Colorado wolves create stress, fears for ranchers
Ranchers stressed over wolf kills, how investigations are handled and question the viability of the wolf recovery plan and their livelihood.
A recorded conversation reveals a Colorado Parks and Wildlife investigator felt pressured to alter wolf depredation findings.The recording led to the reversal of a denied compensation claim for a rancher.Ranchers express distrust in the agency’s investigation process and suspect higher-level influence.
A secretly recorded cellphone conversation between ranchers and a Colorado Parks and Wildlife wolf depredation investigator exposed how agency investigations receive top-down influence to alter the number of confirmed wolf depredations.
The Coloradoan on July 20 was provided a copy of the nearly 20-minute recording by Merrilee Ellis of Coberly Creek Ranch that included a conversation between her husband, Mike Neelis; son-in-law, Adam Edwards; and state wildlife damage specialist Rhea Ebel-Childs on April 23.
Ellis believes the recorded conversation was pivotal in the ranch winning a wolf depredation compensation claim that Colorado Parks and Wildlife had initially denied.
The conversation centered around a wolf kill investigation on the southern Routt County ranch. The investigation occurred after a calf was found dead April 19.
On the recording, Ebel-Childs explains she will write the report and that the area wildlife staff will refer or deny the claim based on her evidence and evidence submitted by Coberly Creek Ranch. The decision then goes before the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to accept or deny the state recommendation.
Ebel-Childs is a Colorado Parks and Wildlife employee trained to investigate wildlife depredations. She is one of 10 in the state and it is her job to collect evidence to determine whether an animal was or was not killed by a wolf. She has worked for the state wildlife service for more than 6 years and conducted more than 100 necropsies on a variety of species, according to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife brief.
Ebel-Childs tells the ranchers she believes the calf was killed by a wolf, but doesn’t know if she has enough evidence to prove it, and that higher-level Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials will pressure her to call the investigation inconclusive.
For a confirmed wolf kill, a “preponderance of evidence” — meaning a majority of the evidence indicates the animal was killed by a wolf — is required.
“Where I think I’m at, Mike — which is I don’t like it; you’re not going to like it — is that everybody is telling me that I have to call it (the investigation) inconclusive,” Ebel-Childs says. “And if I don’t call it inconclusive they are going to argue with me. So I will submit my report and it will say inconclusive.”
“They all know I think it’s a wolf,” Ebel-Childs later says.
Edwards can be heard on the recording asking Ebel-Childs how that makes her feel, knowing that despite her findings, higher-level Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials “can just say no.”
“It makes me feel like I have no power,” Ebel-Childs says. “Right. It makes me feel kind of stuck. The thing of is it, Adam, I’m the bottom of the totem pole. I’m the person they send out in the field.”
How the recording changed an investigation outcome
Ellis said the ranch has a good relationship with Ebel-Childs but felt it needed to record the conversation without her knowledge to show how some higher-ups in Colorado Parks and Wildlife are manipulating onsite investigators’ reports and pressuring those investigators to rule potential wolf kills as inconclusive.
“The phone recording shows exactly what the investigator thought,” Ellis told the Coloradoan. “Rhea doesn’t deserve being thrown under the bus, but if we hadn’t had the recording we would have never gotten our inconclusive overturned. That’s something other producers are going to need to know to fight these investigations.”
The Coloradoan left a phone message with Ebel-Childs at her office July 21 and July 24 but those messages were not returned.
Under the state’s wolf recovery plan, ranchers are to be compensated for confirmed dead and injured livestock caused by wolves. If a ranch has a confirmed wolf depredation, it can also choose to file claims for missing livestock and reduced weaning weights and conception rates caused by the stress of wolves, compared to three years previous.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife initially recommended to deny the Coberly Creek ranch’s $2,250 claim for the calf to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission before its meeting July 17 in Grand Junction.
However, a day before the meeting the agency reversed its decision and recommended settling the claim.
Ellis said that reversal was because an attorney representing the ranch sent the agency’s legal counsel the cellphone recording in a rebuttal to the agency’s case before the commission.
In a July 21 email, Colorado Parks and Wildlife public information officer Luke Perkins confirmed to the Coloradoan the wildlife agency received the recording July 16. Perkins did not answer a question asking whether the recording played a part in its decision to change its recommendation. Â
“Within a few hours after they received the recording, we got a call that they would reverse their recommendation if we would not bring up the information at the commission meeting,” Ellis said. “My personal belief is they didn’t want all the producers and commissioners to hear the reason why it got changed. My firm belief is it shows they took the facts and lied about them.”
Prior to the meeting, the state wildlife agency recommended paying the ranch’s claim of $64,557.29 for decreased conception rates.
However, the agency recommended denying the ranch’s claim of $30,860 for missing calves, a denial that was overturned by the 11-member commission resulting in the awarding of the claim to the ranch at its July 17 meeting.
That same day, the commission also narrowly voted against another Colorado Parks and Wildlife denial recommendation. This time, the commission chose to award $100,045.57 to Farrell Livestock based in Grand County for missing cattle.
Those claims brought the state’s 2024 total awarded wolf depredation claims to $603,327.60, which is more than $253,000 over what the state budgeted.
Discrepancies in wolf investigation unveiled
Ellis provided the Coloradoan several documents that showed the state wildlife investigator’s report and, according to Ellis, what those investigators told Ellis and Neelis at the scene to dispute the state’s report.
Ebel-Childs filed her report with the agency’s area wildlife manager, Jeromy Huntington, and assistant manager, Dan Coil, who signed off on the final investigation report that read, “While it’s not possible to determine with certainty whether the calf was scavenged after dying or attacked while alive, it is unlikely that a wolf killed the calf.”
Documents show there are many differences for reasons why and how the calf died between the state’s final report and the ranch’s report.
Two significant ones are the ranchers’ claim that onsite investigators, Ebel-Childs and Max Morton, told them a predator killed the calf and that Morton said a bear, mountain lion or coyote could not have killed that large of calf, which weighed approximately 180 pounds. Ellis said Morton didn’t rule out that a pack of coyotes could have killed the calf and a pack was in the area, according to the state’s report.
“I know those two investigators during the necropsy both agreed that a predator killed that calf,” Ellis said. “They ruled out all the predators so you have one, a wolf.”
The Coloradoan left Morton a voicemail July 24 seeking an interview regarding the investigation that went unreturned.Â
After the voicemail was left, Perkins emailed the Coloradoan asking it to stop calling Colorado Parks and Wildlife field staff and that all questions must be submitted through the public information office. As of July 24, neither Perkins nor anyone else from that office had answered the Coloradoan’s question about whether the recording influenced the agency’s recommendation to the commission.
The state’s report, signed by Attorney General Phil Weiser, called Ellis’ verbal claim false and that there was no mention of her claim that the two wildlife investigators agreed a predator killed the calf in Ebel-Childs’ investigation report.
Ellis said that is because she believes what Ebel-Childs and Morton verbally told her was omitted in the report Ebel-Childs presented to Huntington and Coil.
Ellis added without those comments in the report, the state could conclude there wasn’t a preponderance of evidence to confirm the calf was killed by a wolf.
“They all know a wolf killed this calf,” Ellis said. “Again, the phone recording shows exactly what the investigator thought and counters what is in the final report. They will do anything to make sure it’s inconclusive, but the recording changed all that.”
Ranchers say deceit runs deep in Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf investigations
Ellis said going forward she will have her veterinarian at investigations to observe and record all conversations “so they can’t change their story” and advised other ranchers to do the same.
Some ranchers are already taking such precautions.
When Pitkin County rancher Brad Day was alerted July 19 by a range rider that he had a dead calf on his grazing allotment above the McCabe Ranch he leases, the first thing he did when he went to the kill site was call his veterinarian.
Ethan Kohn, wildlife damage specialist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, arrived at the kill site and asked Day if he wanted him to wait to examine the calf until his veterinarian arrived, to which Day responded he did.
The Coloradoan was on the ranch at the time and documented the investigation, which was confirmed as a wolf kill.
As wolf depredations mounted last year, especially in Grand County where there were 18 confirmed wolf depredations, ranchers voiced concerns that onsite investigators were being told by higher-ups in Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Gov. Jared Polis and his husband, Marlon Reis, an animal activist with ties to wolf advocates, not to confirm that depredations were caused by wolves.
In a previous Coloradoan story, the governor’s office refuted that the governor has had influence over the implementation of the wolf plan.
Those depredations prompted Grand County ranchers to contact the county sheriff’s office first when they have a suspected wolf kill before alerting local Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff because of a belief higher-ups in the agency will change the onsite investigators’ findings.
In March, Rio Blanco County hired a part-time animal and livestock conflict investigator under the sheriff’s office to act as a third-party observer of suspected wolf investigations and “foster trust and transparency between CPW and landowners.”
Ranchers and some Western Slope county commissioners have said that distrust stems from Colorado Parks and Wildlife being “judge and jury.” Colorado Parks and Wildlife is the lead agency in determining investigation findings that result in the rancher being compensated or not, depending on its conclusion.
Ranchers and county commissioners also said investigations resulting in confirmed depredations, especially involving repeated ones such as what happened in Grand County last year and is happening in Pitkin County this year with the Copper Creek pack, makes the state reluctant to confirm cases.
They believe that’s because under the definition of chronic depredation, the state can lethally remove a wolf or wolves if they have three confirmed depredations in a 30-day period.
The state wildlife agency for the first time lethally removed a Copper Creek pack member for that purpose in Pitkin County in May under its chronic depredation definition.
“Somewhere along this whole wolf management plan, unless it is absolutely without a shadow of a doubt, they are going to unconfirm it,” said Pitkin County rancher Mike Cerveny, who has had multiple confirmed depredations by the Copper Creek pack but has also lost additional livestock that were investigated but not confirmed. “It just puts a bad taste in your mouth for the whole program and makes you just want to distrust everybody.”
Legislators at a Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee hearing held June 30Â said they heard those ranchers’ concerns and questioned Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis.
Those questions included if he deliberately delayed confirmation of wolf kills so the agency didn’t have to compensate ranchers or if he manipulated collar data to attribute kills to different wolves that didn’t actually make those kills or vice versa.
Davis responded “no” to the questions.
The Coloradoan’s request to interview Davis for this story was denied by the agency. The director to date has refused all interview requests from the Coloradoan.