A gray wolf from British Columbia released in January was reported dead April 20 in Rocky Mountain National Park, state wildlife biologists said Thursday night.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will complete a necropsy on the dead female wolf to determine a cause of death, but state officials made a point of noting that some wolf deaths are expected and are a normal part of the controversial, voter-mandated reintroduction effort.
Soon after announcing discovery of a dead wolf, state wildlife officials also updated their monthly gray wolf movement tracker and highlighted more than 1,230 miles of wandering by another British Columbia female since the January release in Pitkin and Eagle counties.
The monthly tracking report showed wolves continuing to spread out across wide swaths of Colorado from their northern and central mountain releases. Collar-tracked wolves showed up “in watersheds west of major population centers like Denver, Boulder, and Estes Park,” a state release said. “While these areas saw brief movement on the western fringes of these watersheds, it does not mean that wolves were or are currently in those cities or neighborhoods.”
The tracking system also sends alerts when the collars stop recording any movement, and a mortality alert was sent from Rocky Mountain National Park on April 20. State and national park officials confirmed the death of the animal, known as 2514-BC, but did not release any more details about what they discovered.
“Wolf survival in Colorado is within normal margins for a wolf population in the Rocky Mountains. Any reintroduction effort includes eventual mortality levels and these were incorporated into the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan,” the state release said. “The average lifespan of a gray wolf in the Rocky Mountains is generally three to four years.”
During a Colorado Wildlife Commission meeting in March, wolf biologists said that of the 15 animals released from British Columbia, seven were 3 to 4 years old and two were 4 to 5 years old. The group included eight females and seven males.
Collared gray wolves were observed in all the watersheds shaded in purple between Feb. 25 and March 26, 2025.On Thursday, state wildlife officials were celebrating the wide roaming of other collared wolves, which include animals released in December 2023, a group born in Colorado and two believed to have migrated from Wyoming. The female gray wolf clocking more than 1,200 miles in three months, the agency said, is “an extraordinary display of the species’ natural roaming behavior.”
“This single wolf’s movement traveled nearly the entire southern line of watersheds on our map,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife wolf monitoring and data coordinator Brenna Cassidy said in the news release.
“Wolves can and do travel long distances,” Cassidy said. “It simply shows that a GPS-collared wolf moved through a watershed that encompasses areas of wilderness and the city, often very quickly.”
The latest tracking report repeated that “wolves are habitat generalists, meaning they can thrive in many environments as long as prey is present. Over time, wolves will continue to disperse across the state to establish territories.” The latest tracking release was delayed slightly, the state said, as part of plans to protect individual wolves during mating season.
The state release also noted Colorado has agreements with neighbors Utah, New Mexico and Arizona that wolves wandering from here will be returned after capture. CPW said the agreements are intended to “protect the genetic integrity of the federally listed Mexican gray wolf,” a separate subspecies found in Arizona and New Mexico.Wyoming was not listed among the states with return agreements. At least two Colorado reintroduced wolves have died in Wyoming. Federal agents killed one in north-central Wyoming in March, after they said it had preyed on sheep. A second animal died April 9, but CPW declined to provide any information about the male wolf’s death, including the location, citing Wyoming law.
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