Colorado Parks and Wildlife has released their latest update related to the movement of the state’s collared wolves, also touching on several other wolf-related developments.

The most recent update looks at what watershed areas wolves have been detected in from September 24 to October 22 (seen in image above), though it’s important to note that if a wolf is detected in a given watershed area, it doesn’t mean that they’ve been seen in that entire area. This is put on display in how some watersheds that wolves have been detected in cross I-70 to the south – meanwhile, no tracked wolves have actually traveled south of this major thoroughfare.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife continues to monitor nine wolves in the wild, with wolves detected in watersheds that are present in Jackson, Routt, Grand, Summit, Eagle, Larimer, Rio Blanco, and Garfield counties. Two key shifts between the most recent late-October release of data and that of late-September include less wolf presence in Routt County and more presence in Jackson County.

GPS points are collected from the tracking collars on wolves every four hours.

It’s worth noting that while nine wolves have been included in this tracking data, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has stated that this does not include data from the Copper Creek pack, which was captured in recent weeks. While the patriarch of this pack was found to have an injured and infected leg, succumbing to that injury, the mother wolf and five pups are still alive, last reported to be in some sort of an enclosed space with limited human-interaction in order to ensure these pups get the nutrition needed to survive winter.

Other wolf-related news includes that five new ‘Wildlife Damage Specialists’ have been deployed to help with depredation investigations, site assessments, depredation response resource deployment, range riding, and carcass management. Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff also recently completed two weeks of training related to depredation investigations and nonlethal conflict minimization with wildlife staff out of Oregon and Idaho.

Find more information about wolves in Colorado here.