A Colorado Parks and Wildlife plane that apparently looped into Wyoming airspace Tuesday has raised speculation that the aircraft was tracking wolves that had crossed the state line into Wyoming.
But Wyoming and Colorado wildlife agencies say there isn’t any active tracking of wolves in the area.
Colorado resident John Michael Williams told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday that he remains skeptical of the flyover and thinks the plane might have been after wolves.
He posted information about the airplane’s alleged identification and flight path to his Facebook group, which has been buzzing with speculation.
It shows the aircraft at one point crossing into Wyoming airspace near the Huston Park Wilderness Area in southern Carbon County.
Flights Confirmed Near State Line
CPW has been operating aircraft in northern Colorado, agency spokeswoman Rachael Gonzales told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
“We have a couple of things going on in the northern part of our state where we are utilizing CPW aircraft,” she stated in an email.
Those things don’t include tracking wolves, she said. The agency is monitoring fish plants in high alpine lakes and doing pronghorn surveys.
It couldn’t be verified as of press time for this story whether any of those aircraft had crossed into Wyoming airspace at any point.
Wyoming Game and Fish spokeswoman Breanna Ball stated that her agency wasn’t involved in tracking wolves near the Colorado state line.
“This is not a joint operation related to wolves. It is also not uncommon for wildlife managers conducting aerial surveys to fly along the state borders and classify or count animals that move across the state line during their seasonal movements,” Ball wrote in an email to Cowboy State Daily. “Generally, states do not venture very far over the line.”
Skepticism On Both Sides
Williams, who administers the Colorado Wolf Trackers social media group, remains unconvinced that the plane wasn’t tracking wolves based upon flight path information he said he’d obtained.
“If you look at the color coding of the flight path, they were at 10,000 feet in altitude. That is too high for visual wildlife surveys from what I have read,” he said. “They should be a lot lower. Not too high to pick up VHF beacon signals from a tracking collar, though.”
Another Colorado resident, Matt Barnes, supports that state’s wolf reintroduction program and told Cowboy State Daily that he doesn’t think it’s productive to speculate over what the plane was doing.
“If it is, indeed, true, I don’t think we necessarily has anything to do with wolves,” said Barnes, a range scientist who has worked on wolf and grizzly bear conflict mitigation on ranches in Wyoming and Montana.
Fueling Anti-Wolf Sentiment?
Barnes added that he doesn’t like speculative information about wildlife posted online, particularly if it could lead to animals being killed.
“It’s well outside of established norms to say that there might be wildlife in your area and then posting online as if it was actual wildlife locations,” he said.
If verified locations of Colorado wolves crossing into Wyoming ever does get posted, that could make it easier for those wolves to be killed, Barnes said.
The part of the Cowboy State north of the Colorado line is in Wyoming’s “predator zone” for wolves. That means they’re classified as predatory animals in that part of Wyoming and may be legally killed at any time.
Posting the plane’s supposed flight path, or other information about wolves’ whereabouts, fuels anti-wolf sentiment, Barnes said.
“It looks like an attempt to get people in Wyoming to go look for those wolves, or to get people from Colorado to go to Wyoming and look for those wolves,” he said.
A Matter Of Transparency
Williams said he’s trying to pressure CPW to be more forthcoming with information about wolves.
“I believe in full transparency, since the CPW has been unwilling to share hardly any information, the Colorado Wolf Tracker page, by default, has become an alternate ‘source of truth,’” he said.
He said that people are frustrated by continued loss of sheep and cattle to the wolves reintroduced in Colorado in December, as well as CPW not yet killing two wolves thought to be responsible for many of those losses.
There have been other alleged incidents, such as a wolf coming to with 15-20 yards of two children and their 4-H lambs in Grand County, Colorado,
“If wolves get taken out legally in Colorado or Wyoming, those who pushed this ill-advised unscientific forced relocation have only themselves to blame,” he said.
