Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced that a new source for gray wolves soon to be reintroduced into the Centennial State has been secured – and this time, the wolves will be coming from Canada.

An agreement related to the wolves has been established between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Lands, and Resource Stewardship, and it involves up to 15 wolves being collected from this part of the continent for reintroduction into the Centennial State this winter. The wolves will be captured and translocated between December 2024 and March 2025, according to a press release on the matter.

This agreement will help Colorado stick to its goal of releasing 10 to 15 wolves in the state’s Western Slope region per year for between three to five years. This follows July news that the Confederated Tribes of Colville Reservation had rescinded their offer to capture and translocate gray wolves to Colorado from their Washington state reservation, per a report from the Denver Gazette. The 10 wolves that were previously brought into Colorado were sourced from Oregon. Seven of those wolves are still alive, along with four pups that were born in Colorado and two Wyoming wolves that naturally migrated into the state.

“We learned a great deal from last year’s successful capture and transport efforts and will apply those lessons this year as we work to establish a self-sustaining wolf population in Colorado,” said CPW Wolf Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife will be responsible for funding the capture and relocation effort, including testing and disease treatment, placement of tracking collars, and other related costs. Animals that are picked for relocation must be relatively healthy, with no major injuries, no broken canines, no mange, and no lice.

It’s also worth noting that the press release about the agreement states that wolves from packs currently involved in repeated depredation will not be relocated to Colorado. This statement follows reporting that five of the wolves previously brought into Colorado were part of an Oregon pack that had been involved in livestock depredation, with concerns over livestock depredation continually expressed by Colorado ranchers since the December 2023 reintroduction. More than 20 head of livestock in the Centennial State have fallen victim to depredation in 2024 in more than a dozen separate instances.