Get Big Pivots

Somebody sent me a clipping they had found among their possessions. It was an essay (op/ed) I had in The Denver Post in 2004. A wolf had been smacked late one night while trying to cross Interstate 70 between Idaho Springs and Georgetown. This is what I wrote.

In later years, the Colorado Wildlife Commission rejected proposals to reintroduce wolves. In 2020, Colorado voters went over their heads, adopting a plan to reintroduce wolves.

I voted against that proposal, because by then it was clear that wolves were migrating on their own into Colorado. It was only a matter of time before they would re-establish populations. My vote was partly a result of conversations with cattle ranchers in northwestern Colorado. The counter-argument was that yes, it would happen, but it would take decades.

Was I wrong to vote against the reintroduction? Currently I am writing about the pivot on renewable energy that occurred in Colorado about the time that first wolf became roadkill.  A critical block of state legislators in 2002, 2003, and 2004 had refused minimal renewable energy mandates. Voters in November 2004 went over their heads, by a 53-47 margin orders Colorado’s first mandate of 10% to be achieved within a decade. From today’s perspective, that was a ridiculously low bar.

The reintroduction of wolves has not yet happened, but in late 2021 came a report of wolves killing a cow or calf in North Park. The report said it was “in” Walden, although I find that highly unlikely. You can walk through Walden, east to west, in three minutes. North-south might take a minute longer. I suspect the writers should have said “near” Walden.

I do believe this affirms that descendants of wolves introduced into Yellowstone in the 1990s are establishing themselves in Colorado and needed no population augmentation. There have been reports of wolves in other parts of northwest Colorado, too.

Regardless, it’s a pivotal moment in Colorado. A species banished during the first half of the 20th century is, now almost a century later, finding its place once again. How many cows and sheep they kill will, of course, be a a large part of the conversation going forward. Below, the essay from 2004.

 

by Allen Best

Wolves are once again loping through Colorado and Utah, and I suppose I should
be glad. More rapidly than it took to wipe out grizzlies, lynx and other
competitor species, wolves are returning to the ark of the Southern Rockies
ecosystem.

But yet I pause, and an absorbing four-minute film I saw recently gets at the
core of my ambivalence. The film was made in Yellowstone National Park, where
wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and it shows two wolves chasing a herd of elk
almost playfully before getting down to the serious business of killing.
Narrowing their attention to one cow, the pair of wolves follow at a respectful
distance for a minute, then quicken the pace before leaping at the throat of
the tiring cow.

Despite knowing the outcome, you root for the elk to boot the wolves with her
sharp hooves. It doesn’t happen. The elk slows to a walk, then stops and, with
the pair of wolves hanging on her neck, topples over. A later examination of
the carcass revealed a severely arthritic leg.

The wolves had detected a weakness in this elk that was not immediately obvious
to the human eye. This is a compelling argument for those who welcome wolves
back to the Southern Rockies, for by culling ungulates of weak members, wolves
will improve the health of herds the way that trophy-bent big-game hunters do
not. More broadly, advocates argue that wolves, the meat-eating keystone
species at the top of the food pyramid, will balance the populations of other
species, such as coyotes. With wolves in place to regulate the browsers, even
the vegetative diversity will be better maintained.

Yet this killing hits a primeval note in all of us. Biologist L. David Mech,
who has been described as the Jane Goodall of wolves, suggests that the
reputation of wolves as a predator of people is not altogether wrong – if
wildly exaggerated.

For all that he has learned about wolves during the last 46 years, Mech
acknowledges that much remains unknown. We don’t know for sure how wolves in
Yellowstone are affecting elk and coyote populations, he says. “We have to be
very careful when we make these claims that wolves are having this wonderful
effect,” says Mech, always a cautious scientist.

Mech, who is obviously sympathetic toward wolves, thinks people and wolves can
co-exist, as they do in northern Minnesota. But, he adds, it’s easier if you’re
not running cows on the edge of the wilderness.

This summer, a wolf loped down from Yellowstone and was smacked by a vehicle on
Interstate 70, west of Denver. It was the first documented wolf seen in
Colorado since 1945. The wolves are getting to Colorado more rapidly than had
been expected. Two polls taken in the state in the last decade found
substantial support for their return, but it is true that most supporters live
in cities and won’t have much interaction with the animals. People who are
cranky about wolves usually live in rural areas, at places like W Mountain.

W Mountain is on the edge of the Flat Tops, a wild area considered by
biologists to host substantial habitat for wolves. Yet standing on its flanks
you can see Interstate 70, Colorado’s main east-west artery, as well as the
Colorado River. Eighty years ago, a wolf called Old Lefty terrorized the local
ranchers here, who summoned a trapper from the U.S. Biological Survey. The
trapper killed Lefty, and the stockmen expressed their gratitude in a letter:
“It is a big relief to us to know that ‘Old Lefty’ is a thing of the past, for
his track on the range meant he was back and on the job of cattle killing once
again,” the ranchers said.

Those stockmen are long gone, but the stories of Lefty and of wolves following
the sleighs of pioneers are still told at family gatherings. Why, they want to
know, would you want to bring back these creatures? I don’t have a good answer,
except that wolves to me are like thunder rolling over the high country, a rush
of wind, a flash of lighting on the horizon.

Allen Best lives and writes in the Denver area.

Allen Best
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