Colorado
Wildlife officials aim to keep Colorado’s wolves from meeting the endangered Mexican wolf. Is separation the right goal?
A Mexican gray wolf called Asha wandered hundreds of miles across Arizona and New Mexico searching for a mate — no easy task for one of the most endangered mammals in the United States.
After five months of scouring hills and arroyos, she crossed Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque in the fall of 2022 and headed into the forests outside of Santa Fe. But when she traipsed across the interstate blacktop, she crossed an invisible boundary set by federal wildlife officials. As part of longstanding federal policy, any Mexican gray wolf found north of the interstate can be relocated — which is why Asha was darted and flown south, as documented in news stories and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports.
The Mexican gray wolf subspecies has made a significant recovery over the last 25 years, but government biologists now worry that the reintroduction of the larger northern gray wolf in Colorado could derail that progress, should the two populations mix via wandering wolves like Asha.
Those worries prompted Colorado wildlife officials in September to sign first-of-their-kind agreements with New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. They will allow those states to relocate any roving northern gray wolves back to Colorado. The agreements will help keep the 10 wolves released in Colorado in December inside the state, crucial to establishing the self-sufficient population mandated by voters who approved reintroducing the species.
“This is not a typical kind of agreement for us to have between states,” said Eric Odell, the wolf conservation program manager at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “It’s not common practice. Wildlife work usually involves geographic boundaries, not political ones.”
Much is at stake with the Mexican gray wolf. Its recovery took hold through an extensive, decades-long effort involving a captive breeding program, international transplantations and ongoing litigation.
The states’ recent agreements, coupled with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s I-40 policy, will create a buffer zone between the two wolf populations.
Without the precaution, Odell said intermixing could result in Colorado’s larger northern gray wolves taking dominant breeding positions in packs, changing the subspecies’ gene pool until they are indistinguishable. In effect, government biologists believe northern gray wolves likely would take over the Mexican gray wolf population.
“Having that hybridization would become detrimental to the Mexican wolf,” Odell said. “We’re working hard to keep (northern gray wolves) separate from those Mexican wolves.”
But conservationists question whether allowing the two to mingle would imperil the rare southern subspecies, and some say the Mexican gray wolf needs the northern gray wolf to survive. The wild Mexican gray wolf population suffers from a limited gene pool, so breeding with the northern gray wolf could help diversify the population.
“Historically, there was a spectrum of wolf species and subspecies from Mexico up to the Arctic Circle,” said Chris Smith, the Southwest wildlife advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “To have this wolfless zone between Colorado and Mexican gray wolves is a bizarre and arbitrary symptom of the politicization of our legal treatment of these wolves.”
A subspecies on the brink
The Mexican gray wolf — also called the lobo — is a smaller subspecies of the gray wolf that historically ranged across Mexico and into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The Mexican gray wolf is managed separately under the federal Endangered Species Act than the northern gray wolf, which numbers in the thousands across the northern Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes region.
People nearly eradicated the Mexican gray wolf from both the United States and Mexico by the 1970s. Decades of unregulated hunting and targeted trapping by the federal government to protect livestock took their toll.
By 1977, there were only seven known remaining Mexican gray wolves in the two countries.
Wildlife officials returned the subspecies to the wild in 1998 and, after decades of management, at least 241 Mexican gray wolves now roam New Mexico and Arizona, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The federal agency imposed the boundary along I-40, which cuts across the Southwest, in part because the documented historical range of the subspecies did not extend north of the interstate. Officials also faced pressure from ranching and hunting interests to restrict the recovery area.
But the wild population has a lack of genetic diversity.
Each wild Mexican gray wolf’s genes are as similar to the next as siblings’ genes would be, said Michael Robinson, a senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity and the author of a book on wolf management.
Instead of creating a wolfless buffer zone, Smith and Robinson said, wildlife managers should introduce Mexican gray wolves into southwestern Colorado.
Those wolves then would breed with northern gray wolves and add much-needed genetic diversity to the subspecies, while minimizing the risk of the northern species’ genes taking over the Mexican gray wolf population. The risk to the Mexican gray wolf would be greater if northern gray wolves established themselves farther south in the core of the Mexican gray wolf’s habitat.
“We can try to approximate the gradation of wolf types that (once) existed from north to south,” Robinson said.
Wandering under watch
The technical working group that shaped Colorado’s wolf reintroduction plan considered reintroducing Mexican gray wolves here but found them the “least desirable” option.
The ballot measure that mandated Colorado’s reintroduction of wolves did not specify whether a subspecies could be reintroduced. But the group wrote in its final report that the Mexican gray wolf should be the lowest priority for reintroduction because Colorado was not part of its historical range. It also cited logistical management concerns due to the subspecies being managed separately under the Endangered Species Act.
“Because they are listed as a unique entity under the ESA, maintaining the genetic uniqueness of this subspecies is paramount,” the November 2021 report states. “If Mexican wolves were present in Colorado, premature interbreeding with wolves from the north could compromise the Mexican wolf recovery effort.”
It’s unlikely that Mexican gray wolves roamed in Colorado before their extirpation, but the subspecies is better adapted than the northern gray wolf to warmer, drier climates — which is the expected future for southwest Colorado as the climate shifts, Smith said.
“We have to recognize that we’re imposing not just political boundaries, but also pretty complicated legal frameworks on wildlife that do whatever they want on a landscape,” he said. “It’s a problem that we’ve painted ourselves into.”
Biologists have said that Mexican gray wolves need at least three separate but connected populations to thrive, Robinson noted. One study found that one of those populations should be located in southwest Colorado.
It would have made sense to keep the Mexican gray wolves separate when there were only a few dozen of them, Robinson said. But the population is now robust enough to allow some northern gray wolf genetics into the pack, he said.
While all of Colorado’s 12 current wolves — including two that predated the reintroduction effort — and the wolves released in the state in coming years will have radio collars, their progeny will not. That will make tracking whether the wolves have moved into neighboring states more difficult, Odell said.
“It’s not in perpetuity,” Odell said of the agreements with the other states. “We’ll revisit this in time and see how things are going.”
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Fascinating facts about rattlesnakes
Prairie rattlesnakes are one of three venomous snake species in Colorado. The other two are also rattlesnakes. (This chatter was updated to add the missing species name.)
Guarantee you won’t stick your hand in a rock crevice without first looking while hiking after you watch the Colorado RattleCam livestream of a rattlesnake mega den.
Yikes! Viewing the livestream is like watching a scary movie, equally entertaining and terrifying.
The mega den on undisclosed private property in Larimer County is crawling with the venomous snakes now that sunny weather has returned.
Project RattleCam is a collaboration between Cal Poly, Central Coast Snake Services and Dickinson College that allows viewers to observe rattlesnakes a lot closer than you would ever want to get in an effort to educate the public about these reptiles with a reputation.
A high-definition camera continually scans and zooms in and out on the rocky outcropping, where rattlesnakes slither among the rocks, bask in the sun and will give birth to live babies at this rookery, or communal birthing site, in late August and early September.
Watching the May 12 livestream, which includes a live chat, was fascinating.
The camera zoomed to show the patterns on the snakes that slowly slithered among the lichen-splotched rocks, a rattlesnake resting its head on a rock while soaking in the sun and rattlesnakes hiding in the brush.
The highlight was the camera capturing a rattlesnake muscling along a rock shelf. It zoomed so close you could see the vertical, slit-like pupils; pit organs on the snake’s face used to detect heat from prey; and the black forked tongue probing the air to locate prey and check out its environment.
Unless you want to get some work done, the best way to view the livestream is checking in every so often to scan the stream and see when the camera detects a rattlesnake. Otherwise, the livestream can take you down a rabbit hole, or in this case a rattlesnake den.
Here’s a timeline for your rattlesnake viewing pleasure
- April-May: Rattlesnakes emerge from hibernation.
- Early June: Most of the snakes travel downhill from the den to nearby meadows and shrublands where they spend the summer searching for food.
- Late August-early September: Pregnant rattlesnakes return to the den to give birth.
- Late September-October: The rest of the rattlesnakes return to the den.
Miles Blumhardt covers news and the outdoors for the Coloradoan.
To improve food access and build a healthier community, Boulder County, Colo. Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) team collaborated with the city of Boulder on its comprehensive plan. The HEAL team analyzed best practices in nutritious food access and sustainable agriculture in comparable communities across the nation to help inform its recommendations for city planning, according to Amelia Hulbert, Boulder County Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) lead.
“A comprehensive plan is visionary, it’s long range,” Hulbert said. “It should not just be a document that fits on the shelf and doesn’t get used, so when you have the opportunity to either create something new or update it, how do you make sure it [outlines] goals and policies that are going to support the work that you know needs to happen?
Learn more
Boulder County’s “Improving Food Access and Health for Boulder Residents Through Municipal Comprehensive Planning” initiative was the 2025 NACo Achievement Award “Best in Category” winner in Planning.
“We wanted a place to specifically call out public health priorities, so when it came time to talk about allocating funding or anything like that, we can point to it and say, ‘As a county, we said that food access is important. We said that air quality monitoring is important.’”
When starting the process of creating the city’s comprehensive plan, City of Boulder staff reached out to the state health department looking for subject matter expertise on food access, which is how the HEAL team got involved, Hulbert said.
“I think there’s this through line of ‘planners are planners, and they’re usually not subject matter experts,’” Hulbert said. “And so, when they seek out subject matter expertise, how can we make sure those connections can easily be made to people in their own community who are going to not only know the content, but know the issues? I think it’s a cool process, and others could totally do the same thing.”
The HEAL team analyzed comprehensive plans from a dozen municipalities like Boulder, including Ann Arbor, Mich.; Asheville, N.C.; Burlington, Vt. and Provo, Utah. Factors considered when choosing the municipalities included population size, economic and demographic makeup and communities with a mix of urban, suburban and unincorporated rural land, according to Hulbert.
Olivia Ott, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Associate working with the HEAL team, identified 34 model policies from the plans and categorized them into five themes to compare against the City of Boulder’s existing plan: healthy food access, sustainability, built environment, equity/culture and local agriculture.
“We’re usually looking to a couple key cities across the nation that we would consider cutting edge and innovative,” Hulbert said. “So, we just applied that methodology to something very specific, of digging into, ‘How are their plans structured? What are they saying?’ And then thinking about, ‘Does it make sense for our community?’ And then [assessing] ‘What are other things that are really specific to our community?’”
Factoring in the identified best practices, Ott scored the city’s plan into three categories: “Present” in Boulder’s current plan, “Somewhat Present” and “Absent.”
“That kind of grading system actually worked really well, and it really resonated with the planning team,” Hulbert said. “You could tell that they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re doing really well here.’ And then, it was really specific, of ‘Hey, other people are talking about this one thing, and you all aren’t.’ I think it was just put in a way that they could really absorb.”
The HEAL team’s research and recommendations were presented to the Boulder and Broomfield County’s Food Security Network (BBFSN), a community group made up of people with lived experience of food insecurity and organizations that serve food insecure individuals, that were providing input on the city’s comprehensive plan. The HEAL team’s findings helped inform the BBFSN’s recommendations to the planning department.
While the HEAL team had the expertise and staffing to do the research, it was “critically important” to then integrate community engagement with the BBFSN into the work, Hulbert noted. Final recommendations for the city plan from the BBFSN address food access through six different categories: transportation, land use, housing, climate, economic development and food systems.
“We did what was within our wheelhouse, and then we knew that there was another group who has a totally different wheelhouse, so it was how could we then pass off what we’ve done and have them take it a step further?” Hulbert said. “Because I think what they brought is more of that lived experience community storytelling. Olivia can say, ‘It’s important to emphasize culturally relevant foods.’ And then there’s likely a community member that can actually give real voice to that and why that matters.”
Colorado
Families, care providers navigate cuts to Colorado’s Community Connector program | Rocky Mountain PBS
“Typically, between me and my husband, there are no breaks. We have to constantly ask each other to change him and feed him and shower him. I always worry about the future if Elli has to leave and not get help anymore,” said Dina Katan, Batikha’s mother. “The free time is good for my mental health. For me, when Elli comes here and helps, I have time to do things that usually I am not able to do.”
Other parents are concerned that the reduction in hours will make it harder to find care providers. Becky Houle of Greeley is the mother of Hadley, a 13-year-old diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, a rare neurogenetic disorder that causes significant developmental delays and little to no speech.
Hadley used to qualify for 10 Community Connector hours a week and is now down to five, Houle said. With those hours, she previously played unified basketball, went to the park and interacted with others and participated in running errands with her caretaker.
“I worry that the person that provides some of that caregiving role for her won’t be able to commit with such few hours,” Houle said. “I like Hadley to have interactions without us being there, so she can feel like a teenager.”
Tom Dermody, chief budget and policy analyst for Colorado’s JBC, said spending on Community Connector services has risen substantially over the past six fiscal years.
Dermody said that as the program, which started in 2014, has become more popular, costs have ballooned. He said participation in the Community Connector service has increased by 510% since fiscal year 2018-2019, and that annual spending has risen from about $5 million in fiscal year 2018–2019 to more than $66 million in fiscal year 2025–2026.
To cut costs, the JBC not only capped annual hours for the service, but also revised the rules to narrow what qualifies as Community Connector hours. Jane said this makes it harder to consistently reach the five-hour weekly allotment.
“When these changes were made, I did our usual Community Connect on Sunday. After I worked my shift, I noticed that I couldn’t clock in or out because my shift was removed from the app,” Jane said.
After sending an email to her employer, her agency told her that what she did — taking her Batikha to a gas station and showing him how to ask an associate how to find a product — does not qualify under the new Community Connector rules.
Under the updated rules, Community Connector hours must be tied to activities in the community that align with a person’s care plan and build skills or participation, such as volunteering, attending enrichment classes or going to the library alongside peers without disabilities.
The state has excluded simple supervision, passive outings and activities typically considered a parent’s responsibility from qualifying for Community Connector hours. Providers must now clearly document how each hour supports a specific goal.
“It’s unfair that they cut those hours for these kids and they are very strict about how we use those hours,” Katan said. “The new requirements are very specific and not inclusive of high needs kids like Taym.”
Batikha requires full support whenever he goes out, Jane said, and the stricter requirements make it harder to plan weekly community trips.
“He needs hygiene changes. He needs to be fed every two hours. And he can’t be fed anywhere. I want to give him privacy for his feeding,” Jane said.
She now plans to split her five Community Connector hours over the course of a week instead of providing them all on Sundays, as she previously did.
“I care about him and I love my clients so much, so I’m definitely going to stay,” Jane said. “His parents need the time to be able to watch a movie and not worry about if their son is okay.”
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