By Shannon Lukens.

Range Riders have been employed throughout Colorado to help with non-lethal mitigation of wolves. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has ten range riders. The Colorado Department of Agriculture employs three range riders, one of whom is Shelby Neiberger, who grew up in Rangely. She is 30 years old.

“Hello. I’m Shelby Neiburger. I work for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and I am their Northwest Non-Lethal Mitigation Specialist.  I’m also a full-time range rider for the state of Colorado. So, what we do when we’re range riding is we focus on areas  of wolf activity currently. Wolves have been introduced into Colorado and are hanging around livestock. So our job is to try to protect the livestock and encourage the wolves to leave any areas where there’s a high density of livestock.”

Photo courtesy Shelby Neiberger.

Neiberger says they have many tools they use.

“We have thermal vision to watch the livestock at night. We’re listening for verbal or vocal cues from the livestock themselves because a lot of the times they will let you know if something is in the area that they’re not a fan of. We also use horses and ATVs. We have non-lethal hazing tools like the pepper ball launcher. You can chase wolves on a four-wheeler as long as you’re not making contact with them. Anybody is able to do that without a non-injurious, non-lethal hazing permit. We can use things like box lights or noise machines. It’s typically the things that people know about. We also get very creative and we come up with different ways, like placing stinky shirts in areas to create that human presence, and maybe marking a human territory  to try to keep the wolves out of an area.”

Neiberger has been on the VanValkenburg ranch where there is a confirmed pack of wolves, known as the One-Ear Pack. There are four adults, with a suspected set of possibly three pups. She and Adam VanValkenburg check game cameras throughout the property.

“They (the game cameras) let us know if they’re traveling alone or if they’re traveling as a pack. We got pictures of them packing back food to the dens, and a lot of the times it’s actually small things, like birds or marmots and stuff like that. So even though they do eat large ungulates, they do feast on smaller things as well.”

Photos courtesy Adam VanValkenburg.

Neiberger is out there alone at night. We asked if she is afraid of the wolves.

“People ask me this often. They’re like, ‘Are you afraid of the wolves?’ And I’m really not. It’s actually the moose, the moose I’m afraid of because they’re mean, and they’ll go after you.”

The Born to Be Wild License Plate Grant Program helps pay the cost of the range riding program for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

VanValkenburg had his praises for Neiberger.

“Yeah, Shelby’s out here. She’s out here late at night. You know, everything’s harmless right now, but late at night in the dark, you don’t know what’s around here. I’ve been charged by mountain lion, bear, moose, everything around here. So, she’s out here at night and she’s trying to keep herself between our cows and the wolves. And at the same time, being on a four-wheeler not knowing where to go or looking at her phone and OnX, and it’s kind of a hard, hard thing to ask. There’s special people that have to do this. I mean, you’re not gonna come in here thinking, ‘I’m gonna make a lot of easy money just driving around other people’s property.’ You’ve gotta be here at dark and it’s a whole different scenario at dark.”

The Colorado Department of Agriculture reached out to Steamboat Radio News, asking if we would like to meet Shelby Neiberger and interview her to learn more about the range riding program in Colorado.

YouTube Link to interviews with Range Rider Shelby Neiberger on wolves, range riding, a pepper ball launcher, and an interview with Adam VanValkenburg

• CPW Website — Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Colorado Department of Agriculture Range Rider Program is fully staffed, trained and deployed to reduce wolf conflicts
• Colorado Department of Agriculture Website — Range Rider Training
• CPW Website — Tracking Collared Wolf Activity

Long Interview with Range Rider Shelby Neiberger

“Hello. I’m Shelby Neiburger. I work for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and I am their Northwest Non-Lethal Mitigation Specialist.  I’m also a full-time range rider for the state of Colorado. So, what we do when we’re range riding is we focus on areas  of wolf activity currently. Wolves have been introduced into Colorado and are hanging around livestock. So our job is to try to protect the livestock and encourage the wolves to leave any areas where there’s a high density of livestock.

That could be, you know, during calving season all the way into the fall, until the cows come home again. We use a lot of different tools. I think a lot of people think that range riding is just out there on your horse being a cowboy, which it is. We do spend quite a bit of time with the livestock, particularly at night when we’re watching them.

Me particularly as a CDA range rider, we have thermal vision to watch the livestock at night. We’re listening for verbal or vocal cues from the livestock themselves because a lot of the times they will let you know if something is in the area that they’re not a fan of. We also use horses and ATVs. We have non-lethal hazing tools like the pepper ball launcher. You can chase wolves on a four-wheeler as long as you’re not making contact with them.

Anybody is able to do that without a non-injurious, non-lethal hazing permit. We can use things like box lights or noise machines. It’s typically the things that people know about. We also get very creative and we come up with different ways, like placing stinky shirts in areas to create that human presence, and maybe marking a human territory  to try to keep the wolves out of an area.

Basically anything we can to throw the wolves off and be uncomfortable while they’re near livestock or doing an undesirable behavior. We have three CDA range riders. Currently there’s 10 contracted CPW range riders that work from April to October right now. And then, the CPW damage specialists also help us out with range riding. So, with the CPW contractors, we typically have one or two in each county that’s flexible enough to go to the neighboring county if needed.

And then as CDA range riders, we kind of focus on areas like where there’s packs of wolves or it’s just potential problem areas or it has been a problem area. And then CPW kind of focuses on the same thing we do. It’s a very collaborative effort. We couldn’t do it without the collaboration of the producers or the landowners, because sometimes that’s two different things. Obviously, it doesn’t mean you own the land even if you’re running your cows on it.

So, it’s really important to have that open communication with each other, so as long as we tell them what we’re seeing and if they tell us what they’re seeing, then it helps us paint this picture of what the wolves are doing and kind of helps us build a plan to better attack a situation for the better of it. We use all sorts of techniques and tools to kind of paint this picture of what the wolves are doing.

The CPW, some of them have access to the collar data, which they do share with us. When I say ‘us,’ CDA range riders or their contracted range riders. And that’s sometimes when the wolves and the data points are focusing on an area, and that could mean that they made a kill there or maybe that’s where their den is. And we’ll go investigate that area just to make sure, you know, it’s not a dead livestock animal or anything of concern.

It is delayed. It’s very delayed data, so it is helpful, but it’s just a piece of the pie. Definitely we don’t just solely rely on that data. We are constantly looking for tracks and signs that lets us know, you know, obviously where the wolves are moving, how they’re moving. Just from their feces we can tell even what they’ve been eating and if they’re healthy and stuff like that.

We also rely on game cameras. The game cameras do similar things. They let us know if they’re traveling alone or if they’re traveling as a pack. We got pictures of them packing back food to the dens, and a lot of the times it’s actually small things, like birds or marmots and stuff like that. So even though they do eat large ungulates, they do feast on smaller things as well.

So we use that camera data a lot for that as well, and we’re constantly moving cameras if we’re not getting them because obviously the wolves are usually changing their territory a little bit. I mean, they will travel long, long distances in a short period of time. Even if they have a den, um,  when packing particularly, they’ll travel usually like six miles away from their den as the crow flies.

So, they’re going much more than 12 miles in a night. They’ll have a pretty big radius in an area. It it seems like they do like to scavenge a lot too, even off of other predator kills. And then other tools that we use…  It kind of depends if we’re trying to get close to the wolves or not. So when we’re trying to create sound, sometimes we’ll hike around with music. Just being creative, or just speaking or human presence thing.

Or if we’re trying to get close to them, we’ll listen to their howling and try to pinpoint at night where we need to go  from a direction from there.

Do you get nervous at night doing it by yourself?

I don’t.  People ask me this often. They’re like, ‘Are you afraid of the wolves?’ And I’m really not. It’s actually the moose, the moose I’m afraid of because they’re mean, and they’ll go after you.

It doesn’t matter how much. It doesn’t seem like they’re bothered if they’re mad. They don’t care how big you are. So yeah, I’m not afraid of the wolves. You know, up in this country,  we can ride four-wheelers. Four-wheelers are loud, there’s lights and everything like that. In other areas that are dense like this behind me where cows are in this tall trees and brush and you can’t hardly see anything,  our only options are on horseback or hiking.

And so that’s when I guess it would be… It’s really important to track ourselves, especially if we’re in an area that we don’t know because, one, we want to know where we’ve been so we can tell if it affected the wolves’ movements and if it’s working, and then two, if you’re in a dense forest area, you’ve got to know how to get out. So worst case scenario, if you’re tracking yourself, you can at least backtrack.”

Interview with Shelby Neiberger on Pepper Ball Launcher

“So this is a pepper ball launcher that CDA Range Riders and some of the CPW staff has. It is a non-lethal hazing tool. The reason why we got them actually is because they’re least likely to cause harm to any animals that it’s used with. Law enforcement uses it as well. It’s powered by an air tank and I guess depending on obviously conditions, we can shoot up to like 300 yards.

But we have all been trained on like, you know, depending on those conditions, how far we should go out and just how much air is in the tank and stuff like that matters. We don’t want to haze animals for no reason. We want to associate hazing with an undesirable behavior that the wolves are doing, which that might be, you know, in the middle of a cow herd, harassing the cows would be a good time.

Or if they were especially repeatedly going back to an area that we wouldn’t want them in, that would be an ideal way to catch them. Otherwise, if they’re not going back to the same area, it’s pretty hard to catch them in the act, I guess. So these are the projectiles that the pepper ball launcher uses. They took one of the hottest peppers that they could find and they made a synthetic version of it.

And so there’s just powder in the front of that projectile. So obviously they’re designed to break, so obviously when they hit something, they’re gonna break and  you’re gonna see a bunch of powder. Which one of the concerns with them is obviously depending on which way the wind is going. You want to make sure that you’re not downwind of whatever your target is because you don’t want to get that pepper in your face.

But if that does happen, there’s safety precautions and things you can do to obviously to get rid of the pepper on your face.”