Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf reintroduction team on Thursday released video of pups from the King Mountain pack in Routt County, one of four packs created by wolves reintroduced to Colorado.
Wolf packs are named when pups are born and this week biologists said they were also watching the One Ear pack in Jackson County, the Three Creeks pack in Rio Blanco County and the Copper Creek pack in Pitkin County to collect details about their spring litters.
Eric Odell, wolf conservation manager, told the state parks and wildlife commissioners the monitoring includes trying to count pups, “but it’s just inherently difficult to monitor at this time of year.”
That said, the video was taken June 21 and showed three tan and gray pups from the King Mountain pack, their genders unknown, chewing each other’s fur and one seeming to eye suspiciously the game camera that was capturing them from a sliver of sunlight in the forest. A day later, a trail camera caught a solo King Mountain pup walking through a grassy clearing.
That makes at least four pups in the King Mountain pack, Odell said, but there may be more. There can be as many as six pups in a litter, though only about half will survive the first year, he said.
“They’re small,” Odell said. “They’re up until now tied very closely to the den in deep cover. So we don’t have pup counts at all of those den sites, but we do have cameras deployed at a lot of those and we’ve captured some.”
Last year, CPW believed the Copper Creek pack had four pups, but when the group was captured in the fall after at least one of the adults attacked and killed cattle in Grand County, biologists realized there was a fifth pup.
CPW thinks the King Mountain pups were born mid-April, so they were around 10 to 12 weeks at the time the video was taken, and probably weaned, Odell reported. “So they’re no longer nursing, but they’re tied very tightly to a rendezvous site and aren’t at the point where they can travel with a pack.”
