‘Give me the tools, we’ll play the game’: Roaring Fork Valley ranchers highlight issues working with Colorado Parks and Wildlife in wolf reintroduction

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This is the first in a two-part series addressing how Roaring Fork Valley ranchers are trying to manage a new life with reintroduced wolves. Part two can be found here.
Before a fresh batch of wolves dropped into Eagle and Pitkin counties in the middle of January, Tom Harrington was already frustrated with how the entire wolf reintroduction effort has been handled by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
“In my recent experience and many others — literally anybody in the state who’s been waiting on the transparency and communication to improve from CPW to the landowners, producers, and ranchers — I believe it’s gotten worse instead of better,” said the president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, who is also a board member of the Holy Cross Cattlemen’s Association.
His experience is made more poignant by the fact that the ranch he manages just outside Carbondale summers its livestock in Thompson Divide as well as to the north and east on Cottonwood Pass — areas around where the latest wolves have been reintroduced.
“Within 20 miles, in my opinion, any rancher should be notified,” he said, so ranchers can at least begin to be prepared for any kind of problems.
“It’s unacceptable that something that we felt like was put onto us, that we hadn’t been managing for, we didn’t have experience with, and now we feel like we don’t have the tools to deal with it,” he added. “I think that’s where the real frustration comes from.”
The state agency is supposed to supply, pay for, and manage nonlethal deterrents, which can include electric fencing, fladry, fox lights, cracker shells, he said.
“We don’t have any kind of inventory anywhere,” he added, saying that even the range rider program is not in place. “We haven’t been offered, even told where I can go get (nonlethal deterrents). I’ve never put up fladry fencing, with the flags on it. … Apparently, there is one manufacturer of this fladry in the country, and they are already behind in supplying demands.”
The lack of tools and support from the state agency to manage the new predator is one part of what has made the transition reactive instead of proactive as well as extremely difficult to prepare for, he said.
“We’re just not being communicated with by CPW to put these things in place or them saying, ‘We’re here to help you. It’s right here — I have it in my hand, and I’m ready to give it to you and help you put it into place,'” he said. “That hasn’t happened.”
The other part is the lack of communication and transparency where wolves may be, whether in and around rancher operations.
Bridget O’Rouke, the statewide public information officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said the state agency is committed to keeping the ranching community informed.
“CPW staff have done this in multiple ways, including public meetings and one-on-one conversations,” she said. “Field staff will inform local area producers when wolves are spending time in an area and conduct site assessments to identify and deploy deterrence measures that would work for them and their operation.”
How the state agency has managed the reintroduction is in stark contrast to how Carter Niemeyer worked on the ground with ranchers during the federal reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park and Frank Church Wilderness Area in Idaho back in the 1990s.
Spending over 30 years managing wolves during his career with various agencies before retiring from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he was also a member of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Wolf Technical Working Group.
In Colorado, nobody seems to know when, where, or how the wolves are coming in, Niemeyer said, and that’s a problem.
“When people are so unfamiliar with the animal to start with, and then this cloak and dagger stuff (from CPW) — it’s not the best way to handle it,” he said.
During his long tenure, he didn’t have a lot of nonlethal tools to provide to ranchers, but he did a number of interventions: trapping, collaring, relocating some to other areas, or minimizing the need to kill wolves.
When ranchers would ask for information on collared wolves if they were in the area, he and others he worked with kept them posted. He shared radio frequencies — this was before GPS technology was used to track wolves — and even shared some of the receivers or tracking units with the ranchers, he said. Turning on the receiver, it would begin to scan, signaling if a wolf was in the area.
“My comments to them was, ‘Don’t misuse this. Don’t do something foolish that reflects badly on your industry,'” he said. “I absolutely can’t remember any ranchers that I worked with violating that trust. They seemed to be more comfortable with the tool.”
Any poaching that did occur was from those outside the ranching community, he said.
“It was what I called jokers and clowns riding around in a pickup truck looking for something to shoot — that’s the people who’d be doing the poaching,” he said. “They can’t shoot a wolf, then they’re shooting the road sign, just doing some vandalism with their gun.”
There was a lot of trust and face-to-face communication with the ranchers, he said. One of his primary responsibilities was to be responsive, meeting people and trying to nip misunderstandings in the bud before it gets started. This also included letting the ranchers know everything he knew about the wolves and, in turn, working with ranchers, having them tell him everything they knew.
“I guess at the time, you had to trust somebody until they proved they couldn’t be trusted,” he said.
Niemeyer saw ranchers as part of a team that worked together to make sure the federal wolf reintroduction and the years following as the wolves spread out across the states — namely, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — went off with as little conflict as possible.
“We sat in the house, we talked, we drank coffee, tried to answer everybody’s questions,” he said. “When I left, I’d tell them, ‘Here’s my card, here’s my number. If you see them come back, if you have anything that concerns you about it, call me, and I’ll be here.’ That’s how we did it. I never felt like we were secretive whatsoever.”
With the lack of communication and transparency on wolf movement as well as tools from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Harrington is having to rely on the experience of those who have had wolf encounters on their ranches, namely those in North and Middle Park, to try to prepare for the recent batch of wolves.
“There’s going to be a huge learning curve for those who haven’t had that experience,” he said. “I’m fortunate I have that connection that if we end up in that situation, I can tap those guys and say, ‘What did that look like? What did you do in that situation? What worked? What didn’t work?'”
In his ideal world, he would have Colorado Parks and Wildlife stop the reintroduction. He would want all the site assessments completed with recommendations established on what will help deter wolves from preying on livestock, as well as the nonlethals and range riders in place.
Additionally, he would require open communication and transparency from the state agency about wolves in a rancher’s area. If chronic depredations are occurring and nonlethal deterrents aren’t working, then the next step would be lethal removal.
The wolf reintroduction was voted in by the people, he said. He and other ranchers didn’t like it, they didn’t vote for it, but it is the law that they have to comply with, he said. He’s just asking to do it in a way that is successful for everyone. By that, he said he felt he just needed more time to prepare — and not just him and other ranchers but Parks and Wildlife employees, as well.
“Do I want the wolves here? No, I don’t,” he said. “But I was outvoted on that, so I’m going to live with what the results were. There is a saying I’ve used many times: You told me what the rules are. Give me the tools, and we’ll play the game. But we’ve got to play by those rules.”
Jonathan Bowers is the assistant editor and copy editor for The Aspen Times. He can be reached at jbowers@aspentimes.com.