:35:17
Speaker 1: Of our country for a long time tried, well, what’s just let everybody go do what they’re going to do and see what happens, and it don’t go well. No, So the fact that, I mean even the fact that even the fact that like that there’s all these sort of opinions and and people want what’s best for animals. You know, we’re like spending money on these questions and and thinking about them as like a big positive from where we were.

01:35:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the late eighteen hunters when it was like do what you want to guess? All that shit’s gone.

01:35:51
Speaker 3: Right, No, it’s there’s something to be said that the state wildife management agencies have a really important role, and the and the hunters and fishermen too.

01:35:58
Speaker 2: I think that there’s there’s.

01:36:00
Speaker 3: A a all all of these pieces play together and work to manage and conserve all of the wildlife.

01:36:05
Speaker 2: Speakings that we’ve got, and I do man, Like, just to.

01:36:08
Speaker 1: Close, I appreciate this, Like I appreciate the position that you, as an individual found yourself in that that it was it was you had a job, you work for the people of the state of Colorado. Voters handed a thing, and you like in good faith, took the will of the voters and and put it into practice. Yeah right, Yeah, I mean that’s big. Yeah, that’s like, that’s public service. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I just want to acknowledge that, Like, I don’t want you to think that I’m that I have an adversarial viewpoint to the situation you, as an individual, we’re in where like you did your job, man, you know, Yeah, I appreciate you saying that as handed to you and the whole department.

01:36:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, we’re I mean, we’re we’re professionals. We take our jobs very seriously and and yeah, we have a mission that to drive and work work to get that done.

01:37:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was at that time, it was the will of the people. And you like did your job as a carnivore guy or predator guy, and and and oh, thank you for doing great. Thank you for doing your job at a state wildlife agent.

01:37:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:37:17
Speaker 3: Thanks, thanks. It’s something I’m really proud of, you know. It’s it was a great career. It got me to all corners of the state and beyond. I traveled quite a bit throughout the country. And yeah, it’s been it’s been truly a privilege to be able to do that and to call this a career for the last two and a half decades. It’s it’s something that’s that I’m really really proud of.

01:37:37
Speaker 1: Ye.

01:37:37
Speaker 2: Well, good luck on what comes next. Thanks ladies and gentlemen.

01:37:40
Speaker 1: Again, Eric O’Dell from former I’m saying your last name Craig, right, that’s right, okay, former employee of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

01:37:51
Speaker 2: Or how’s where do you guys go by? Coloro Parks and Wildlife. Parks and Wildlife, Right, Thank you very much man. Thanks