The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 918: Eric Odell, The Man who Ran Colorado’s Wolf Reintroduction

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Eric Odell, the recently retired Colorado Wolf Reintroduction Manager, about politics, predation, and the realities of living with wolves. Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com Find our favorite trail cameras and hunting products at www.moultrie.com Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I've been wanting to talk to this guy for a long time. I'm sure this is going to get a lot of, this episode is going to get a lot of attention. from people who follow wildlife politics and intrigue and everything. We're speaking with Eric O'Dell, who is a veteran wildlife biologist who spent 20 years with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, serving as the state's first wolf conservation program manager. So back following the passage of Proposition 114, which as our guests will explain, basically brought on the Colorado Wolf introduction. His position was

created to execute on that directive. Beyond Wolves, Eric led restoration efforts for other key Colorado carnivores, including Canada links, wolverines, blackfooted ferrets, earning a reputation among ranchers and conservationists alike for his pragmatic field-driven approach to wildlife management. And he retired on Friday. Retired on Friday. Now, I want to set this first question up but not going to try to give a little background you ran the you ended up running the project that became the wildlife news story of not just a year but of a couple years it became an international news story right it's a big national news story every person who feels that they have an opinion on natural resources management wildlife management every hunter

every rancher has expressed an opinion on the Colorado Wolfrey introduction. It was discussed, you know, like the biggest podcast in the country being Joe Rogan experience, this issue was discussed, probably came up, I would guess, scores of times. Many. On the biggest podcast in the country. Like, it's a thing. It remains a thing. It was a thing.

Tell people how it. became, how it came to be that one day they, they, I don't even know who they are, you can explain who they are, that they're like, Eric, this is your baby. Bring wolves back to Colorado. Yeah, well, yeah, it's a long story. But the short of it is, wolves were reintroduced in the state because of a ballot initiative. And most recently, the whole interest of reintroduction of wolves to Colorado goes back a long time. In the early in the 1980s, people were thinking about which what would Wolfrey introduction before Yellowstone, before Idaho, and for a variety of reasons that

never happened. And so then starting about 2019, there was a group that started to collect signatures, understanding that there's this way in Colorado that you can get an initiative on the ballot for the voters to go. If you get enough signatures on the, on these petitions, it will go to the voters to make that decision. And so that's what happened. And they collected enough signatures, 200,000 some signatures.

of people throughout the state to say should this be on the ballot and in November of 2020. I want, I want, as you do, this is great, keep going. But if you don't mind, as you do this, if you can just check in on your

individual awareness. Like, you mean, are you like watching this? Yeah. This ballot thing. Are you watching this knowing this is going to become a thing that's going to impact my personal world and my family? For sure. Yeah, for sure. So you knew, you saw.

saw that. Before all this, I'd been involved with the agency for a bunch of years. And like you said, working on a bunch of other projects, other non-game, non-hunted carnivore species. So primarily focused on links and wolverine, potential for Wolverine reintroduction, been involved with Mexican wolf recovery planning efforts as well. And so the whole idea that if this comes up, if this passes as a valid initiative, then it becomes my responsibility. Okay. So I had an inkling that this was going to be. got it. A major player.

Yeah. So please keep doing the timeline. I just want to know at what point you saw it and then like, oh, this is interesting. Yeah, it was election night that we knew that it was going to happen, right? And so, so yeah, so leading up to this, there's, there's, you know, this is not a state-led effort, right? This is not the agency saying, hey, we want to reintroduce wolves. This is the citizens and groups saying, hey, should, should this become an issue that the

voters make a decision on? First time that any, any kind of ballot initiative to look at any kind of reintroduction, much that's Wolfrey introduction. And the first time that wolf free introduction would be put in the state's hands, right? When it was done in Yellowstone, that was park service. When it was done in central Idaho, that was through the tribes and through the state to do that, or through the tribes to do that, sorry, not through the state. And so this was, this was unique, right? And so they got enough signatures, 2019, very different time, right? Before COVID, before, you know, all these different kind of things that were happening. November 2020, presidential election, anticipating a big turnout.

There'd been a lot of polling going into the election to say, what's the likelihood that this initiative is going to pass like they do with all kind of political efforts? And, you know, initially it was expected this was going to pass overwhelmingly, 60%, 70%. Oh, that's how it was polling. Yeah, it was pulling way positive. I knew at the time I'd kind of forgot. Yeah. So what, it was, it was expected to have a wider margin.

For sure. And so, you know, and as the state, we were limited in terms of what we could or couldn't say. But just by statute, as, you know, we can't. take a position on a ballot initiative as a state agency, we didn't produce a lot of materials or, you know, we didn't get involved to try to influence the decision one way or the other by, by statute, by policy. And so, but, but explain that little bit to me. Yeah.

Who, who was supposed to sort of opine on, right. Who, who would, who would, who was doing, who was doing, who was doing the role of saying, here's what that would look like. Yeah. Just politicians and private individuals? Private individuals. You guys were said, you guys had as a stay. And I get it.

I'm not questioning about it. I get it like, it was stay out of this. That's right. And it's not by choice. That's the department's directive. That's statute. That's a we can't get involved. You cannot say as a department, we think blank.

Right. That's right. And so. Well, then I've seen people break that. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. Not in this case, but in other cases I've seen people break it. Yeah.

And it may be. specific to Colorado. I'm not familiar with the other states and how it works there. But yeah, so we were limited in terms of what we could say, what we could do, and how we could say this is, you know, wolves could or couldn't, these will be the conflicts, these will be the challenges, these will be the opportunities. We didn't, we didn't have that opportunity to say those kinds of things. And so, so we watched, essentially sitting on the sidelines, watching how, you know, those that were supportive of Proposition 114, those that were opposed to Proposition 114, we saw lots of television ads, saw lots of billboards on the highways and vote no, vote yes.

All of that kind of stuff that you would expect leading into an election. And election night comes up and, you know, the group of us within the agency are texting back and forth, it looks like it's, you know, as results are starting to roll in. And sure enough, the story is well told that it passed, just barely, 51 to 49 percent. And it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter if it's 51 to 49 or 80, 20. It still passes. It becomes state law.

I forgive you if you don't want to answer this. yeah like i get it um the first one's easy questions two questions the first one is you know it's a presidential election too yeah was you what would you was more of your mind space um the wolf question than the president question but for sure it was it was more more directly impactful right yeah that's like when you're talking about election election results most people think like oh who's going to be the president yeah but you're thinking is the wolf thing going down past and it got a lot of attention like looking at the media the i mean it was it was a big deal in Colorado at that time it was like you say it got all kinds of attention locally it got all

kinds of attention nationally and even internationally and so yeah it it became a really really big deal so the second part of that and I totally get it if you don't even want to say but did you have a hope you know I don't really want to say how I voted on it or what my thoughts were on it I respect that yeah I mean I think that it's it's a it's a unique way to make a decision what I'll say is that it's a very unique way to make a political decision on unique way to pose that question to the voters. Should this be something for the state agency that's full of professional wildlife biologists?

Yeah. So the next morning, you guys wake up and... Proposition 114 passes, right? And so then it's like, wow, now what do we do? We'd given some thought to it. Like we had some plans within the agency, you know, kind of sketched out plans as to what if, and we had scenarios about if this passes,

if this doesn't pass. But, you know, it's the other unique thing about this is that at this point in time, wolves are federally listed in Colorado. So they're, they're not even in what that means is that they're listed under the Endangered Species Act. And so when a species, regardless of whether it's wolves or grouse or whatever species it is, when a species is listed under the Endangered Species Act, federally, Fish and Wildlife Service has management authority for that. So our federal partners have that. And here it is that we're now being tasked with this reintroduction of a species that native to the state historically, and we don't

have the direct management authority. So we've got to work with Fish and Wildlife Service on this process too. And so, yeah, so we have all of these different scenarios laid out as to what could happen if this does pass, if this doesn't pass. And sure enough, it did. And then we began the process to think about, well, how do we, how do we execute what the statute now says, right? Yeah, there's a little bit of confusion on that. Yeah. Can, I'm sure you know it by heart. Can you say what the statute said? Because the statute wasn't, Colorado needs to immediately release wolves into Colorado. It was something different and more confusing.

It said a lot, but fundamentally what it said is that we needed to reintroduce wolves west of the continental divide, right? The continental divides that north, south line in the state, Pacific and Atlantic watersheds had to release wolves west of the continental divide. We had to develop a plan. We had to do that. How would we do that? We had to develop a method for compensating landowners that were experiencing conflict. We had to develop some recovery goals, state recovery goals. So not only federally listed species,

but also it's also a state listed species. We didn't develop any kind of federal recovery goals. That's for the Fish and Wildlife Service to do. Our role was to develop the state recovery goals. And then we had to do what it says is take the steps necessary to begin reintroductions by December 31st, 2023. Got it. Right? So November, I forget, fourth or fifth, 2020,

till December 31st, 2023, a little bit over three years to do all of that. Develop a plan and develop all the compensation programs. Got it. different kinds of things that so it was very prescriptive it was very prescriptive yeah i mean it it was prescriptive in the sense that it said this is what you have to do it didn't say this is how you're going to do it right that became our role our responsibility as the state and so it wasn't something that they said you will reintroduce this many walls these locations those kinds of things

that became the process that we then developed our staff myself primarily leading the development of what we call our wolf restoration and conservation restoration plan or some wolf restoration management plan is what it's called. And so that's what we've put together. And there's a long process to do that, right? We began pretty much immediately after the ballot initiative passed. We can talk more about that process, but it involved the public, involved tribes, involved stakeholder groups, involved technical groups, really to try to put together. What's the best way to do this? This is a task. This is what you have to do. You have to reintroduce wolves and you have to address these points. But how are you going to do that? And so lots and lots of meetings, lots of discussions about these are the kinds of things

that need to be incorporated into what's going to be a good management plan, knowing that we're not going to get it right exactly the first time. There's going to be, you know, this is the plan for 2020 to 2023 and beyond. And at some point, we're going to have to revise this plan as things go on. And so help me understand what prevented you guys from being smart asses and saying, okay, we'll put two out. Yeah. Because part of the statute said that we have to develop a self-sustaining wolf population.

Okay. So there is an aspect. Well was spelled out. Yeah. Okay. Right. So I didn't, I didn't elaborate on that. But yeah, we can't, we couldn't do that.

We couldn't just say, okay, here's one wolf. We've reintroduced wolves. We've, we've reintroduced wolves. We've reintroduced wolves. So it was defined enough that it, that everyone knew what it meant. That's right. Yeah. I mean, it was a serious effort.

And, you know, it was state law. It is state law. It remains state law. And so that's what, you know, that's what drives what we do as, as an agency is the state laws. We have to abide by that. And so, you know, we took that very seriously. But, you know, took that responsibility. And at what point did they create?

Because you, what was your job? On election night, what was your job title? Yeah, it was a species conservation program manager, right? So more general, working on all these other species that we've talked about, lynx, Wolverine otters. And on what day did they come and go, forget all that, you're the wolf guy? Oh, it was, I mean, it kind of became, so for a while I was doing both. I was trying to do all the species conservation program stuff and the wolf stuff.

And it became pretty clear pretty quickly that you couldn't do both. It was really was that was two separate jobs both really high demand jobs and so then I I moved into the wolf job that that was a new job that was created a new position that was created and I I moved into that and then we've since backfilled that that position to do all the other. It seems to me that if you'd have gone out and done a call for applications to come run Colorado's wolf for introduction reintroduction you would have had a boatload of applicants. We might have. Yeah, we might. Were you dying to get it? Like, did you want it? You know, I look forward to the challenge.

Sure. I thought it was, you work in wildlife conservation. I've been there for 20, at that point, you know, 20 years, 24 years. Wow, 20 years, I guess at that point. And yeah, I mean, here's this opportunity to do something pretty historic, pretty, you know, kind of setting a legacy for the work that this agency is going to do. And, yeah, I was excited to take it on. And did you know that you were going to become like, I don't want to do?

draw too much parallel, but you were going to become like this Fauci-like character that all of a sudden everybody was going to have an opinion about. Yeah, I tried to avoid that. I tried to make it not about me. I tried to make it about the program and the agency. He did not. Apparently. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I wanted this to be, you know, the success of the program. And this is the success of the agency. So you decided you wanted to keep low profile. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to do the job. And I wanted to do it well. And, you know, I think that it's, and it isn't just me that that did the job. either. I've gotten a lot of attention

for it. I've gotten my name has been associated with it a lot. And I take a lot of pride in that. I did that well. You had gotten threats and stuff too, though. There was times where it was, it was very tense. We would have meetings at our commission meetings. We had discussions about, you know, if things go south, this is what you do and

that kind of stuff. Nothing ever personal. But was it, oh, nothing personal? Do you feel, I don't want to dwell on this too long, but I just want to kind of understand for you personally. Do you feel that the public understanding was there that like you're a guy you have a job this is coming from the voters and you're there to execute on the job not that you're some not that you were the one that was like hey i got an

idea yeah like that was understood that yeah absolutely okay we we made we i made anytime i had the opportunity to talk about this in front of a stock you know a producer group or or even the wolf advocates or our commission or just to the general public it was it was you know we made the effort to say, we're doing this, and we're going to do a good job at this, and we're doing it because Proposition 114 passed. Yeah, we're doing it in accordance with the law. This is what we have to do, right? I mean, this is, and so, you know, we did not, and I think in some ways that helped us, you know, if we go into these small Westlope communities and say, hey, we're the agency, we want to reintroduce wolves, that's not a, that's not a winning conversation, right? If we say,

hey, state law says that we have to do this. And in fact, this was a major point that the chair of our commission at the point was saying is that, you know, even though, you know, even though the vote was carried on, carried largely by the front range counties, right? The population centers for Colorado, Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs, Pueblo, vast majority. And remember that the initiative said that we'll reintroduce wolves west of the continental divide, very much the rural part of Colorado. Her statement was, we want to do this with the west slope and not to the west slope.

And that rang really, really true, right? We really wanted to incorporate their opinions. And we have to look for positive outcomes. We can't just say it's a terrible idea, we're not going to do it. It's a good idea and we have to do it. Because they would find someone that would. Right, exactly. And so working with the West Slope,

trying to find, understand what their concerns were, understand how we can address what they want to see in wolf restoration. What kind of, you know, considering again, federally listed species, how do we manage this federally listed species that has, you know, certain prohibitions and how do you work on that? And we found really good tools to do that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it was a long, long process. And having that, back to your question, like being able to say, this isn't an agency initiative.

This is an agency. We're driven to do this by state law, by the voters. That was very helpful for us to be able to do that. During the, so you had a three year, roughly a three year window to get this on the ground. Between election night and wolves are on the ground, roughly three years. I felt in watching this play out, it was very interesting to me. During that three years, like something totally unprecedented happened. And wild wolves on their own four feet walked into Colorado.

That's right. Out of Wyoming. And even before election night, that had happened. Okay. Oh, before, okay. Yeah. And I get, like I totally get that the piece of legislation that passed did not contemplate that. That occurrence didn't affect, didn't negate it.

It wasn't written in that like all this doesn't matter if a wolf walks in on its own four feet. Right. But it complicated stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Can you speak to that? Yeah. I mean, so, two different things happened. Two different scenarios happened. One was in an extreme northwest Colorado, Moffat County. Right, I truly right on the board of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, right in that little tri-state area. We found a carcass. Our field staff found a carcass of an elk that had been killed by wolves. Wolf tracks were there. Wolfscat was there. We collected that wolf scat, ran some genetics on it, and discovered that it was not just a wolf, but it was several, several different wolves

that were related, right? So meaning that there had been some reproduction. There had been a wolf den someplace. Nobody ever found it. And how far into Colorado is this? Miles. Not far at all. So it's, it's very likely that this pack of wolves,

and it was a pack because there was- Flirting with the border. Right, it was flirting with those three borders. Somewhere, Idaho, or, sorry, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado. Yeah. And never heard, never saw those wolves again. We get reports from them from time to time. We would see individuals.

And then those wolves in Wyoming, wolves are not federally listed, right? They are under state management. And especially in that predator zone, they can be shot at any time. And that's what happened ultimately to those wolves there. Oh, okay. And so that's one scenario, that Moffat County scenario. In North Park, we had a black female wolf. We get these reports from time to time and a very clear photo of a, a lot of the times

those come back as like a German Shepherd or a Malamute or something, right? Somebody mistakes it. Clearly not a wolf. this clearly was a wolf black caned you see a caller on her talk to my colleague in in Wyoming got the radio frequency for her and started to monitor her from the air and we were flying for her just a lone female alone female right and so this was when was this i think spring of 2019 is is when this happened that fall and so as we're we're we're leading up into a lot of the ballot initiative stuff in uh 20 let's see 20 2021

towards the end of 2020 we saw a gray male or another gray animal with her and so then in early 2021 we we capture that animal put a collar on him and so that was the first time so this is 2021 right after the ballot initiative and put a collar on him and they they paired bread and reproduced and produced the first litter of pups had they had do you feel that those two wolves knew each other no I don't think they did I think they came so it was like just a freak like a freak deal. There's possibly at that time two wolves in the state of Colorado and they found each other. I think that's

right. And we had had other wolves that had come down from the Yellowstone system, from Montana, Idaho, Wyoming. And they've come into that same general area. So there's some way, I don't know how the wolf sees the landscape, but that general area, that North Park area is where they had come. We had reports from them from, I think, 2007

that we'd had individual wolves. And so certainly from time to time, wolves are going to naturally migrate into the state. And it's a gauntlet. You know, getting through Southern Wyoming is tough for a wolf, but it happens, right? And they've done that.

And so those wolves that reproduced in North Park, we called them the North Park pack, that was the first time that we had had a documented reproduction of wolves in 80 plus years. Yeah. And then the same kind of thing happened. They go up into Wyoming, and they can get shot there at any time.

And so there's still a few members of that pack that remain, but for the most part, that pack didn't, didn't persist long term. It fizzled. Yeah. Understood. Yeah.

And again, it just had no bearing on what you needed to do, right? It wasn't enough, right? Yeah. So a few individuals from time to time is exciting from a wolf restoration perspective, but it's not, it doesn't meet the letter of the law in terms of what the ballot in this statute says. Hey, there's a version of hunting where you just show up, you sit in a tree stand, you hope something happens, and then you go home. A lot of people hunt that way.

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because hope is not a strategy. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.

Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Good Lord, they're finally here at long last. After fighting and yelling and fighting some more, Clay Newcomb and First Light have done it. They have built a pair of work bibs together, not just any work bibs. We're talking the bare grease bibs from Clay.

Now, I've watched Clay work long enough to know that he, He wasn't going to put his name on a pair of hunting pants, pretending to be work bibs. And boy, he did not. These are Clay's invention for things like breaking mules, rendering grease, kneeling in the dirt. I'm going to use them all the time, trapping, working, fixing stuff. It doesn't matter. If you want good, durable, comfortable bibs, these are your bibs made from tough, stretch, duck cotton. They got briar-proof chaps that run from cuff to thigh.

They got pockets damn near everywhere. Again, comfortable and durable. Put them on. You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck. And they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store.com. When you guys had to, I know that there became this big issue about, let's say a fellow wants some wolves, how do you go get them?

Yeah. The legislation didn't contemplate this. No. Can you explain, like, I mean, just like the whole basics of the question is like, okay, we need some. Yeah. And they're not here. Where do you get them from? Like, how do you get them?

How do you ask? Like, who do you approach? You know, what are the conversations like? Yeah. So, well, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a much longer story to the development of the plan and how we came up with what the, what we needed to do. Yeah, go ahead. Restoration to happen. And I think one thing that's really important

that doesn't get told enough is that there's, because of this federal status, because they're federally listed as endangered, what that means fundamentally is that take is prohibited. And take means a bunch of different things legally. And there's been some new, new kind of interpretations as to what that means. But fundamentally means that you can't kill an animal.

You can't, you can't chase, harm, harass an animal. Yeah. I want to explain, because you alluded to something really quick. Yeah. We've covered us on the news show. It's like, I can't remember what year some years back the language of the endangered species act around take was interpreted to mean let's say there's a endangered swallow and it only nests on a cliff so you'd be like well you

can't take a swallow but they would they define that to be where you can't destroy the cliff right because that's tantamount to taking a swallow and now they've and now the current administration is trying to walk back some of that language and more narrowly defined take yeah meaning if you kill a if you destroy a bird's nest did you take a bird right right it's like a philosophical question as much as anything yeah because because there's the take has has habitat implications right and so for wolves that's not really all that it doesn't really mean that much for wolves because wolves are habitat generalists they'll live wherever but what what we learned in all of these conversations that we had with other states that are managing wolves.

We had many, many meetings with current state managers, state wildlife managers that are dealing with wolves. They say you have to have some kind of tools. You have to have the ability to haze and harass wolves that are not behaving in ways

that are good, right? That are getting into livestock conflict. And in some cases, even kill wolves. And we've done that as a state agency. And so within that confines, within that status of a federally listed species, what we developed was called a 10-J rule,

or what the Fish and Wildlife Service developed. And that's something that they've used for many different species, not just wolves, but it allows take in certain circumstances. That's the experimental population or something like that. Right. So it's called the non-essential experimental population. Okay. And so that was really important. And there's, we spent a lot of money and took and did this on a very accelerated time frame to get all of those federal rulemaking processes in place. It has to get published in the federal register and get all the public comment on their CPW, Colorado Parks and Wildlife paid for the consultants to write that that, that, um,

Those NEPA documents, the EA and the EIS for that work. And it was done on a really accelerated time frame because it had to be in place prior to wolves being reintroduced. And fundamentally what the 10-J rule does is that it relaxes those take prohibitions. It allows wolves to be chased and harmed and rubber buckshot. And in certain circumstances, even lethally managed,

lethally removed. And so that was really important that we did that. And because if we didn't, then we're reintroducing federally endangered wolves with no management tools at all, right? And so that's a really challenging situation. When you were pursuing that experimental thing that gave greater management latitude,

were you at risk of lawsuits from wildlife advocacy groups? Or were they understanding that that would be necessary? For the most, I mean, it's hard to generalize, right? There's a whole, as much as there's a whole spectrum of hunters and there's a whole spectrum of wolf advocate type groups, too. Some wolf advocates were absolutely opposed to the idea of the 10-J rule, the experiment, non-essential experimental rule. Some understood that, yeah, this is how you're going to buy some tolerance.

This is, if you have this ability, then you're going to have, you know, some legal ways to manage those challenging situations that are bound to arise. But that was pursuing that was a decision of the department. It was totally a CPW decision. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't our decision. It was, it wasn't our doing. It was a federal rulemaking process.

And so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service led that. It was the only way to do it. It was the only way to do it. Right. And so they, Fish and Wildlife Service had to be a partner in this. And through that process, we developed an MOU that gives a memorandum of understanding that gives us a status called designated agents. So it allows us as the state wildlife management agency to manage wolves in the state. And so what it did, what that 10-J rule does is it defines.

that geographic barrier. It says from north to southeast to west within Colorado, any wolf that's there, whether we reintroduced it or a wolf that comes in from the north will be considered part of that non-essential experimental population. And so that allows that management flexibility for all wolves in the state. It's, you know, there's no way. So you didn't need to find out who came from where. No, exactly. As long as it's within the state borders, we can treat it as a member of that population, that non-essential population. So if those, so those wolves that came from, you know, in from Wyoming. Yep. Like doing this, all of a sudden, their status would change. Right. Well, even without 10J, as soon as they cross that state line, in Wyoming, it's a, it's a state managed species. It's a, I don't know exactly what their status is, but their status within Colorado

changed. Right. And then they come into Colorado, they're federally endangered, but within Colorado now, they're considered part of that non-essential experimental population. And so that was good, right? And so that's, as well, that was one of those things that we really needed to have in place to get some of that. that buy-in from the states. So back to your question. How do you ask for world?

I got another one just following in the timeline. We're during this three-year period when you're working on this, I'm getting this has to be true. Are there political figures or groups exploring some way to undo this? Oh, for sure. To challenge this, to sabotage this. Did any of that ever come close? Well, yeah. I don't know that it ever came close, but it, I mean, we had, there were several lawsuits filed. There was a federal lawsuit filed the day that we're driving out of the driveway to go to Oregon, which is where we sourced our wolves from the first time, that said that we hadn't done the NEPA process to do that 10J rule properly.

Okay. And, and so, you know, they were, they were trying to shut it down. The litigants in that side were trying to shut down wolf-free introduction because they, on a procedural note, And, you know, we're leaving. We're going up to catch wolves to do this work. And our agency leadership said, just keep going. We'll let you know if we'll give you a call if you need to turn around. No, we didn't.

I mean, they all got dismissed through the courts and all that. So there's, there were a lot of efforts today. No, there never was a delay. No. Okay, so now on the, my earlier question, like, how do you find one? Yeah. So what our plan said is that we were going to reintroduce 10 to 15 wolves a year for three to five years. We passed that plan in May of 2023 and presented it to our commission. This is kind of an

interesting piece of it, too, is that when we started this process, we told the commission, this is how, as staff, we think we should develop this plan. And we'll develop a stakeholder group. We'll develop a technical group. We'll have a lot of public meetings. We'll have tribal consultations. We'll have a lot of commission meetings to hear that input. And ultimately put all that together. Developed a plan. And our commission's a broad, broad-based group, too. A lot of different of hunters and outfitters and ranching communities, at large members. And so we're now a parks and wildlife agency,

so we've got some of that representation in there too. When it came to vote on the plan, the commission gave us unanimous approval, which doesn't necessarily mean that the commission is all in favor of Wolfrey introduction. There were certainly members of that commission that were not supportive of Wolfrey introduction. But to me, what that said is that we did a good process.

The process to develop that plan was thorough and complete and really evaluated a lot of different perspectives in that. was that was important, I think, to have that in there. So here it is May of 2023. The statute says by December of 2023, we got seven months to get wolves on the ground. We had a new director that came in right at that time too. And one of the first things he did was write letters to his counterparts, the other agency directors in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was the first agency that responded positively that said

that, yeah, we'd be a partner with you on this. And so that, that, began that process of developing logistics of how do you how do you do that how do you catch wolves and transport and release if you if you get into the heads of uh the agencies that said no okay yeah

the states that said no you can't have our wolves uh some of these states are not under leadership that wants more wolves right what i didn't get is if someone says hey you know these wolves you guys are somewhat uncomfortable with, some political figures in these states are uncomfortable with these wolves' presence, I would like some.

One might think, they would go, have all you want. Take them. Yeah. But they were instead, like, no. Yeah. Like, what was the game being played there? Yeah. I mean, and these were discussions that happened at the director's level, I think what, I mean,

from Wyoming perspective, as an example, in order for us to take wolves from Wyoming, we would have had to take them from northern Wyoming. and release them in northern Colorado, very likely they would go into Southern Wyoming. And the director of Wyoming probably was very smartly said, I don't want to create a problem in Southern Wyoming. Right. And so you're going to create potentially like a big population,

and then it's going to be, you're going to be dealing it from the south. Right. And so that was Wyoming's rationale. Idaho, Montana, where the other two states that really have robust wolf populations, big wolf populations, and they both said no. They very explicitly said no. I think largely for political reasons,

I think that there was some influence that they had heard that they did not want, you know, that some entities within Colorado didn't want to have wolves. And so they had made contact and communications. And that kind of convinced them from a political perspective that, yeah, we don't really want to partner on this, despite the fact that we've got very large wolf populations in these states. I read it like, I kind of read it like what you're saying is I read it as a way, it was a way to express disapproval. Yeah.

With how this happened. Right. And my way of expressing disapproval is to deny you. To deny you this thing that I'm not really happy to have anyway. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, and so then, so Oregon and Washington, and the other piece of it too is that we had to get wolves from federally delisted areas, right? And because of, and it's a lot, it's not that interesting of the story, but the fact of the matter is that they had, in order to take wolves from a listed area where they're federally listed, you have to do more NEPA work. You know, more, more of that EIS and environmental impact state.

and environmental assessments to look at what the impacts of those populations are going to be. And so that took a lot of those areas out of consideration. So wolves are federally delisted Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and throughout those states, and in the eastern portions of Montana, or sorry, of Washington and Oregon. And so it was really those five states that initially we had those conversations with. And Oregon, like I said, yes, you can come and. And at that time, they said, you can take 10 wolves. we don't want you to take any breeding pairs

so none of the breeders of the packs but you can take you know essentially the the yearlings of wool of the packs we did not want to take pops you know we and so there's there's a lot of different considerations for what makes a good candidate what kind of wolves do we want to take down to

to Colorado what of this what of this story that well first I just want to reminisce because when Montana did you know when Yellowstone did it it was that they that they that they got stuck with these superwolves yeah which is you know whatever pretend but that they got

stuck with these super wolves um and then the the popular narrative that i hear not from officialdom but i just hear is that you guys got stuck Colorado got stuck with the cattle killers yeah is there there's not truth to it no it's when you when you hear that you're like i don't get where that came from i get where it came from i get where it came from i mean it came from i mean it came from the fact that where wolves and livestock overlap, there's going to be conflict, right? So there's, and in eastern Oregon, there's a lot of livestock, and there's a lot of wolves, too.

And there's history. You know, all of those packs have had some involvement, some not good involvement with livestock. And so that was part of our criteria, is that, you know, not only do we want yearlings, we didn't want this super young, we didn't want the super old wolves. We want somebody that's going to contribute to this population and not be naive to know how to hunt.

But we also weren't. going to take wolves from an area that was from a pack that was currently depredating in it in currently depredating yeah right and so and we did not was fundamentally what that meant is that we didn't want to take wolves from a pack where organ or wildlife services was doing wolf control act actions there were a lot of scenarios where we had wolves available to us to to capture um you know they were they were in a geographically just a flat open area not a treat area they were on federal land, but they were wolves that had been involved in very recent depredations. And so we passed on those. We said, no, we're not going to, we don't want to take that anticipating that that was

going to be the kind of response that we would get, is that we're just bringing in these cattle killers. So we brought in wolves from packs that had had wolf livestock history, but nothing that was, that was current, nothing that was active. And so that narrative plays, right? If your challenge had been, if your challenge it was to go find wolves that had never, to go find wolves in the lower 48, that had no history of cattle, you'd have been S-O-L. There's no way. I mean, the only place is the park, Yellowstone, right?

And that's not an option for a bunch of different reasons. And so, yeah, within the lower 48, that becomes nearly impossible to find wolves. And that's a huge reason why we went to British Columbia in the next year in 2025. Did Oregon sell them to you, trade them to you? No, they give them to you. Wildlife agencies do a lot of that kind of stuff

where we've given, as one of the projects I was involved with was Swift Fox. We took Swift Fox and put them up in North Dakota and on some of the tribal lands there. And so there's no sale, like we are not buying wolves. We, CPW, paid all of the helicopter contracts. We paid all of the fees, all the costs associated with capture and transport of wolves. But we didn't. There's no exchange, no monetary exchange for individuals. Were you involved in captures?

Yeah. How'd you guys do it? So we contracted all that out. We don't do the capture work ourselves, but there are capture companies that go out and dart from the air. And so Oregon was great to cooperate with their wolf program manager was great. She had a lot of information. She had been monitoring the wolves really intently for the last several years.

And so she would tell us about which packs were available, which individuals were available. She knew which the breeders were and could comment on those based on coat color and collar color or things like that. And so the gunner would go up, the helicopter would go So dart a wolf, and then they would bring those wolves to us in the field, and we would do what we do, measure them, weigh them, process them, put collars on them. And how did you transport them? They were transported from the field where they were captured to where we were in the field was in the helicopter.

Tranclized? Yeah, absolutely. You don't want to put a wolf in a helicopter that's not a tranquilized. Well, I don't know. Like tied them all up? Oh, they're hobbled. They've got a muzzle on them for sure during transport, but they're out. Yeah.

Yeah. And then they're never held anywhere, though, right? So did you put, did you put them in an enclosure in Colorado? No. So in Oregon, they would be put in, say, we captured them on a Tuesday. They get worked up in the field. They get the color on. They do what we do with the blood draws.

We do all the genetic samples, all that kind of stuff. Put them in a crate, a large, reinforced dog crate. And then they're flown to Colorado that, that you probably the next day. They're held overnight in those crates. and then flown the next morning and then released straight away just flat out real yeah hot release call that a hard release yeah versus a soft release and and both work you know those are two different strategies that's something that we really considered a lot so that sucker wakes up and he's just in a new spot he's in a new spot yeah and so we would release them from oregon they were transported

three to five animals at a time and so those animals would all be released together in the same place at the same time and they knew each other you weren't mixing or were you mixed they were mixed Yeah, they were mixed. They weren't necessarily all from the same pack. There's probably some that did come from the same pack. I'd have to look back precisely the relationships. But for the most part, they were, we wanted that genetic representation. We didn't want them all to be, you know, we didn't move entire packs together.

They were all individual animals from separate packs. And really, I mean, that's kind of the way wolf biology works. As they get to a certain point, they disperse out of those packs and start to create new packs and become, to defend new territories. And so that's kind of what we were trying to mimic in a somewhat artificial way. But to say here's a yearling male, a yearling female from neighboring or separate packs, let's see if that works. And in some cases it did. How did you pick?

How did you pick and did you make it public where you were actually letting him go? So, yeah. So we kind of made it public after the fact. This is a sensitive issue, right? We've got to protect the wolves. we've got to protect our staff too. There were threats that we were getting about and who knows in some of the social media world

how real some of these threats really were, but that was definitely a concern. It's hard to best that stuff, man. Again, this is the responsibility that we're given. This is the task that we're given by state law. And we've got to make sure that everybody stays safe and the wolves themselves too. And so initially we were very secretive

about timing locations, all that kind of stuff. The wolves were released on state or private lands. And so we, we didn't do it on federal lands kind of coming back. And this is a criticism that we got is that we took shortcuts,

that we didn't do the NEPA, we did not do the NEPA work on releasing on federal lands. If we were to release on Forest Service lands, BLM lands, we would have had to do more NEPA work. And that costs money. That's what's funny.

Because, I mean, come on, you let, like, if you let it go on, I mean, you're effectively letting go on public land, whether you do or not on federal land. They're going to go. Right.

They're going, they're going to move. Hey, stay on this guy's place. Exactly. There's never the expectation that you open the crate and the wolf is going to stay on that 10 acres, 100 acres, a thousand acres. These animals move, right? Did you put a collar on every one you let go? We did.

Yeah. And not only just a collar, but a GPS collar. And so, you know, the technology has changed quite a bit. And so we have these collars on that allow us to get points. And they're not super frequent. You can change that, but these catch a point every four hours or so. And so really that the purpose of those callers isn't to say, look, it's going this way, it's going up this. drainage and getting minute by minute kind of action on it. It's really just to say,

this is the general area where the animal is. It's still alive. It's still doing this. It's paired with this. It's traveling with this animal. Those kinds of things. And so, yeah, so they all have that GPS collar. There's some risks with GPS callers. They're technologically a little bit more sensitive. We've had some collar failures versus the more traditional the VHF callers, which is just the signal that you have to be in either in the field or in a plane and, you know, with a receiver and getting those, those And so, yeah, every wolf that we released had a GPS collar on it. We will try to keep, what our plan says is that within each pack, we'll keep two collars active.

One GPS and one VHF collar just for the longevity of it. The callers last five, six, seven years, hopefully, in best case scenario, which is about the life of a wolf. And so we don't want to be replacing collars that much. Catching wolves, collaring them is, it's expensive for one thing. It's risky. Anytime you're up in the helicopter, it's risky to the people is risky to the end. animals too. And so, yeah, so everything had had GPS colors on. But back to it, we, we did not release on federal lands, but knew full well that wolves would go on to federal lands. Like you say,

these things move big distances. Tell me the numbers. So how many, how many wolves you did and when? Yeah. So in year one, December of 2023, we did 10 animals from, from Oregon. And then 14 months later, January of 2025, we reintroduced 15 animals from British Columbia. Okay. And then we had plans to do a third year of releases in January of 2026. We would have gone back to British Columbia. And British Columbia was great to work with. The staff there was awesome.

We had great cooperation, great facilities to use there. It worked well for their programs. They were in a predator reduction mode for some of their caribou recovery efforts. And so it gave them a positive spin to do some of their wolf work. And based on that criticism that we heard from the animals that we'd reintroduced from Oregon, there's no overlap with livestock. There are no livestock in the northern, central northern British Columbia where we were getting these animals from.

And so it was, you know, we were addressing that concern that we had heard after year one that, you know, you're bringing in cattle killers. And we brought wolves from British Columbia down. And sure enough, they've been involved in some depredation just because that's just what, that's what predators do. Yeah. When the 10 hit the ground, the first 10, what were some of the most

immediate, what were some of the first things you saw in terms of, of distances before they settled? I mean, did they wake up and split? Yeah. So by the time they were released, they were out of the effect of drugs, right? So they're in the crates. You open the crate, and sometimes they'll take a few minutes, a minute or two to get the gumption to leave the crate. Sometimes they would go right away. And so, and they all, you know, in that first wave of five, I think.

we did five and then we did two and then we did three or something like i don't remember exactly the numbers on on how exactly that worked but um they some animals moves big distances right away some animals stuck super close within five 10 miles of of the release sites too and so they would they just they were all in exploratory mode right and some of them i think were probably um a little confused I think they all probably were, at least in some way or another, confused about what they had just experienced. And you're just flown from Oregon, driven in a truck, and then the crates are open, and they're in a different place.

One of the things that we really wanted to kind of mimic is taking wolves from some place that is ecologically pretty similar to Colorado. And so that works pretty well. They're in, you know, an elk-dominated environment. We've got obviously huge ungulate populations in Western Colorado. So that was good.

And they, you know, some animals moved quite a bit and some, some stuck pretty close. In that first year, we did have one, one pair. And they developed a litter of pups. They produced a litter of pups and started to defend the territory as well. So that was, that was the first, that was in the spring of 20, 24. Okay. What was the, and I know you're only getting a, you're only getting a ping on them every four hours? Yeah.

How long, do you have a guess? when they, so they, they cut loose in Colorado, how many hours or days went by before one of them had a successful hunt? Yeah, great question. So we get pings every four hours. We don't get a ping, we don't get the result of that ping every, we get one download a day, essentially. So we get just to understand how that works. I don't, that's a great question. I don't know how long

it was. I don't think it was, you know, wolves don't eat every day, right? They don't need to have a kill every day. We would probably within the first week that we I don't remember we were really sensitive to to not wanting to go in when we would see a cluster of points we don't want to go in on that because we don't want to scare him off of that and create conflict push him off of that that kill of a deer or an elk or something like yeah you imagine like there's a temptation to go running over there to see what they've been doing every time you get like that he's been in the same place for 12 hours that's right you're dying and go see what's up but you would just stay back we would stay back and then we would go in afterwards right

after they've moved on, then you can go in. And we've got some great research that's, happening right now, looking at that, kind of looking at what wolf diet looks like. And so that's how we'll do that and go in and look for SCAT. Then he can run some genetics on the SCAT. How many months went by before you had one, kill a cow? Well, we had a cow.

We actually had depredation from the North Park PAC. Before we did reintroduction, we had depredation in there. There was probably from the wolves that were released in Oregon. I'd have to look back. I don't know for sure, but months. Month or months. Yeah.

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After fighting and yelling and fighting some more, Clay Newcomb and First Light have done it. They have built a pair of work bibs. together. Not just any work bibs. We're talking the bare grease bibs from Clay. Now, I've watched Clay work long enough to know that he wasn't going to put his name on a pair of hunting pants, pretending to be work

bibs, and boy, he did not. These are Clay's invention for things like breaking mules, rendering grease, kneeling in the dirt. I'm going to use them all the time. Trapping, working, fixing stuff. It doesn't matter. If you want good, durable, comfortable bibs, these are your bibs, made

from tough stretch duck cotton. They got briar-proof chaps that run from cuff to thigh. They got pockets damn near everywhere. Again, comfortable and durable. Put them on. You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck.

And they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store.com. What's your take? Now that you've looked at this so carefully, we were talking about this the other day on the news show research around this question but like what's your take on the degree to which wolves are just opportunistic and remain opportunistic versus they hunt elk they hunt moose those animals behave in a certain way you might get a kick to the head right they're faster whatever and then you discover cattle and in the wolf's mine, I don't know this is true or not. In the wolf's

mine, he's like, man, I just prefer to deal with cattle. Like, do you see that switch? No, you don't. In fact, I mean, there were, in one of the the first dens that we had in that North Park den, there was, there were yearlings right in the field, right, right below

the home site, right below where, where animals were. And you would see wolves walk right through the cattle. They would not touch the cattle at all. And so, you know, I don't, I think that they, it's not as though they're just bloodthirsty killers and we'll kill whatever. So I think in those animals, we know that those animals were killing native ungulates too.

And so I don't think that they get that opportunistic feel. And I think that a cow is probably much easier to kill for a wolf. Yeah. But what I meant more, I didn't do a good job to ask the question. What I meant more is, do you see that a pack or a pair or whatever will kill a cow? and then do you see that they all of a sudden go like that's what they focus on or will they kill a cow

and not get hazed off it just kill a cow and leave on their own and then go back to elk and deer and never visit another cow again or does it seem like once they do it they're headed down a path toward trouble good good question i don't think we have the resolution of data on that yet i think that I think that there are scenarios where they will find that situation, that they will, they will find a situation that's easy eating, right? And they'll, they will stick with that. And I think that there's other times that they will, they will get involved with livestock depredations, and then they'll be gone and they won't come back to livestock, meaning that they're going off and eating something else. I know that both those scenarios have happened,

whether they're more inclined to do one or the other. I can't say definitively, yeah, that that's the way it works. So that's not the way it works. I think that it's, it's probably, a mix. Wolves are all individuals, right? They do, they're smart animals. They have personalities. They have different kind of traits. And that's part of the reason

that that 10J is so important, right? If we can document that wolves are getting into livestock and we've got range riders out there, we've got the producers themselves are out there paying attention. If we can see that that's happening and you can try to get involved and try to get some of that behavior modified, you can get in there and hit them with beanbags, hit them with crackers shells, hit them with, you know, noises and different kinds of things that kind of scare them away.

let them know that's not the right thing to be doing, there's scenarios where that helps, and that can change their behavior. And that's really good. That's what we're after. And so I wouldn't say that, you know, once a wolf has a taste for livestock, that they won't go back to me.

I don't think that that's a true statement. Yeah. What was the earliest time, what was the first time you guys had to make a decision to go, like, basically do a recall on one of your wolves, you know? Yeah. where you're like, all right, he's, he's coming out? Right away.

I mean, right away. It was that first spring. So it's spring of 24. We had this scenario where wolves were getting into a lot of livestock. This was right after we had documented our first den. Lots of attention on this media attention, social attention on the wolf program has introduced these wolves. We've got a documented breeding.

We've got a documented den. And we've got documented depredations and repeated depredations. And those depredations were coming from that den site. Nearby. We're coming from that group. That group. Yeah. And that was the Copper Creek pack.

And that pack's gotten a lot of attention for, you know, a variety of largely for this whole, whole effort. And so here we are faced with this really challenging scenario. And we have that 10-J rule in there to say that there are, there are situations where we can manage wolves. It was not an intention, I don't think, to say from, you know, from day one, we're going to start doing lethal management of wolves. Right. We had had had so much invested in this. so much work had gone into getting sourcing those wolves, transporting, releasing, and to say, we're going to go in.

And there was calls for us to, you know, people were trying to get us to remove those wolves, remove the pups from that pack. There were the two breeders, and I believe there were four pups. How many were removed? We didn't kill any of them. Oh, you did not kill them. So this is a scenario where there were four, there were actually five pups in the Copper Creek pack, but what we ended up doing because,

they're kind of as the compromises that we we captured those animals from from that private land moved them to a facility held them there for a bit of time and then release those release the copper creek packs those that remained one of the the breeder male died we were only able to capture four of the five pups we didn't realize that there was a fifth pup at the time so the the breeding female and four and four pups ultimately were at that facility and then they were re-released in in January of 25 into colorado that same into Colorado yeah that had to get a lot of of heat. It sure did. Yeah. It did. And, you know, part of it was some behavior modification work, and they were re-released in a different spot. And so it definitely got some criticisms for

doing that. So what happened then? Did they give up their cattle killing ways when you let them go to second time? So the female then paired again with one of the British Columbia males, and they had another den. It's different, different part of Western Colorado. And there have been some depredation issues with with that pack still uh what was the first lethal removal you had to do the first lethal removal was part was actually i think part of of that um i can't remember right off the top i should know this it was um shortly it was either in in that pack one of the one of the yearlings that was was part of that or in another part of the state too so what would be what's the decision making process or what are the sort of inputs on that

one will catch yeah and we'll try to dissuade it from wanting to do to be around people and let it go that one we're gonna remove is gonna we're gonna letfully remove that that that whole to to go back that capturing animals transport you know to to re release them in another place that we really don't want to do that that that whole effort that we did with copper creek that that first spring it was that was terrible so that's a learning experience it was a huge learning experience like it was it was a lot of work it was a lot of, there's so many different challenges that went into that, that effort. Okay. Wasn't good for anybody.

Like, it was, it was really challenging kind of thing. So that's not standard protocol for us to do that. And so for us to consider lethal management, we have a definition for what makes up, we call it chronic depredation. If there's three or more depredations by a pack or an individual in 30 days, so three confirmed depredations in 30 days. And there's different level, you know, one is, you know, preponderance of evidence. So more likely than not, and one is clear and convincing. Like we, there's, there's no room for doubt.

A wolf killed that. Yeah. Sheep, lamb, cow, cattle, calf, or whatever. So three, three events in 30 days. And there's, um, there's been some, some use of non-lethal, some kind of deterrence. The producer has done some of that. Yeah. There's the likelihood that, that depredations are going to continue into the future.

And, and also that there's no attractance, right? So that the producers have removed dead and other carcasses. in the field too. And so there's a little checklist. There's a checklist. And that's formalized in our regulations and how we go about that. And it's a process. And it's a conversation that involves the local area staff that are local game wardens,

our district wildlife managers, our area managers, our conflict team, all the way up to our director. It's ultimately the director's call is to when and how that happens. And if you have to do a lethal removal, is that, are you contracting the, that out or were you guys doing it on your own? We do it on our own. Yeah, we do it on our own. From the air? No, from the ground.

Because they're all done from the ground. So that there is a way that if the agency doesn't have the resources to do it, we haven't run into that situation. Every lethal management situation that we've had, our staff had it done it. You never had AIS do it. Correct. It's always been our own staff to do that.

Got it. Yeah. How many to date, how many to date have lethal removals have there been? I think three, we just did another one. I'm not full on the details of it. I think just this last week, too. So I think four, I think. And when you guys do a lethal removal, I'm guessing you just get blown up by certain interests.

Oh, for sure. I mean, you can't make everybody happy with any kind of wolf management decision. Somebody is going to not agree with the decision that was made. And that's a challenge. I guess it's just one of those things that, you know, it's just recognizing that knowing that's the way it is. win situation man yeah it's hard yeah when uh it's hard but what i say is that it's it's important for us to be responsive right and i and i think that we're we're demonstrating that like it's you mean to not brush off criticism yeah right i mean you have to you own it right this is this is something that we did this is

something that we said what we're going to do right that's part of the plan that's part of why we have the 10j in there we're in this situation right now where we've we've only had two years of reintroduction we had we had anticipated a third year and the wolf population will grow pretty quick and and as as it grows, then we can be much more flexible in our management. And removing an animal, an individual is, you know, there are some that would disagree with that that's ever appropriate, but it becomes easier to do that. And it, in the long term picture, the big picture of what we're trying to do is establish a self-sustaining population, that helps us, right? And so we've, we've made the argument a lot that, that getting packs established makes management a whole lot

easier, right? When we've got individual wolves that are moving all around and they truly are moving all around. It's it's really difficult to predict where that animal is, where it's going to go. And so it's truly needle in a haystack. Whereas when they're in a pack, when they're defending a territory, they're still moving big distances, but they're moving in a much smaller geography. And so it becomes a way easier to deploy those tools. I can see it gets easier to get your arms around the whole thing when you see them all in place. And as that the number of the population size goes up, when there are problems, it's, it's more palatable. I'm not going to say a lot more palatable, but it's more palatable to say we can we can remove animals that the population can sustain that from

the conflict side of things especially if that can reduce that conflict you might not think of it as a problem i do but uh have you had the problem in colorado of celebrity wolves like we have in in the greater yellowstone area we've we've worked to avoid that yeah right we give are they at the park man they they they court it yeah they love it we we have i mean we give our wolves a number, right? There's a four-digit number. The first two numbers are the year that it was collared. The next two numbers are, if it was male or female, sequentially, right? So the first male captured in 2025 would be 2501. Males get the odd numbers, females get the even numbers. And so you have to have that, right? You have to know individuals that you're talking about. There have been

campaigns, some of the advocate groups, tried, wolf advocate groups, try to have naming. To make celebrities. And we don't want to do that. Right? We don't do that for any of the wildlife species that we do. There are some interesting behaviors, and we've seen some of our animals make huge movements. And, you know, there are very interesting things that we're learning, but we're really not into that. Yeah, that, like the wolf celebrity thing gets leveraged, right? It gets politically leveraged. Yeah. Because then it becomes, well, you wouldn't want that to happen to old Betty.

Right. You know, and then it brings in this whole other conversation. Makes it much more challenging. Yeah. Right. What was did there wind up maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like I remember this. Did it wind up being that there was some legal problem with the feds around the decision to get them from British Columbia? Well, that's their interpretation.

Okay. And the state has a different interpretation of it. And it all comes back to that 10-J rule, right? And so remember that, that 10-J rule talks about how wolves are managed in the state, north to southeast to west. They can, it relaxes those tape prohibitions. Fish and Wildlife Service's interpretation on it is that the 10-J is a, explicit into where wolves can be sourced from. And we don't agree with that. To us, and generally, the 10J talks about management within that geographic boundary. And so, you know, we, we don't feel like

anything was violated by us going to British Columbia. We had all of the federal permits, there were federal importation permits that we had to get from Fish and Wildlife Service, just like any kind of wildlife that comes across international borders. We had to get CITES permits It's a convention of international trade of endangered species. We had provincial permits. We had Environment Canada permits. We had our caller department of agriculture.

So we were buttoned up. We had everything we needed in place. And all the way up until we got back from there in January of 25. We had planned to go back in January of 26, all the way up until October of 25, leading up to it, that was our plan. And then we get the letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service

telling us. Well, don't you feel... that when they pointed that out, that it was probably the result. I mean, however one feels about the reintroduction, but that bit, them calling legal fault on getting them from BC, was probably the result of someone saying, I want you to go over every decision that was made and see if you can find me a problem.

Yeah. Yeah. And then they got creative and found a problem. they found what they found what they thought to be a problem. We don't think it was a problem. But I'm saying, but they might even know they're being creative. Right. No, I think that that's true. I mean, that has all time, man. You're like, dude, there's got to be a problem. Find me a problem.

And to follow up on that. And some lawyers like, I got it. Well, and to follow up on that, then after that, after we got that cease and desist letter, then we had had a wolf, we have agreements with other states, Arizona, New Mexico. If a wolf goes into Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah, those wolves can be recaptured and brought back into Colorado.

that's really to put the long story but that's fundamentally to protect mexican wolf recovery all the investment that's happened there and so that happened we had one wolf that that that that went down in new mexico new mexico captured it transferred it to us we re-released that animal in colorado i i don't i don't want to get into names i have i have some dear friends that that um that are very invested in the the the mexican wolf yeah project and i understand this that this desire that there's so much time and energy put it into recovering the mexican gray wolf in new mexico and arizona right yep um and mexico yeah and that that bringing wolves from bc or bringing wolves from oregon and putting them into colorado and then they're going to go in and

and and then by some definition corrupt these lineages right down there um earlier i used the word like something seeming academic, one could look and say, well, historically, wolves were present on the landscape. Yeah. From way into Mexico to the Arctic. That's true.

Right. And there wasn't a line anywhere. It was all just bleeding in, right? I mean, there was, there was lines here and there because of desert ecosystems. Right. I'm saying like any of these populations, I can't tell you this empirically,

but I'm just assuming any of these populations is being infiltrated by individual animals coming from the north or south at any given time. Right. They're not like fence. There's not walls divide. It's not like there's a wall that says, okay, this wolf group is here and then over the wall is the next wolf group and they don't breed. They don't interbreed. So what's your take on that? Like what's up with wanting there to be a line now where there probably wasn't a line historically?

Is it just because of because of the politics? No, it's not, I mean, it's scientific. There's, there's evidence. I mean, so wolf taxonomy is, is super interesting to those that are interested in that kind of stuff. There have been lots of different subspecies of wolves to find over time, up to 25. Now there's five different subspecies recognized. And throughout all that time, Mexican wolves, Canis Lupus Belii has been recognized as a separate subspecies. They're smaller, they're just, they're different.

Like, they had a barrier. They, they're, the barrier between northern wolves and. as far south as Colorado and Utah in Arizona was a substantial desert, right? It is not a great... And you feel that it functioned as a barrier? It must have. Because there is a different subspecies.

There's something that moves so much. The idea of subspecies is that they are isolated for long enough time consistently enough. There's not this infiltration of other genes coming in that they develop another subspecies. And so that's because bali... Canis lupus bali... has been recognized as a subspecies for as long as it has,

always independent. There is some influx. Northern wolves can breed with Mexican wolves for sure. And so it's happened, but they are also unique in there. And there's also the political side or the policy side of it is that Mexican wolves are listed separately under endangered species. Yeah, that's what I say. I can see that someone might say, I can see that a manager or a wildlife person might say,

I get the point. Historically, they were all over. They're not now. Yep. We have different management practices in place. And for that reason, and that reason alone, we don't want them to mix because it's going to cause confusion of management strategy. Yeah. Like, I'd accept that.

Yep. But it does seem to me as like, if what wolf advocates are striving for is restoration of the wolf, I feel like that would mean that they're striving for a situation where there's just like wolfness. Continuity. Yeah. Wolfness running. running up and down the continent and they just move all over hell. And in time, that might be this scenario. I'm not the geneticist to ask this question, but, you know, there may be a point in time

when having Northern Wolf genetics infiltrate, integrate with Mexican wolves. Maybe it would be a time when as appropriate. But that's a real, like, what they're doing is so intensive with Mexican Wolf recovery. They're taking pups that are born in captivity and putting them in wildborn litters, which all requires incredible timing and incredible coordination with. that like that there's huge efforts to do that that that Mexican wolf population just like a lot of these endangered species stories started with a really really small population seven to 10 animals something like that and so there's there's genetic inbreeding concerns and they're very very very

deliberate about how that works and so to to have northern wolf genes come into Mexican wolf population now would undo a lot of that really important word that's that's happened and so so that's that's an important thing right and so I think I mean And we got off on a little bit of sidetrack, but that's why when that wolf came down into New Mexico, we have that MOU to kind of keep that from happening. The same thing, if Mexican wolves come out of their experimental population area, then they'll be captured by those states and brought back into that area.

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of the time you have. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.orgia for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Good Lord, they're finally here. At long last, after fighting and yelling and fighting some more, Clay Newcomb and First Light have done it.

They have built a pair of work bibs together, not just any work bibs. We're talking the bare grease bibs from Clay. Now, I've watched Clay work long enough to know that he wasn't going to put his name on a pair of hunting pants, pretending to be work bibs, and boy, he did not. These are Clay's invention for things like breaking mules, rendering grease, kneeling in the dirt.

I'm going to use them all the time. Trapping, working, fixing stuff. It doesn't matter. If you want good, durable, comfortable bibs, these are your bibs made from tough stretch duck cotton. They got briar-proof chaps that run from cuff to thigh. They got pockets damn near everywhere. Again, comfortable and durable. Put them on.

You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck. and they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store.com. Let's say they go and let's say during the current administration, I'm going to give you my viewpoint. I know, it's probably not your viewpoint. I don't know.

I'll just tell you mine. From a wildlife, from a wildlife conservation perspective, there's not a ton. This is me talking. Like I want everybody know this is me talking, not Mr. Odell. there's not a ton that one can be hopeful like from a wildlife and conservation

perspective under the current administration there's not like a bunch of guy could root for but a thing I would root for is I would like to see lower 48 wolves just delisted right and there's a movement to do this for sure what would that mean for Colorado

it would what it would mean well fundamentally what it means is that the fish and wildlife services is no longer a partner right I mean they're a stakeholder in it, but they're not a man, the MOU that we have that gives us designated agent, all of that kind of goes away. And wolves are managed like many of the other wildlife species in the state,

managed solely by the state agents. But they'd be a state endangered. What do you guys call your own endangered list? Yeah, it would be state endangered until we meet, and our plan describes what those recovery goals. So it would be state endangered until we meet the threshold, and then it would be downlisted to state threatened, and then it becomes a non-game when it's delisted.

Yeah, but don't you feel like, this is a crystal ball and shit a little bit here is when we when we did the grizzlies and wolves and put them under Endangered Species Act protection federal ESA protection and we came up with a recovery objective there were a lot of players involved in that conversation that were not being honest

brokers like there were people protectionists wolf advocates grizzly advocates absolute protectionists like protectionists absolutists that gave a verbal sign off on what recovery would look like but then once recovery was achieved

they reneged right and now they sue and sue to prevent delisting because they're not really interested in the recovery question they're interested in protecting wolves from lethal

removal or recreational harvest right right and this is and and these battles are taking place in states that are politically red or politically purple okay um i mean varying degrees of bluish michigan wisconsin minnesota right and then you have like very red states Wyoming montana Idaho. Then you go to like deep blue Colorado. It just seems to me that whatever was agreed to about recovery in Colorado is a lie. And that there are factions in Colorado that will never accept delisting or non-game status.

They will never accept it. Well, yeah. So a couple of things about that. One, there's never been recovery, federal recovery. goals for Colorado, right? And so the recovery goals are for other parts of the country. And so there are not specific federal recovery goals for Colorado. There's some in the staff. But no, I'm talking about in the event that the feds, I'm saying like, hey, feds delist. Let's play this out. Right. It's if on if. The feds move and they delist lower 48.

Yep. Okay. Remain state listed at this point. But it's state listed. What I'm saying is, you know, never mind all that. Let me just say, let me ask what I'm saying more. bluntly. Can you picture in Colorado a situation where there's ever a world where they are issuing like wolf hunting tags like are issued in Idaho and Wyoming and in Montana like were issued in Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota? Like that ain't happening. I mean, that's my crystal ball. There's a couple things to that. One is that the statute that, the ballot initiative the statute that passed defines them as state endangered species and so so right now and there's some some uncertainty as to to how how much influence that has truly on the state status of

them we have another process because but but so the ballot language didn't spell out how they would become not state endangered no it just definitionally state endangered right i got you and so our plan or the the plan that we wrote has criteria if we meet 50 animals for four years, it gets downlisted to state threatened. If we get to 150 animals for two years or 200 animals, they become delisted and just have the non-game status. Then,

if the commission ever, a future commission ever made the decision to change that status from non-game to game, that's a decision down the road. And who's to say, whether that's likely or not. I'll say, it'll never happen. Maybe. I don't know. It's not going to happen right now. And I mean, very clearly right now

is not the time that's going to happen. Every Texas would have to move to Colorado before that happened, man. Not just not just a trick of all the Texans would have to go there. Yeah, it's, it's not, I mean, we're, we're several years away. Like, we just don't know what it's like to live. We know what it's like to live with 32 wolves, right? That's what we've got right now in the state on our annual report that comes out of each spring. 32 wolves was our count last year.

What's it look like for 300 wolves? What do you think is the maximum? It's a social question. What do you think is maximum? Well, let's look at it. Let's take the social out of it. Okay. Let's just look at, let's look at acres and deer and elk.

If you had to guess, I'm not, no one's going to hold you to this. No, thousands, thousands of, like, we have, we have, the landscape could support thousands. We have a huge amount of public lands, wilderness areas. We have huge native ungulate populations that we, so biologically, we could have thousands of wolves. But not thousands for a long time. No, I mean, that's what I'm saying is that it's socially. Well, no, I believe it's social out of it. Yeah.

Let's explore non-social for a minute. Yeah. Like you have a ton of elk. Maybe thousands is probably over. Yeah. Well, you have a ton of elk, maybe. Yeah. Because you don't have many wolves.

Right. Right. I mean, what do you think is going to, so just leaving the social acceptance element out of it and just look at like, let's say Colorado could host a thousand or more wolves. In your mind, does that mean with your expertise, does that mean that mean that? that its elk herd stabilizes that 50% of current. It's Elkirk stabilizes at 80% of current. Like, what is it?

I don't know. I don't know what that looks like. I think, I mean, it's wolves eat, right? And any predator eats. And so there's going to be, there's going to be some impact to ungulate populations. But it's in the yellowstone wolves get credit or get blamed for all the effect on the northern range. And there's so many different things that are happening at that.

that point that it's hard to say, you know, it's impossible really to say that's cause and effect because of the wolves, the elk populations went down. There's so many other things that were happening at that point in time. The more wolves you have, the more prey they're going to consume. That's the fact, right? What it looks like in time, I don't, I don't, I really don't know. It is, it would just be a guess to say what that looks like. Well, whose job, or is it nobody, like, in Colorado, is it nobody's job to model out what it might look like for the deer and elk herd if there are 200 wolves, 500 wolves, a thousand wolves, like no one's curious about this?

Curious for sure. We're not at that point where we're deep into that. I mean, we're many years away, a decade away from wondering about that. Well, not, I mean, we're starting to wonder about it, but we're a decade away from the reality of that happening. Okay. And so, you know, in time, we will get there. You know, we're, and I say we, I'm not with the agency anymore, but it's, it's, yeah, I think that that's, that's where we, that's where we, that the agency will start to look and say how, how do we manage? Yeah. For native ungulate populations, how do we manage for predator populations as well? Let's bring in social. Yeah, the social side of things. So I think that that's, that's part of the reason that it's an interesting question, but I don't think it really matters fundamentally because socially, I don't think that we can, we can hold that, that number of, yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. It's, the,

the non-social thing was a fantastic experiment, right? Yeah. I get it. I get it. With social pressures. I mean, and I know you can't put numbers to it, but like you got 36 now, right? 32. Yeah.

32 now. Considering that humans are here too. Yeah. And people are feeding the country and agricultural interests, right? Right. Not to discredit them, but they, they, they have needs and they provide a service to people with producing food and all that. Like, so when you add that in, are you more comfortable with a, with spitballing a number as a retired guy? I mean, half of that maybe, maybe 500 to a thousand animals.

Somewhere in there, I think, is a reasonable population to kind of have as a target. So if someone said to you, if someone, if someone from the future, from 20 years in the future came to you and said, Mr. O'Dell, there are. are 500 wolves, and we've been at that for quite some time. We got about Colorado supports about 500 wolves, you would, you would think to yourself, well, that's more than I thought. Or you'd think, I thought it'd be more. No, I think that that's probably, you know, we, we never set an objective in, in the plan because we just didn't know.

Like, we just don't know what it looks like. I think that that's a reasonable number to have in, in Colorado. I mean, it's, it's crowded. There's a lot of people in Colorado. There's a lot of people that recreate all year around there. It's not the same as Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, where they're, you know, here in Montana, it's just much more rural. There's a lower population density.

And so there are more people in Colorado, but you fly over it, you see the landscape. There's a lot of, there's a lot of good wolf habitat. And so I don't, I don't totally buy the argument that people say that Colorado is too crowded for wolves. I think that it's, we certainly have the capacity to, to have. a self-sustaining fairly large I think self-sustaining wolf population in in the state what number that looks like it's it's too soon to tell especially when you incorporate that that social metric into it but I think it's it's probably in that 500 to maybe to a thousand I don't know something like that yeah when you review the whole thing in your mind what do you what do you wish

would have gone differently hmm you know I think one of the things that we learned is is is that the communications and how to outreach, how to, how to share information is, is really, really critical. And that's one of the things, all, all different kinds of information, how, especially from day one, how we share information about how we're doing the releases, where, where that happens. And so, you know, we, we took a very precautionary approach that, that first year. And I, I don't, I don't regret that at all. I think that that was very wise of us to do. When you say precautionary, meaning undersharing or oversharing? Undershersharing. We were very, you know, likewise, you're quiet.

We were quiet. We didn't say where we were going to release animals, and we didn't say when we only talked to people after the fact. I think that we learned from that, that that was not acceptable. And we needed to be a bit more, you know, still protecting of really sensitive details,

but a little bit more open with that kind of stuff. And you feel like that may be lost, that maybe cost you politically, cost you publicly. I think so. Yeah, I think so. With voters.

I think so. Stakeholders. I think. So, and then, you know, the communication. about depredations. We've changed a lot of that. We've gotten a whole lot better at that.

Was there a tendency within the department to underrepresent depredations? No. No, never. I mean, we have a website on our page on our CPW website that is very explicit. So you were frank about that information. If it happened, you were just like, here's the facts. Yep. Got it. I think one of the things that we could do better is that is the, is the, media communications. Like here, you look at the media and the local media really emphasizes the negative, right? Local media.

Local statewide media that in Colorado, when we get, when something happens about wolves or the personnel, it gets talked about a lot in the sense of, well, here's another chink in the armor of the wolf program. Here's another example of how the wolf program is failing, and it is not failing. The wolf program is doing well. And even with my leaving of the program, I think that we've got a really good strong staff that's there.

I think that we've got really good biologists, researchers, field staff that are able to address a lot of those concerns, but the media would have you believe otherwise, right? And so if we could be more proactive in that and tell the good stories and have the media tell those stories, and we've tried that. We've tried to reach out to some of the media and say,

hey, look, I get it, that this is what sells a lot of your ads, but there's other sides to that, too. And some have taken that opportunity and done well and told some of those good stories. But still, we struggle with that. Well, because the people that the people that announce and amplify the missteps are the people that feel burned. Yeah. They want to find a problem. Right.

Right. Like if you're just, like, a lot of buddies of mine, they love to hunt out. Yeah. And in other social circles, it would be people that like they love to run cattle. And they don't like it. And they don't like that they came from voters. And they don't like that they feel those crammed down their throat by Denver. Yeah.

Right. And so, yeah, when something negative happens, they're going to be all over it because they want to amplify it as a way of expressing discontent or a way of hopefully subverting the whole thing because they feel it was an assault on them. Yeah. I mean, one of the most poignant conversations I had was early, early on in this process. It was at an open house that we had in Boulder, Colorado, very liberal part of part of the state, very much a pro-wolf state. And we had a rancher come all the way from Western Colorado. He brought his daughter to this. And not because they wanted to fight the whole thing.

They just wanted to hear that perspective. And this rancher's been very involved with this whole work, the wolf planning work. It's been great, really great to work with. And his daughter, I don't know, 20 years old, 25 years old, I got in a conversation with her. and what she said to me is, I don't care about wolves. I don't care if they're here, I don't care if they're not here. All I want to do is ranch. That's what's important to me.

And to me, that was, that, that's stuck with me throughout for the last six years is like, we have to figure out how to reintroduce wolves. We have to figure out how to develop and maintain a self-sustaining population of wolves by the state law. And we have to work with the people of Colorado. We have to find the way to address those conflicts and to allow, not, the idea is not at all

to keep ranching from happening or to stop ranching from happening or to stop hunting from happening, not at all. I think that that's a misconception that's out there is that wolves are just an avenue to make that happen. And that's not the case. Well, that's not the case at all. You're out of it now and you were never the mouthpeat. You were never meant to be the guy selling everybody on it. But I think that like if you're curious and you say, you know, you have opinions about how news is shared,

you have opinions about how the public is engaged. like a hot tip if I was going to offer your former colleagues a hot tip is wolf advocates and protectionists have a bad habit

of of I never use this word but they have a bad habit of gas lighting people to say so when a guy says so there's going to be a lot less elk right

they don't want to have that conversation. They're reluctant to do it. I think that if they would come and say, you're right, man, you're right. It ain't going to be like it is. Yeah. They can't bring themselves to do it. The same way they can't bring themselves

to acknowledge to a rancher, this shit's going to come kill your cows. Right. They can't bring themselves to do it. They act like he's a dumb redneck. Yeah. The hunter doesn't understand the science, right? And they cannot just say,

buddy I know it sucks for you you're losing a lot of these elk it's going to be harder for you to get an elk tag I get it I understand I don't really care but I understand you're right I'm doing what I'm going to do anyways but the fact that they cannot bring themselves to just say the truth yeah bugs the shit out of people yeah you know and we I mean we tried to be straightforward with I mean I remember at the very beginning conversations that we had with the commission I said wherever wolves and livestock share the landscape there's going to be conflict but it's not it's not as though they're they're doing all these great things for the environment and it's there's no challenge to to life that's going to be a challenge yeah that's well but the advocates and you're i'm not saying you're one of them

but the advocates and the absolute as protectionist that's the narrative they spin and it infuriates people and in some ways i think that a better strategy or more harmonious strategy or a strategy that would lead to a more harmonious disagreement would be a higher level of acknowledgement about certain realities. And again, just tell them you don't care. Yeah. But don't tell them they're wrong. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's infuriated. I can imagine being it, being, I'm not a rancher, being in a rancher shoes and having a wolf advocates say this is, you're not right. Yeah. There's nothing more intimidating than that. Tell them, you're right. I don't care. Yeah. He would, he would, he would sleep better at night.

Or an El Conner is going to sleep better at night. If you go, you're right, I don't care. Yeah. You have, you see it this way. I see it this way. He's telling him that he's wrong. Yeah. That's a hot tip.

What, uh, when you left on Friday, you retired? Like, you just people, I mean, you hit like retirement. That's right. You know, like, storm out, you know? No, it's, no, it's totally, totally my call. There's no political influence. You get a lot of people ask about that. No, it's, is long career.

long career with the agency, very satisfied, and it was just the right time to go. Did you, because what you've been doing is so high profile, man, did you, did you go home one night and just like sleep? Like, what did it feel like to walk out the door? It feels good. Well, it's kind of been a process. And we've got, like I say, a really great team in there. We've got a backfill into that position. And so we're, you know, it's been a lot of work to get to that point. And you're right. And once you're done with it and you're not thinking about it and you're not get you don't wake up and have an inbox full of emails about the latest conflict and all that that kind of stuff it's that's nice you know i know i want to i want viewers

understand i'm in no way drawing a parallel i'm drawing a light parallel but i'm not drawing a serious parallel between the war in afghanistan and the wolf war in colorado but when we finally pulled out of afghanistan i have a friend that did many tours in afghanistan he lost friends in Afghanistan. Like he gave a significant part. I mean, he went in the military as a young guy and like came of age. Yeah. In Afghanistan. And we finally pulled out of Afghanistan and I text him. I'm like, what are you feeling right now? He said that we should have left a long time ago. Yeah. Right. If, which is not what I expect to hear from him. But if if all of a sudden there's like some, I know it can't happen or I know it won't, but if all of a sudden there's some referendum,

you know, and it comes to a vote and they're like, scratch the whole thing. and they sent some helicopters out and all the wolves are gone. What would, like, well, that would be, that would be, I wouldn't want that to see that. Would you be like, ah, geez, wasted all that time? Exactly. I mean, there's so much has been invested in, I mean, like I say, the conflict is there. Conflict is going to happen. But it, we can also, there's, there's a lot of stories about wolves not getting into conflict.

Like, what, what you hear about are, are those scenarios where it's not gone great. Yeah. There's a lot of scenarios where it has gone great that aren't getting that story. So I don't think it's necessary. I think it's, I think it would be a bad idea to, to kill all the wolves that, that we're introduced.

I think that they're, they are doing what wolves do. I think part of what the wildlife agency does is not only manage for deer and elk and trout and game birds and waterfowl, but also for all of our non-game species as well. And so this is really important responsibility for, for all state wildlife agencies, but for,

for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, it's an agency that's really proud of the work that, that, there and so I don't think you know reversing what we've done is is in the cards I think wolves are wills are gonna find their way they're they're gonna do well and and the program the program is gonna do well the species is gonna do well and and you know the people of Colorado will do well with it as well like we will find ways to make that that whole all the that that challenges that go along

with managing bears and lions and wolves all all of that together is is part of it and I think that we'll we'll get there and we'll do a really good job is the agency will i went out of my way not out of my way but i i was careful to articulate a perspective held by a lot of hunters that i know but um in all fairness the perspective i was giving isn't the full perspective and there's the thing i've always observed with people um with my like you know my sort of community right of outdoors men and hunters is um no matter how anybody feels about wolf politics. I never meet anyone

who isn't really happy to see a wolf. That's right. You never talk to a guy who comes back and he's like, damn it. Worst night could have had. Saw a wolf. Yeah. People come back and they're like, dude. I know.

We're starting to hear that. Right. What's so funny is like, it's like in that way it doesn't line up. up with it's just one of those it's just one of those contradictions that it doesn't line up and like in in in no matter what someone's stated view is they hear it howl and they get happy they see it and they get excited yeah and it's like their their brain isn't totally aligned on what they're after yeah like people struggle right no they i mean i hate them or love i should hate these animals i should be afraid of them but in reality it's i mean and that was very intentional we we we brought people

to these releases, or, you know, to see wolves within the agency that we're somewhat skeptical of this. And let's, let's get them exposed. Let's let them see a wolf, handle a wolf, hear a wolf. Like any of, and then from the public, we hear those reports, too. Like, I was camping, I was hunting, and I heard the howls, and people get excited about it, right? It is, even for those, like you say, that feel like, for whatever reason, they should, should or shouldn't love or hate these animals, it, there's something, there's something pretty magic. about it for sure i remember hearing it would have been 98 or 99 1999 hunting elk bo-hunting elk and um not far from yellowstone and thinking at dusk it registered in my head that i was

hearing a bugle like the second it started off ways was like it's a bugle then i'm like oh my god It's a howl. You know? Yeah. And that being like the first. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? People remember that.

Yeah. The first time you hear a wolf, the first time, even maybe you don't hear him, maybe you don't seem you see the track and on the trail. And it's, it's unmistakable. And it's, you know, you understand there. And we even hear from hunters that are, that are in some ways happy to be around wolves and say, hey, I'm, I'm hunting ungulates. I'm hunting elk or deer moose in, in an environment that has the component, you know,

the added component of wolves to, to the system. And, you know, it's not every, you know, not everybody that agrees with that perspective but but we've heard that i've heard that you know i keep saying it's just it's just important to me that that again i want to return i don't know why i just feel very compelled to return to a point that i know will come is it'll come if it's like you said it's a successful program and they really take off and it gets to be where there's hundreds and there's and like there's going to be a decline there's going to be an elk to climb yeah i'm wondering if they're going to tell people that that's not what it was

they're going to be like it was climate it was you know i mean right no they're gonna obfuscate it and they're going to tell them that's not really what happened yeah it was other factors i don't know i mean i think that we maybe it's it's hard to say how how the story will be told i'm telling you they'll obfuscate it'll be that it was other it was climate yeah it could be like it's There's so many things happening. I'm just making a prediction. Hey, Nate, go to the, get us on one of those prediction markets and put my bet down. But man, I appreciate you coming on and talking about it all.

Yeah. Appreciate the interest. Dude. Yeah. I mean, like wildlife management is, I mean, it's beautiful. So I mean, it gets people around. It's like, it's complex with just the thing in and of itself is gorgeous. Yeah.

It's what we get into this field for. Like, we love it. As biologists, this is so meaningful kind of work. Our country for a long time tried. Well, let's just let everybody go do what they're going to do and see what happens and it don't go well. No. So the fact that, I mean, even the fact that, that, even the fact that, like, that there's all these sort of opinions and people want what's best for animals, you know, we're like spending money on these questions and thinking about them is like a big positive from. where we were.

Yeah. In the late 18 hunters when I was like, do what you want. Guess all that shit's gone. Right. No, it's,

there's something to be said. The state wildlife management agencies have a really important role. And the hunters and fishermen too. I think that there's, there's a, all of these pieces play together and work to,

to manage and conserve all the wildlife species that we've got. And I do, man, like just to close. I appreciate the, like, I appreciate the position that you as an individual found yourself in that that it was it was you had a job you worked for the people of

the state of colorado voters handed a thing and you like in good faith took the will of the voters and and put it into practice yeah right yeah i mean that's big yeah that's like that's public service i appreciate you saying that yeah i just want to acknowledge that like i don't want you to think that I'm that I have an adversarial viewpoint to the situation you as an individual were in we're like you did your job man you know yeah appreciate you saying that as handed to you and the whole department yeah we're we're we're professionals like we take our jobs very seriously and and yeah we have a mission that to drive and and and we work work to get that done yeah it was at that time it was the will of the people yeah and you like did your job as a carnivore guy or yeah predator guy and and

And, I don't know, thank you for doing, thank you for doing your job at a state wildlife agent. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. It's something I'm really proud of. You know, it's, it was a great career. It got me to all corners of the state and beyond. I'd travel quite a bit throughout the country. And, yeah, it's been, it's been truly a privilege to be able to do that and to call this a career for the last two and a half decades.

It's something that's that I'm really, really proud of. Yeah. Well, good luck on what comes next. Yeah, thanks. Ladies and gentlemen again, Eric O'Dell from former. I'm saying your last name, correct, right? That's right. Okay.

Former employee of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Where do you guys go by? Yeah, Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Parks and Wildlife. Right. Thank you very much, man. Thanks, Steve. This is an I-Heart podcast.

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