By Shannon Lukens. (Warning: Photos can be disturbing.) Cover photo is of Grand County producer, Conway Farrell, and his kids.

UPDATE at 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed the Wolf Depredation in Grand County. Confirmed Gray Wolf Depredations

CPW defines “Confirmed Wolf Depredation” as physical trauma resulting in injury or death.

• April 28, 2024. Grand County. No claim submitted. 1 calf involved.

 

UPDATE — Article from Miles Blumhardt with the Fort Collins Coloradoan; April 30, 2024 — 

The toll of Colorado’s wolf war: Rancher says Grand County on edge after wolf kills

 

Another yearling calf has been killed on the same Grand County ranch where four yearlings were killed by wolves on April 17, as confirmed by Colorado Parks & Wildlife. A yearling is a calf that is less than a year old.

 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Northwest Region Public Information Officer Rachael Gonzales emailed Steamboat Radio News this morning at 11:11 a.m.

“CPW has received a report of a possible wolf depredation in Grand County on the morning of April 28. Local staff are conducting a field investigation. If confirmed, CPW will update the new Gray Wolf Depredation Report webpage. The webpage was created to inform the public about confirmed livestock depredations by wolves in Colorado. This page will be updated each time CPW staff investigates and confirms a new depredation event.”

 

Photos of the April 28 yearling kill, courtesy of Conway Farrell.

Conway Farrell is the producer and one of the owners of the cattle. Here’s what he says happened this morning. He saw the wolf. There is another dead calf, but they aren’t sure if it is from a wolf. He also talks about the overall impact it is having on the animals and his family.

“This morning, I was up the valley at a different ranch at daylight and I seen the heifers roll in out there in the meadow. They got up and started trotting around and I looked, and I could see, and I just got my glasses as it was just getting daylight, and I could see the big male, the big gray male. He was packing a bone, carrying it up towards where we think they are denned. It was going right through the cattle. My dad called me about one minute after that and he said, ‘I’m down here at this other ranch and there’s a dead yearling where they killed them ones the other day.’ So he went out there and looked at that one, and seen it, and I just started walking from up there and I walked the back tracks all the way down to this other ranch. I walked it 2.5 miles back to where it came from and by then the snow was starting to disappear and I lost the tracks in the sagebrush and the dirt.”

“It’s in the same field where he killed the other four last week. And the crazy thing is he walked right by a cow in a different pasture, walked 20 yards from a cow with a brand new calf, walked right past her and went over there into the same yearlings. We followed his tracks and he killed that yearling. And then across the road on the other side of the road, there’s a dead calf from last night. So they’re going to skin it next and see if they can see any marks on it. But the one for sure is a wolf, and we don’t know about the dead calf on the other side.”

“So there’s another one?”

“So there’s a dead calf on the other side of the road but there ain’t a mark or anything on it. So the vet and the DOW are going to skin it out to see if the cow stepped on it. It’s a two-week old calf though.”

“The damage that these things are doing, they have all these animals so stirred up and so distressed, that we’re having other problems and other issues. So the other day when that happened, I spent three hours up here with the DOW, the one day, and had a calf die on the river because I wasn’t down there providing our cattle with the proper animal husbandry. And then, two days later I took the 2 o’clock to daylight shift with the DOW. The Parks and Wildlife. I took that shift. And by me being up there, I wasn’t providing proper animal husbandry for our cattle on the river and I had a prolapsed cow that died. So the amount of money that this is costing my family, it’s just tenfold to what the actual damages are to the dead ones. We lose $5,000 down there. They started hazing there. My buddy, he was watching another herd for us of our bulls up there, where our bulls and sheep are, and that wolf went from here by hazing him here, he went up there and spent three days in there, three nights in a row, he seen him in there. And we have a $7500 crippled bull we won’t be able to use this year. There’s no proof that he’s crippled and the DOW can’t verify that the wolves did it. There’s just so many costs that are associated with this deal that are tenfold, that are 100-fold, I don’t even know. The financial damages that this is doing to us, it’s sickening.”

 

Farrell says they have been working with CPW to figure out how to stop this, and it is hurting everyone.

 “So we’ve been working with everybody, from the guys on the ground. Our local DOW staff is amazing. The game wardens are out here. They’re working their butts off trying to do everything they can to do their job. We went to the higher-ups. We tried telling the guys the problems that we’re seeing on the everyday level right here. With the game wardens going their job, they’re not focusing on their actual wildlife management now. The game wardens aren’t out there counting their sage grouses, catching the shed hunters that are out trespassing, running these elk and deer around right now. They’re not doing their day-to-day jobs, the local game wardens. They didn’t sign up for this to come skin beef cattle and look around and try to find wolf tracks in cattle, and then watch cattle at night. What’s happened is that they took the local game wardens away from their normal duty to have to go start doing this and patrolling cattle.

And it ain’t right. Other wildlife is suffering.

We’ve tried working with the higher-ups, meeting with these guys and telling them all this, and telling them how big a problem we’re having, and they’re so worried about the activists’ side coming at them if they remove one of these wolves. And it needs to be done.

This has to be done. It’s causing so much stress, so much stuff that nobody sees and that we would have never imagined seeing, by having these things on the landscape.

They want to come put up their non-lethal (things)… Their flags, they put up their lights, we’ve shot cracker shells, we’ve done all the things that they say we can be allowed to do and all it does is push this wolf, this one male – because the female’s not here now. We haven’t seen her. She must be somewhere else – But the male keeps coming and showing up, killing stuff, and heading back all by himself. There’s one male that’s causing all this trouble right now in Grand County. Now he is responsible for six kills? Known kills.

And now that we’ve seen what we’ve seen, we definitely know that there’s more. We definitely have had other depredations that, we didn’t know what we were looking for, we thought it was a natural death.

But until you really look at these animals and start seeing the rake marks and then pulling the hide off of them, it’s devastating what these things’ powerful jaws are doing and what they do to the internal of the animal, but you don’t understand it until you actually see one, and see a few of them.”

 

Middle Park Stockgrowers from Grand County, the Grand County Commissioners and Sheriff, and North Park Stockgrowers from Jackson County have requested Colorado Parks and Wildlife remove the wolves that are killing cattle. That’s according to the Wolf Commission Plan for chronic depredators, which are wolves that continue to kill livestock.

Here’s Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke.

“We have asked respectfully, and civilly for action to be taken in this matter and all we’ve gotten is denial. Stockgrowers in Middle Park and North Park and across the state are incredibly frustrated.”

 

CPW Director Jeff Davis responded to the two requests from Middle Park Stockgrowers April 23, saying that GPS collar tracking shows a pair of wolves could be denning in the area where the kills are happening. The letter said, “Removing the male breeder at this point would be irresponsible management and potentially cause the den to fail possibly resulting in the death of the presumed pups.”

Davis added, “This is not a desirable result and I am therefore not going to take action at this time to lethally remove this animal.”

The North Park Stockgrowers are also writing another letter to Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis, to follow up on the one they wrote last week.

 

Linke added that the five kills in Grand County and the one kill and one attack in Jackson County have all been on private property and not federal lands.

Confirmed Gray Wolf Depredation Information

Information on confirmed depredations includes date of incident, county where incident occurred, whether a claim has been filed and amount received, and animals involved in the incident. CPW defines “Confirmed Wolf Depredation” as physical trauma resulting in injury or death.

• April 28, 2024. Grand County. No claim submitted. 1 calf involved.
• April 18, 2024. Grand County. No claim submitted. 1 cattle involved.
• April 17, 2024. Grand County. No claim submitted. 3 cattle involved.
• April 13, 2024. Jackson County. No claim submitted. 1 calf involved.
• ​April 7, 2024​​. Jackson County​. No claim submitted. 1 calf involved.
• ​April 2, 2024​​. Grand County. No claim submitted. 1 calf involved.
• ​​​November 17, 2023. Jackson County. Claim received: $489.00. 3 sheep involved.​​
• March 13, 2023. Jackson County. Claim received: $15,000.00. 1 dog​​ involved.
• November 19, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $1,106.09. 1 cattle involved.
• ​October 8, 2022​. Jackson County. Claim received: $338.62. 1 calf involved.
• ​October 7, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $400.00. 1 calf involved.
• ​August 1, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $3,000.00. 1 calf involved.
• ​May 30, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $3,000.00. 1 calf involved.
• ​May 2, 2022. Jackson County​. Claim received: $2,850.00. 1 calf involved.
• April 22, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $779.52. 1 calf involved.
• ​March 15, 2022. Jackson County​. Claim received: $1,230.00. 2 cattle involved.
• ​January 18, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $8,647.00. 3 cattle involved.
• ​​​January 9, 2022. Jackson County. Claim received: $1,252.72. 2 dogs involved.
• ​​December 19, 2021​. Jackson County. Claim received: $1,800.00. 1 calf involved.

Steamboat Radio News Past Coverage of wolves in Colorado

• April 28, 2024 — ANOTHER WOLF KILL IN GRAND COUNTY SUNDAY

• April 24, 2024 —  COLLARED GRAY WOLF ACTIVITY MAP RELEASED FOR APRIL

• April 23, 2024 — A WOLF HAS DIED, AND MIDDLE PARK STOCKGROWERS HEAR FROM CPW
• April 22, 2024 —  MULTIPLE LETTERS SENT TODAY TO GOVERNOR POLIS AND CPW ASKING FOR ACTION ON WOLVES
• April 18, 2024 —  FOUR MORE HEAD OF LIVESTOCK KILLED BY WOLVES IN GRAND COUNTY
• April 9, 2024 — AG PRODUCERS MEET WITH CPW OFFICIALS IN KREMMLING ABOUT WOLVES
• April 8, 2024 — ANOTHER CALF KILLED BY A WOLF OR WOLVES IN JACKSON COUNTY
• April 3, 2024 — A WOLF OR WOLVES HAVE KILLED A NEWBORN CALF IN GRAND COUNTY
• April 3, 2024 —  Denver 7  Calf killed in first confirmed report of gray wolf depredation since wolves were released in December
• Feb. 29, 2024 — COLORADO PARKS AND WILDLIFE OFFICIALS COME TO STEAMBOAT SPRINGS TO TALK WOLVES
•  Jan. 30, 2024 — CPW SENDS UPDATE ON WOLF SIGHTINGS SINCE 2004, AND MORE ON THE MAP
• Jan. 24, 2024  — ELECTED OFFICIALS GRILL DEPT. OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND CPW AT HEARING WEDNESDAY
• Jan. 22, 2024 — CPW GETS HARSH LETTER DEMANDING ANSWERS FROM ROBERTS AND MCCLUSKIE
• Jan. 19, 2024 — COLORADO’S NEXT WOLVES TO BE REINTRODUCED WILL BE FROM TRIBAL LANDS IN WASHINGTON
• Jan. 12, 2024 — CPW CONFIRMS WOLVES WERE IN SOUTH ROUTT BUT AREN’T (YET) IN MOFFAT
• Dec. 22, 2023 — FIVE MORE WOLVES ARE RELEASED BY COLORADO PARKS AND WILDLIFE
• Dec. 22, 2023 — CPW DENIES GITTLESON’S REQUEST TO IMPLEMENT 10(J) RULE ON JACKSON COUNTY WOLVES
• Dec. 21, 2023 — THREE OF THE FIVE WOLVES RELEASED IN COLORADO WERE IN PACKS THAT KILLED OR INJURED LIVESTOCK IN OREGON
• Dec. 19, 2023 — LIVESTOCK PRODUCERS RECEIVE WOLF UPDATE FROM CPW IN CRAIG MONDAY
• Dec. 13, 2023 — GITTLESON SAYS ANOTHER CALF WAS ATTACKED BY A WOLF TODAY
• Dec. 11, 2023 — COMPLAINT FILED IN U.S. DISTRICT COURT TO STOP WOLF REINTRODUCTION IN COLORADO
• Dec. 4, 2023 — KEEP YOUR PETS CLOSE AND CARRY A BIG STICK – CPW HAS ADVICE FOR LIVING WITH WOLVES
• Nov. 19, 2023 — THREE LAMBS KILLED BY A WOLF IN JACKSON COUNTY, SAYS RANCHER
• Nov. 17, 2023 – CPW AND CDA ANNOUNCE AGREEMENT TO WORK TOGETHER ON WOLF REINTRODUCTION
• Nov. 7, 2023 – U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SETS DATE FOR 10J RULE FOR WOLVES
• Oct. 6, 2023 – COLORADO WILL RECEIVE WOLVES FROM OREGON
• May 16, 2023 –  POLIS VETOES 10J RULE WOLF BILL
• May 3, 2023 – CPW COMMISSION APPROVES FINAL WOLF RESTORATION AND MANAGEMENT PLAN 
• May 2, 2023 – MANAGEMENT OF GRAY WOLVES REINTRODUCTION BILL PASSES IN STATE HOUSE
• May 2, 2023 –CPW MEETS THIS WEEK FOR FINAL WOLF MANAGEMENT PLAN 
• April 27, 2023 – CPW CONFIRMS WOLF SIGHTING EAST OF KREMMLING
• April 8, 2023 – CPW WOLF COMMISSION MEETS IN STEAMBOAT SPRINGS 
• April 3, 2023 – CPW TO PRESENT FINAL DRAFT WOLF RESTORATION AND MANAGEMENT PLAN IN STEAMBOAT SPRINGS
• March 28, 2023 – THE SOUTHERN UTE TRIBE ASKS THAT CPW RELEASES WOLVES ALONG I-70 CORRIDOR
• March 15, 2023 – TWO DOGS DIE FROM WOLVES IN JACKSON COUNTY THIS WEEK
• March 3, 2023 –COLORADO PARKS AND WILDLIFE COMMISSION RELEASES WOLF REINTRODUCTION MEETING RECAP 
• Feb. 10, 2022 – MONTANA STOCKGROWERS VOICE SUPPORT FOR COLORADO RANCHERS OVER THE WOLVES
• Feb. 9, 2022 – WOLF MANAGEMENT DISCUSSED BY LOCAL RANCHERS AND OFFICIALS AT FORUM IN STEAMBOAT
• Jan. 22, 2022 – WOLF MITIGATION OPTIONS
• Jan. 19, 2022 – ANOTHER COW KILLED OVERNIGHT IN NORTH PARK BY WOLVES
• Jan. 18, 2022 – TWO MORE COWS ATTACKED BY WOLVES IN JACKSON COUNTY TUESDAY
• Jan. 12, 2022 – CPW ALLOWS WOLVES TO BE HAZED IN EMERGENCY DECLARATION
• Jan. 10, 2022 – A WOLF PACK KILL IS REPORTED IN JACKSON COUNTY OVER THE WEEKEND
• June 9, 2021 – WOLF DEN WITH PUPS CONFIRMED IN NW COLORADO