Will wolves work in CO? Rangeland scientist weighs in

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KREX) — Western Slope Now sat down with Matt Barnes a conservation scientist based in Colorado to learn more about the impacts of wolf reintroduction on the grey wolf species, ranching, and hunting in the Centennial State.

Below is the transcript of the 15-minute interview between Western Slope Now’s Michael Logerwell and Matt Barnes. The transcript has been edited for clarity

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
I’m sitting here today with Matt Barnes, a Colorado-based conservationist, owner of Shining Horizon’s land management, and rangeland scientist. Now, Matt, with all those titles, how would you describe what you do?

Matt Barnes
So mostly I work on human livestock and carnivore coexistence, and a lot of that is keeping cattle alive and not killed by predators. I’ve done some of this in Montana and Wyoming and will probably end up doing some of this here in Colorado in the future. But yeah, I work with ranchers and I spent most of my career working with ranchers in one way or another. In the last decade that’s been a lot about working with ranchers in places that have animals like wolves.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
And so, you know, if you’re working with ranchers so much, do you have an opinion on the recent Wolf introduction here in Colorado?

Matt Barnes
Yeah, I try to see this issue from multiple perspectives. As a range scientist, as a wildlife conservationist, and as a former ranch manager, I support ranching, I support hunting and I support wildlife restoration. I think we can have all of those things. They’re not necessarily in conflict with each other, but sometimes there will be conflicts on a smaller scale, and we need to deal with those in ways that make sense. For example, as the stakeholder group that EPW convened to discuss these issues, we did our best to figure out how we implement the will of the voters, and bring back this native species, but do it in a way that minimizes conflict potential with livestock producers.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
All right, staying with the ranchers here, we’ve spoken to a lot of ranchers on the Western Slope, and they’re concerned about wolves attacking their livestock. You’ve spoken about working in other states like Wyoming where wolves have been reintroduced. Can we predict how the ten wolves released so far, and others released in the future, will impact Colorado ranchers in the present and future?

Matt Barnes
Yes and no. Science is a game of trying to predict things, but it’s always an imperfect game, as we say. All models are wrong, but some are useful, I think is the usual way of putting it. Actions are based on looking back at the history of wolves and livestock in North America, but also especially looking at what’s happened in the Northern Rockies in the last almost now three decades since wolves were reintroduced to greater Yellowstone in central Idaho in 1995.

What we’ve seen there is that, yes, wolves kill livestock. It’s actually a minority of wolves. Overall, about one out of every five wolf packs is known to kill livestock in any given year. So, yes, it happens and the important thing is addressing it when it does. Most ranchers don’t lose any cattle or livestock in most years in the northern Rockies. It is not the thing that keeps most ranchers awake at night, but ranching has bigger problems than predators. But in some places, it can be acute. It can be repetitive. We don’t fully understand why some operations are more vulnerable than others, but we can make some guesses. The important thing is that when situations like this develop we approach them in ways that make sense.

We’ve got both lethal and non-lethal methods for dealing with conflicts in CPW the plan. They say that non-lethal preventative methods will be encouraged and explored before a lethal method. However, lethal control is an option if conflicts become severe.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
You talk about these lethal and non-lethal options. I know the 10-J rule here does allow ranchers to use that lethal force, but what are—some of our non-ranching viewers here—what are some traditional non-lethal techniques ranchers can use to protect their livestock?

Matt Barnes
Yeah, there are actually several. And EPW has a publication out now that shows what many of them are. So there are things that I would call tools and things that I would call strategies. The tools are things like the devices, the fox lights, things that make light and noise, or something called flattery, which you may have seen put up around a cattle pasture.

All of those devices work at least on a small scale for a short time. It’s also important to understand that they all rely on the novelty of being afraid of new things. That means that the effect will wear off over time if you use them too much, but they’ll work in the right situation.

Now strategies are more like, how does a person manage the ranch in a way that makes it less vulnerable to predation, pressure, or put it a different way we have two that are focused on the potential predator that tries to keep the predator in the livestock separate. However, some strategies focus more on the livestock and figuring out how to make them less vulnerable or more likely to survive an encounter when it eventually happens.

That can be anything. From what kind of animals you have in the first place to selecting ones that are more locally adapted to how you plan your grazing management, things like livestock handling practices can all support the natural, dense mechanisms that cattle have, which are staying in a herd and having all their cows in a short time because cows are the most vulnerable age class.

So it’s ways to manage in an operation that reduces vulnerability that I think should be the primary focus. And then we can use those other tools that I mentioned, like the white noise devices when it makes sense.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
Now moving over from ranching to hunting, other concerns we’ve heard here on the western slope are that hunting deer and elk, and the reintroduction of wolves may impact that. Now, when we look at these other Western states that have introduced wolves. How has that impacted the deer and elk populations in those states? And what can we predict for Colorado?

Matt Barnes
Well, believe it or not, Michael, the wolf population does not appear to have had a large-scale impact on elk in the northern Rockies. In fact, Montana, and Wyoming have significantly more elk today than they did when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Idaho calls this the second golden age of elk hunting. So now if you look at a finer scale in those things, you can find places where elk populations have gone up in places where elk populations have gone down.

The fact of the matter is, by and large, those populations are regulated by state wildlife agencies throughout hunting. We are the apex predator almost everywhere that humans and elk overlap except for national parks. So predation pressure is a real thing, but it’s not what drives elk populations. And if you look at Yellowstone, and use Yellowstone as an example, not because it’s representative of the entire landscape, but because it’s the most studied place, wolves generally make a living on elk that are either very young or very old, but generally not contributing to the reproductive success of the elk population. The average age of elk killed by wolves is much higher than the average age of elk on the landscape. In contrast, when we go out and hunt elk, we typically kill animals that are in their prime. That’s a very significant difference. The other thing to consider is we already have mountain lions and black bears in the northern Rockies.

There’s a lot of evidence that mountain lions are the actual apex predators of elk. We always seem to think it’s wolves, but it’s probably mountain lions. In Wyoming, wolves have actually killed a lot of mountain lions. The lion population may be going down. The big losers from wolf reintroduction are going to be mountain lions and coyotes most likely.

We don’t know what the total effect of predation, or pressure of the entire suite of native pressure predators will be. It’s not necessarily the case that it’s going to increase just because we added another predator, that would be the intuitive answer, but we don’t know that. My guess is elk hunting won’t change a whole lot.

But if you look in the Northern Rockies, the one thing you do see is that elk land use patterns have shifted over the last few decades. So wolves and other predators do seem to influence how elk use the landscape. They probably do move around more. There may be parts of the landscape where predation pressure is high enough that Elks then start to avoid those places.

So that could be good or bad, depending on the local specifics, that there’s not a single answer overall. But by and large, you know, I hunt, too. Personally, I think there’s something more esthetically interesting about hunting elk in a place where they’re also hunted by wolves than in a place where they aren’t.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
All right. And so now kind of looking at the bigger picture of the gray wolves as a species, how is Colorado’s reintroduction of gray wolves compared to other states? And will this ultimately Colorado’s efforts here to reintroduce gray wolves will ultimately help them as a species?

Matt Barnes
Oh, of course it will. I think if you look at the conservation community, the long-term goal for restoring wolves in North America, is probably not to restore them in every place they were historically. Historically, they were throughout the continent in the western United States, with gray wolves, in the northeastern United States Timberwolves and Southeastern United States, red wolves, and Mexican wolves.

I think the conservation community would say now that the goal is to have wolves throughout the Rocky Mountains. So an interconnected meadow population from northern Canada down to the southwestern United States. I think that when we have a self-sustaining population in Colorado, the Southern Rockies, and there’s some connectivity to the Northern Rockies and perhaps eventually to the Southwest, I think that is the conservation community’s idea of success.

It’s not just about restoring species, though. It’s about restoring the keystone ecological process associated with that species. So restoring predation pressure by a coarsening predator is similar to the idea of restoring fire to Western landscapes. You know, it’s a process that people, particularly European Americans over the last century or two, have struggled to come to terms with. We eliminated it for many decades. Now we’re faced with the inevitability of bringing it back, and there’s growing pains with that. It’s not always straightforward. Now we have some mega-fires, we have some prescribed burns that get out of control, but in the long run, fire is going to be part of these systems one way or another.

And I think the same can be said of predation by wolves and other large carnivores.

Michael Logerwell, Western Slope Now
I just have one more question here. You talk about reintroducing and getting these wolves that span across the Rocky Mountains. But when we have states like Wyoming, I saw you quoted in other articles where the southern parts of Wyoming have kind of a kill zone where lethal force is used at the state line breaking point. I mean, wolves have a lot of enemies in Colorado, as it seems so far.

How likely is it that we end up with this huge connectivity of wolves that spans the Rocky Mountains?

Matt Barnes
That’s a great question, Michael. And I think the reality is eventually that connectivity will happen. There will be will. But the reality is also that not all of those wolves are going to live long enough to die of old age. People are going to kill some of them. I hope that most of them get to live long lives doing wolf things just like I hope most cattle get to live long lives being cattle. But I know that none of these animals can be expected to live out their life forever without facing mortality. I think that people who hunt and ranch kind of know intuitively that death is a part of life in a way most of us don’t think about daily. We sort of got to live in a bubble where we all get to live long lives.

That’s a great thing for us, but it’s not nature’s way. Nature is nature isn’t always pretty, but nature is beautiful. I think the more we can get our minds around that, the better.

You mentioned Wyoming, Wyoming policy is a really interesting case in wildlife policy in the modern West. Most of Wyoming, including all of the southern part along the Colorado border, is what they call the predator zone in that area.

Wyoming is trying to prevent wolves from getting established there, and effectively that has prevented wolves from recolonizing in Colorado on their own. I suspect that if that policy weren’t the case, Colorado would already have a wolf population and not be doing a reintroduction. Today. That said, I think eventually it will happen and certainly some wolves will leave Colorado and go into Wyoming.

A lot of those wolves will probably get killed there now. I think that’s unfortunate. I think we should have policy focused on removing the wolves that are involved in conflict. I would say a live-and-let-live approach is better. It’s never good for wildlife when they’re completely protected on one side of an invisible line and completely subject to human-caused mortality on the other side of that line. They don’t understand that line is there. The basis of Colorado’s plan is live and let live. If the wolves aren’t involved in conflicts, let them be. If they are in conflict, respond to that conflict, and if we need to, will remove some of them. I think that approach would make sense across the West.

End of interview

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