Copper Creek wolf pack has new pups next door to ranch where calves were killed, rancher says

A Pitkin County rancher whose calf was attacked by a wolf over Memorial Day weekend says a pack with new pups is denning a quarter mile from the ranch where he keeps his herd and that  Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials told him the agency is planning to use roadkill to draw the wolves away from the ready food supply they are finding in his new calves.

Mike Cerveny watched his calf being attacked by three young wolves he believes were from the Copper Creek pack two days after a yearling male wolf, identified by its tracking collar number 2405, killed a calf on the Crystal River Ranch, near Carbondale, and one on the McCabe Ranch, which borders the Lost Marbles Ranch, where Cerveny leases land. Both the McCabe and Lost Marbles ranches are in Old Snowmass, about 20 miles from Aspen. 

State wildlife officials killed wolf 2405 on May 29. It was one of six members of the Copper Creek pack that were trapped last fall and placed in a temporary holding facility after the adults killed dozens of calves and sheep at two ranches near Parshall in Grand County. A seventh animal, one of five pups, eluded capture.

Those wolves, minus the adult male, who died from injuries related to a gunshot wound, were released in January, at the same time 15 wolves were translocated from British Columbia to Pitkin and Eagle counties. Colorado is limited to releasing wolves on state or private land and advocates said the animals were released on a private ranch that borders U.S. Forest Service land. 

Before the release, Parks and Wildlife officials promised ranchers they would do everything they could to prevent a repeat of their first wolf release, in Grand County, in December 2023. But ranchers say that isn’t what’s been happening in the Old Snowmass area. 

The attack on Cerveny’s calf came after a neighbor alerted Lost Marbles Ranch that wolves had separated a cow and a calf from his herd into a hay field in the middle of the day on May 25. 

The ranch supervisor then called Cerveny, who rushed to the scene on his four-wheeler. As he approached, “the wolves heard me,” he said, “and they just stood there and watched me.” He took two shots, from about 700 yards, and missed them, “but after the first shot, they ran about 30 feet and stopped,” he said. 

Wolves are protected as endangered species in Colorado, but under the federal 10(j) rule, it is legal to kill them if they are caught attacking livestock.

Cerveny did not end up killing a wolf that day, but he saved his calf. 

“It really strikes a guy, I mean, it really does something to you, when you’ve been told that wolves are chasing your cattle, and you come over a ridge and look over your big meadow,” he said. “And here all the damn herd is pushed to the north in the brush, and you got a cow and calf about a half-mile away and three wolves are on it like a freaking lightning bolt. And they’re biting the calf and biting the cow, and the mom’s fighting to get them off.”

Cerveny says he’s not anti-wolf, “just like I’m not an anti-crocodile or anti-hippo guy. Like, everything has its own area and place to be where they thrive. But do I think wolves should be dropped off in the freaking first week of January, when it’s 20 below, next to my cows? Uh, no. I think this is the dumbest thing in the world.” 

Voters in 2020 OK’d wolf reintroduction and CPW wrote a 300-page plan for establishing a sustainable population of 30 to 50 wolves in three to five years after reintroduction. The work includes bringing animals to Colorado from other locations. The first airlift, in December 2023, sent wolves from Oregon to Summit and Grand counties. The second, in January, brought animals from British Columbia. A third release is expected in the coming winter. 

Wolves first seen on Lost Marbles Ranch

Cerveny said he first became aware of the wolves in early February, when he heard a howl and tried to convince himself it was an owl. 

When he later went out to feed his heifers, he saw what he believed were four sets of wolf tracks. 

On March 13, wolves killed one of his yearlings, a predation event confirmed by CPW. And on March 16, agency officials came to the ranch to install the nonlethal mitigation tools of fladry and foxlights around his calving ground, he said. 

After the attack, he ran a generator there to create noise and alert wolves in the area to human presence.   

But on March 17, he went to check on a cow about to calve under a tree on a brushy hill at 2:30 or 3 a.m., he said. 

“She was acting uneasy, just pawing at the ground,” he added. 

When his dog went to investigate, he called it back, and as he drove away on his 4-wheeler to give the cow some space, he said he “heard this blood-curdling howl from 15 to 20 yards away.” As he rushed to get his gun, with the intent of shooting the wolf or wolves, he heard more howling. And since then, he said, either he or someone else has consistently spent nights out with the cows. 

Still, wolves have been inside the calving area marked with fladry at least three times since CPW installed it, he said. Fladry is a line of brightly colored flags — often red or orange — said to create a visual barrier for wolves. But on March 28 or 29, Cerveny said a neighbor sent him an image of wolves from his game camera at 6:30 a.m. 

As part of its promise to do better with the second phase of wolf reintroduction, CPW said late last year it would offer “enhanced response to wolf conflict and depredations” with “new criteria to help field staff in addressing wolf conflict and attacks, either proactively or reactively.”

The agency also promised more transparency, after it released 10 wolves in Grand and Summit counties in 2023 without alerting those counties beforehand. And in a joint news release from CPW and the Colorado Department of Agriculture in December, Jeff Davis, CPW director, said the agency “takes its responsibility for the wellbeing of the ranchers, their livestock and the wolves very seriously.  We are confident we will be successful in restoring a healthy, sustainable population of gray wolves to Colorado as mandated, while avoiding and minimizing impacts to our critical ranching industry and rural communities.”

However Cerveny said it wasn’t until a day after he saw the pictures of the wolves on his land that his wildlife officer called to tell him the same. 

Cerveny likens what’s going on at his ranch to what happened last summer in Grand County, where the mating pair of the Copper Creek pack killed multiple cattle and sheep, including at least eight sheep on Conway Farrell’s ranch in July. 

Copper Creek’s history of killing 

Farrell started asking CPW for help with the pack’s continued killing of his livestock in April 2024. 

Dallas May, chair of the CPW commission, said in an Aug. 27 commissioners meeting the wolves were in an “untenable situation” as they were placed “in the dead of winter with very little if any food source” and they “are only doing what they were created to do and that is survive.”

In a letter to the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association, Davis said wildlife officers had been “working with the landowner to do night patrols, as well as to deploy some conflict minimization tools in this area.”

Some say the problem stemmed from Farrell failing to dispose of dead livestock properly, thereby giving the Copper Creek wolves an easy food source. Farrell was unable to speak with The Colorado Sun about this Tuesday evening, due to spotty cell service. But CPW ultimately decided to remove the Copper Creek wolves when killings in Grand County continued. 

Cerveny takes his dead livestock to the Pitkin County Landfill and Solid Waste Center, and said he “also spent multiple days, as did my neighbor, picking up dead-pit bones and hauling them to the landfill.” 

“You can probably just put my name in place of Conway’s name in this situation, with the exception of dealing with Jeff Davis and all of those people Conway told me you can’t trust,” he added. 

As of Tuesday, CPW had not confirmed the existence of the den Cerveny says is near where his cows are currently grazing to The Colorado Sun. But in March officials said as many as four pairs of wolves had potentially mated and it’s likely that an unknown number of new wolf pups were born this year. 

Cerveny said he has seen three to four pups in the den on the edge of his ranch with thermal imaging. 

He added local, district and regional CPW officers told him about the agency’s plan to use diversionary feeding to distract the Copper Creek wolves from hunting livestock. Although wolf advocates have said a sizable elk herd lives in the region where the wolves were released. 

“That’s the big plan. That’s what they’ve got,” Cerveny said. “They think by putting bait piles everywhere they’re going to get them to be more and more like a wolf. But these things aren’t your typical wolf. These damn things were killing cattle in Oregon. They boxed them up and sent them to Conway Farrell’s ranch in Grand County. And after they killed his cattle they boxed them up and sent them here. 

“So I just don’t understand. It’s like they created this problem.” And they need to remove the wolves, he said, “because all they’re gonna do is kill freaking cattle.”  

“Diversionary feeding works”

Mike Phillips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and a member of the technical working group that advised Colorado Parks and Wildlife on the state’s wolf-restoration and recovery plan, said the notion of diversionary feeding has value as “a longstanding practice.” 

“It’s worked for years for the Mexican wolf recovery program, although I’m not a big fan of doing the endeavor for years,” he said. “I mean if you do it for 15 years or longer, you can finally ask the question, ‘Gee whiz, is the habitat suitable if you’ve got to feed these wolves to divert their attention?’”

But he said doing it at the Lost Marbles Ranch might buy CPW time to figure out what to do next. “CPW could say, we’ve only got a handful of adults and an unknown number of puppies. So we’re still at the beginning, and we’re going to do a lot of things we might not do in future,” he said.

The Copper Creek yearlings were also “native born Colorado wolves,” Phillips added, with no evidence they killed anything in Grand County, so “they shouldn’t have had any strikes against them. 

“And you know, you could ask the question, ‘Well, what about their mom?’ You know, CPW didn’t really know who was doing the killing, although now we know that the male had been hurt in some way, and so it was just odd circumstances. And with all of these approaches that are employed with some degree of rigor, there should be the capacity for professionals like an Eric O’Dell (CPW’s Wolf Conservation Program manager) or Jeff Davis to take into account extenuated circumstances.” 

“Nobody gets it” 

But the fact remains CPW did identify a Copper Creek yearling as the killer of livestock in Pitkin County. 

And Cerveny said Monday that having wolves killing and harassing his cattle, along with wolves denning so close to the ranch, has brought incredible stress on him, his family and his neighbor, Brad Day, who lost cattle on the McCabe Ranch. 

“I mean, when my wife tells me, ‘You chose this life, I’m not dealing with this, this is your deal, if this is the way it is’… those are the conversations that happen that nobody freaking gets on this stuff,” he said. “So, yeah, when they’re talking about, like, this diversionary feeding, that’s crazy. Or getting range riders to sit with your cows like some kind of Basque people watching sheep.” 

“I’m wound up,” he added. “It’s like, I’m over here in Utah taking my kid to a football camp. Even though I have so much stuff to do, I’ve just got to get away. But then last night, I’m sitting outside talking to Brad about all of this stuff until 2:30 in the morning. So there you go.”