Watch Wolves Return to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains for the First Time in Decades

Quick Take

• Scientists largely agree wolves transformed Yellowstone, though there is a fierce debate about what they actually deserve credit for. See the Yellowstone debate →
• Relocating a wild wolf involves a helicopter, a blanket, and a step most people would never anticipate, and the whole process was caught on video.
• Wolves ripple through an entire food web, though never in quite the same way twice, and Colorado is about to find that out firsthand. Explore trophic cascades →
• This reintroduction wasn't decided by wildlife agencies. It was put to a public vote, and that changes everything about how it unfolds.

In the remarkable video at the bottom of the page, we get a close look at the beginning of Colorado’s gray wolf reintroduction effort. The TikTok footage shows just how much planning went into moving these animals back into the state. A tranquilized wolf is carefully handled after being transported by helicopter, part of a process designed to move wild wolves from Oregon to remote release sites west of the Continental Divide.

The video then cuts to a wolf wrapped in a blanket as wildlife staff carry it across a field and perform a final health check. Researchers inspect the animal before it is placed in a transport crate to recover. Once the wolf is awake and ready, the crate door is opened and it heads out into its new surroundings.

With the first wolf wasting no time heading into the surrounding landscape, the video cuts to another wolf in a neighboring crate. This one is harder to see at first thanks to its dark coat, but it quickly emerges and runs off in the same direction. These animals were part of Colorado’s first group of five wolves released on December 18, 2023. Five more were released over the following days, bringing the first reintroduction effort to 10 wolves total.

The Importance of Wolves in Ecosystems Across America! 

Wolves can play an important role in ecosystems because they are large predators capable of influencing prey populations and behavior. That has made places such as Yellowstone National Park an important testing ground for understanding what happens when wolves return after a long absence. Colorado is now going through its own reintroduction process, although the ecological effects there will take years to study.

By preying on animals such as deer and elk, wolves can affect both the number of herbivores on the landscape and the way those animals use habitat. In Yellowstone, researchers agree that wolves have contributed to declines in elk numbers and changes in elk behavior. Those changes may also influence vegetation, but scientists continue to debate how much of Yellowstone’s vegetation recovery can be attributed specifically to wolves rather than factors such as climate, other predators, hunting, and changes in water availability.

The return of a top predator can create effects that ripple through a food web, a process ecologists call a trophic cascade. Wolves can contribute to those changes by influencing prey populations, scavengers, and competition among other predators, but ecosystems are complicated and rarely respond to a single species in exactly the same way everywhere. In Colorado, wildlife managers are still in the early stages of learning how reintroduced wolves will interact with prey, livestock, other predators, and people.