Lions and snakes and wolves, oh my

By Vince Bzdek Oct 13, 2024 Updated Oct 13, 2024

from The Gazette

Photo: from CPW

Shortly after I moved my wife here from the wilds of Washington, D.C., she was jogging down our street one evening when a snake fell from the sky. Thankfully, it just missed her head.

She looked up and saw a hawk above, and learned later that dropping their prey is a common method hawks employ to kill it.

Not long after, a bear broke into our garage, opened a refrigerator inside, and somehow managed to get into the champagne bottles in there.

My wife was teased mercilessly by new friends after that: “Those are some pretty aristocratic bears you got in your neighborhood. Have you seen a mountain lion yet? Well, they’ve seen YOU.”

“Everything is here to kill me,” she complained to me soon after, not without some justification.

Welcome to the West, darling.

Yes, yes, we are fond of our wildlife in the West. But I’m starting to wonder, is it getting just a bit too wild for the number of people now living in Colorado?

Are we just a little too accommodating of the wolves, bears and mountain lions we cohabit this state with, anthropomorphizing them into cuddly pet-like creatures when really, these are wild, dangerous, unpredictable animals?

Are we beginning to push our luck?

As if there isn’t enough to be concerned about already, my wife points out that now we are deliberately trying to introduce more pods of dangerous animals among us.

Take the ballot initiative that would altogether ban hunting of mountain lions. Wouldn’t that mean, it’s fair to ask, hundreds more mountain lions that might start to encroach on human encampments, like the one that apparently ran off with my pet cat?

And have you heard about the curated den of 2,000 rattlesnakes in some secret location in the northwest corner of the state, complete with “RattleCam?”

Coloradans seems to think this science experiment is super-cool, and not a bit dangerous, even though the den has vague parameters AND WE DON’T KNOW WHERE IT ACTUALLY IS. And once the weather warms, we are told, only pregnant females remain in the den while the others disperse to nearby territory. Like where?!? The bike path? The playground? What’s to keep these rattlers, I ask, from roaming far and wide around the state and into its cities? Do we really need 2,000 more poisonous, highly mobile fang monsters?

On the RattleCam website, where you can watch the slithery action live from the safety of your bear-infested home, the sponsors have created a cute cartoon of a cheerful and approachable-looking snake as their logo.

Did I mention that none of the sponsors of this little experiment are from Colorado? The project is a collaboration between California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, snake removal company Central Coast Snake Services and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. In other words, they can all go home when all the rattling offspring take over the state next spring.

Of course, the wolf reintroduction is really the heart of our current heated debate over just how wild Colorado should be.

I’m sure you’ve heard, but Colorado has run into a huge raft of problems trying to welcome wolves back to a state that has 5 million more people than it did last time wolves roamed free in the 1940s.

Colorado Counties Inc., which represents every county in the state except Boulder and Denver, just called for a halt in the arrival of the next batch of wolves, due this winter.

They cited all the livestock that have been killed in Grand and Routt counties, and the fact that the rush to introduce wolves last December meant Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff had "limited time to plan, staff and educate impacted stakeholders about the realities of living with wolves." They also cited the lack of communication and training, which they said left producers and rural communities vulnerable to livestock depredations.

The counties also argued that funding for the program is inadequate, and ranchers aren’t being compensated properly for their losses.

When the reintroduction was approved by voters, annual costs were estimated at $800,000. Over a four-year period, as reported by Colorado Politics, the cost has now exceeded $5 million.

Contrast Colorado’s dysfunctional introduction of wolves to the highly successful effort in Wyoming, a place where wolves make much more sense given that Colorado has 10 times the population of the least populated state in the Union.

In addition, Wyoming didn’t rush it.

Colorado approved wolves in November 2020, and released the first batch three years later, in December 2023.

Wyoming prepared for two full decades before they reintroduced wolves back in the 1990s, with careful planning, numerous stakeholder meetings and straightforward transparency from agencies involved. Some of those meetings were contentious, too, but they led to a smarter plan in the end.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has been the opposite of transparent, often making decisions about the program in secret, on the fly, triggering resentment and fueling rumors and speculation.

But the main thing Wyoming did right was to put wild animals in a wild place. The problems surface when wild animals are in urban places, the “urban-wildland interface," or places that are no longer truly wild even if we like to pretend the are.

Wyoming allowed the wolves to reestablish themselves in Yellowstone Park alone, and hunting was allowed outside of the park to “cull wolves” and help protect livestock.

As a result, a small miracle has taken place in Yellowstone. Wolves have ecologically transformed the park through a process called trophic cascade.

With wolves back at the top of the food chain, populations of other animals lower on the chain have been cut back or forced far back into the backcountry, including elk and coyotes. With fewer elk in the park, aspen, willows and cottonwoods have grown back in places where the elk had overgrazed them. When those trees come back, songbirds return to their canopies and beaver come back to waterways where those trees protect them and provide building material for dams. And then those dams provide new habitat for fish, salamanders, otters, muskrats and reptiles. More elk carcasses mean more food for bears, eagles and other raptors, too. All of this results in more biodiversity and balance in an ecosystem and a larger abundance of life.

I’m sure that’s what folks who approved the reintroduction of wolves to Colorado had in mind, but the wolves have barely had a chance to survive let alone magically transform Colorado’s ecosystem.

Most recently, CPW decided to capture the entire Copper Creek wolf pack, because at least one wolf from that pack had repeatedly killed sheep and cattle.

Those wolves, an adult male and female and their four pups, were moved to a wildlife sanctuary in an undisclosed location. The male, which was already injured before being captured, died shortly after being put into captivity.

Once the pups grow up, CPW plans to rerelease them back into the wild.

Instead of repeating their earlier mistakes, Colorado would be wise to consider a policy similar to Wyoming’s. Give wolves full protection in a wild place like Rocky Mountain National Park, but allow people to shoot them if they stray outside of protected areas and attack livestock.

From the park, wolves could cut down the elk herd that has all but taken over the neighboring town of Estes Park.

“How do you make it (wolf reintroduction) work for hunters, how do you make it work for ranchers? How do you make it work for everybody?” Jerry Whited, an experienced outdoorsman who’s lived in both Colorado and Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily. “Follow that Wyoming model, and you’ll have a shot at making it work.”

I like living in a place with proximity to wildness. In wildness, Henry David Thoreau once wrote, is the preservation of the world.

But proximity is the key. I don’t really want wolves and bears and mountain lions in my background and garage, even if they rightfully belong there. Their survival is just as threatened as mine when they stray from their natural habitat and truly wild territory.

Colorado, folks, is not Wyoming.

Let’s keep Colorado wild, but let’s help steer our wildlife to the truly wild places that are their best and real home. With nearly 6 million people, let’s not pretend we’re the wild West anymore.

In doing so, as a nice side benefit, we just may keep my wife alive a little while longer, too.

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.

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