This is the second in a two-part series addressing how Roaring Fork Valley ranchers are trying to manage a new life with reintroduced wolves. Part one can be found here.

During calving season, Tom Harrington would wake up early and ride horseback around the calving pastures, checking on the cows and calves of the ranch he manages just outside of Carbondale.

“We see coyotes every day when we go out to feed our cows this time of year,” the president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association said, “and they will just wander right through the cows. There’s usually not an issue. You don’t see them being aggressive toward livestock. It’s kind of a coexistence.”

---

---

This mirrors the experience Carter Niemeyer had when he managed wolves for over 30 years with various government agencies, before he retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“I’ve seen wolves, many, many times around and in livestock, actually in with the herd, and nobody is chasing anybody,” Niemeyer said. “I’ve watched wolves in the early morning hours walking among cattle — the cattle paying little attention to the wolves.” 

---

---

The mother cows of course became alert and focused on the wolves when the predator stopped meandering and stood with their head erect, he said. But, when the wolves began walking and sniffing with their heads down, the cattle began grazing again.

“Most predators avoid the livestock directly by preying and feeding on wild, natural food sources,” he said. “The majority of predators coexist with livestock, tended and unattended. However, they are also opportunists.”

Where livestock become statistics — that is, killed by predators, like the coyote and wolf — is when a vulnerability factor plays out where a predator behaviorally decides to kill and consume the livestock opportunistically, Niemeyer said.

On those occasions when Harrington does run into a dead calf that’s been killed by coyotes, he said the depredation affects him heavily.

“It wrecks my day, it wrecks my week, thinking that I could have been there 30 minutes earlier or an hour earlier to prevent that from happening and save that calf,” he said.

When it happens, though, he said he can go out and shoot coyotes — unlike the wolves being reintroduced into Colorado, most recently in Eagle and Pitkin counties, which poses a problem for the simple fact that the animals are endangered species.

According to Bridget O’Rouke, the statewide public information officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, “In addition to being federally protected, gray wolves are also a state-endangered species in Colorado, and wolves may not be taken (harmed, harassed, or killed) for any reason other than self-defense. The gray wolf in Colorado is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) and state law. Penalties for illegal take can vary and include fines up to $100,000, jail time, and loss of hunting privileges.”

The 10(j) rule of the Endangered Species Act applies to reintroduced, federally threatened, or endangered species, which allows for lethal measures. The rule categorizes the reintroduced wolves in Colorado as a non-essential, experimental population. This would remove Endangered Species Act protection, essentially shifting the wolves from endangered to threatened. The rule would allow them to be “hazed, killed, or relocated,” but only if they kill livestock and there is proof.

“Part of that is caught-in-the-act, where you can lethally remove a wolf harassing, attacking, chasing your livestock,” said Harrington. “You can shoot that wolf and then file for a permit retroactively. I believe you better have some really good evidence — video, witnesses, GPS, damage to that animal: cow, calf, horse, whatever it is — because I feel like it’s going to be challenged from the CPW side immediately that it wasn’t approved or didn’t occur for a reason, that you just shot a wolf.”

Even with the 10(j) rule, the fact that these endangered creatures are state and federally protected, though, is what makes managing the reintroduced wolves so challenging, he said.

“I can shoot coyotes — I don’t have to have a license, I don’t have to have a permit, I don’t have to have permission from CPW,” he said. “Mentally, you think, ‘Well, I lost a calf to coyotes, and I went out, and I shot two coyotes today, so I made a difference.'”

Though the livestock losses to these and other predators in the state are far higher than those lost to wolves, he said, “If you collectively add up losses from other predators that we deal with and have dealt with for decades, centuries, we still have perceived, personal control of those predators.”

“That’s the difference to me, is that predations that we deal with routinely now, we have some control over that — if it gets out of hand, we can deal with that,” he said. 

“You’re not going to be doing that with wolves.”

Managing the predator vs. managing the livestock

When it comes to managing predators, particularly, wolves, Matt Barnes is fully aware of the limitations of nonlethal deterrents. Barnes is a rangeland scientist with the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative who also served on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Stakeholder Advisory Group.

“Fladry, foxlights, noise devices, tools that make light and noise — they’re all designed to scare the predator away,” he said. “They’re all based on this idea that we have our livestock here. There’s a predator out there. That predator is coming in from out there and taking some of what is ours. These tools are designed to keep the animals separate from each other.”

He noted, however, these all work if you have the right context: If you have livestock in a relatively concentrated area in an amenable place, which is typical during winter and spring calving seasons, the tools can work, and you could theoretically scare a predator away.

“They all kind of work on a small scale; they’re more tied to a place more than anything else,” he said. “When you get up into the mountains and you have animals on a large area, most of those tools basically stop working — it’s just not the right situation.”

A change in approach is needed instead to manage the livestock to make them less vulnerable in the first place, he said. 

“Out here on this large scale, we really can’t manage the predators directly; it’s just not practical. But we can still manage the livestock; we can manage the grazing,” he said. “Methods like that are really different from the gadget kind of tools because, for one, they’re focused primarily on livestock, not the predators. 

“That’s just a real shift in how you think about preventing conflicts. I think most people have not figured that out yet.”

With much of the focus on deterrence for managing wolves, managing the livestock tends to get lost as an area to focus on, said Karin Vardaman, president and co-founder of Working Circle, a nonprofit that’s been working in Colorado that focuses on co-existence to support ranch families sharing the landscape with wolves.

“It’s really hard to deter wolves over thousands of acres. But, we have the power to manage what is in our control, which is our ranch and our cattle,” she said. “And I’m not saying it’s easy. None of this is easy.”

Harrington said he has implemented several methods of managing livestock for at least 25 years of his career.

“Low-stress handling would just imply that you’re moving, handling livestock in a way that is low stress as possible,” he said. “Whether it’s driving that animal down a trail or moving them from one pasture to another during calving time, not getting them upset, going as slow and easy and fast as you can.”

Herd physical health — that is, addressing nutritional and mineral imbalances — is another. These two areas have significant impact when it comes to managing livestock, Vardaman added. Close herding, too, is one that Barnes and Niemeyer have both recommended.

Vardaman said with low-stress handling, you are boosting cattle’s natural defense, which they’ve lost over time without having predators.

“By handling them in a certain way through stockmanship, that will then translate to how they respond to predator pressure — meaning they don’t care if the wolves are coming,” she said. “The wolves can try to pressure them by running in and out, which is what wolves do to get the response, and it doesn’t happen, and the wolves will leave them alone.”

As wolves travel around the landscape, seeking out potential prey, they’re always testing the prey, she said. They’re looking for potential vulnerabilities, as Niemeyer had noted, too, and vulnerabilities don’t always mean just the sick or the weak. Vulnerabilities could be in the landscape itself, whether there is a bog or hill or downfall, and how livestock react to predators. 

“What we try to do is identify in partnership with the producers what those vulnerabilities might be and then address them,” she said. “And sometimes it’s simpler than others; sometimes it is a combination of things.

“But wolves being wolves and cattle being cattle, you are going to have loss no matter what. You just try to minimize it.”

Working together, sharing costs, building trust

A few nonprofits have been on the ground in Colorado, like Working Circle, trying to help ranchers adjust to the wolves and reduce wolf-livestock conflicts. Others include, but are not limited to, Defenders of Wildlife, National Wildlife Federation, and Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. 

“I can tell you that I’ve talked with some of our Colorado cattlemen’s members in North Park that have had acceptable experiences with (NGOs) and others that say they’re not welcome back on their ranch, for whatever reason,” Harrington said. 

While thankful that nonprofits want to reach out and help, he heard that some of them perhaps had a different motive and agenda than protecting livestock and ranchers’ livelihood. 

There are some nonprofits that seek to end the ranching way of life instead of working with and supporting ranch families and their livelihoods, helping them to adapt to living with wolves.

“One thing people need to understand,” said Barnes, “is the conservation organizations agree on some things, like there should be wolves. But on other things, like how they feel about ranching in the West, public lands grazing, there’s a lot of differences. There are a handful or organizations that you might consider the left-wing of the conservation world that really do want to see ranching gone from the West.

“Ranchers are not going to let those people on their properties,” he said. “That’s just a nonstarter.”

One of the best recent examples, said Niemeyer, of nonprofits working together with ranchers and government agencies to reduce predator-livestock conflicts and build trust has been from the Blackfoot Valley in Montana.

“The Blackfoot area has really become a kind of prototype of what a ranching community can do to protect their stock,” he said. “It’s a partnership with state and federal agencies working with them and helping cover costs. I think that’s one of the components I absolutely believe, that people who are wolf advocates should share in the costs.

“It shouldn’t just be on the rancher’s back. But on the other hand, the rancher needs to cooperate and partner with people and try and make it work, too.”

More than 50 ranchers in the Blackfoot Valley, a watershed of 1.5 million acres, have worked with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks; USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and nonprofits, like Blackfoot Challenge. Initially, the main predator to manage was grizzly bears, with wolves eventually following.

“(Ranchers) have really become hypervigilant, just adjusting to the risks of living with grizzly bears and wolves,” said Niemeyer. “And the community generally has very low predator loss. … (I)t can be done.”

Seth Wilson, executive director of Blackfoot Challenge, is proud of the work the nonprofit has done for valley ranchers for more than 20 years — as well as those in northern Colorado recently. A big part of that success in the valley was bringing ranchers and private landowners to the table along with state and federal agencies.

“That combination really helps you work to cross boundaries and at the right scale to address some of these big issues,” Wilson said.

He said when wolves began growing in number in the area, ranchers were faced with the initial fear of the unknown. To address this, ranchers began partnering with the nonprofit, as well as state and federal agencies, and met about six times a year, with agency biologists explaining wolf behavior as well as sharing information on where wolves were located.

“It takes a while to come to some level of acceptance or to accept that you need to change some practices,” he said. “I think at the very early stages, there was anger, there was anxiety; it was stressful. This was a new issue … People were concerned about human safety. They were concerned about their children, livelihoods.”

From these meetings, solutions that did work in the valley — like high-powered electric fencing, livestock carcass management, and range riding — were put into use.

As far as wolf recent depredations, Wilson said ranchers in the valley are losing a total, on average, of confirmed 6-8 calves per year, and another 5-6 unconfirmed with about 8,000-10,000 livestock in the area.

State and federal grants as well as help from Blackfoot Challenge helped cover costs ranchers might have otherwise balked at.

“I think there is a lot more power working together on these issues than letting us get divided — there’s resources to share, there’re skills, good science,” said Wilson. “Any time you can have a forum to bring that skill set all to bear, to be empathetic, to be willing to work with the ranching community and the ranching community to work with the NGO community — that’s really where we found in Montana to be very helpful for us.”