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On a cold morning in December 2023, Joanna Lambert found herself surrounded by five gray wolves on Colorado’s Western Slope. For most people, this sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But for Lambert, a professor who teaches animal ecology and conservation biology at CU Boulder, it was a dream come true.

“I was so close to the wolves, I could smell and hear them,” Lambert said. “The whole experience was just extraordinary.”

For the first time in over 75 years, gray wolves were about to set foot on Colorado soil, marking the first time an endangered and federally protected species was reintroduced to its native habitat by a democratic vote. And this historic occasion was due in no small part to Lambert’s tireless — and often thankless — work advocating for this misunderstood apex predator.

The “Big Bad Wolf”

Lambert was elated as she watched the wolves bound across the snow-dusted field. But as the last wolf disappeared into the Coloradan wilderness, she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety. After a decades-long career studying and advocating for endangered species worldwide, Lambert knew that releasing these wolves into the Rockies was just the beginning. The true test would be whether humans could learn how to co-exist with the wolves — and she had every reason to be worried.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, North America was home to millions of gray wolves whose habitats stretched from modern Mexico into the Canadian north. The largest of any dog species — technically known as Canis lupus — gray wolves were despised by settlers, who viewed them as a threat to their livestock, big game, and personal safety.

“Western settlers brought all these myths and legends about the ’big bad wolf,’” said Lambert. “There’s something about gray wolves that evokes more fear, dread and loathing than any other species I have ever worked with.”

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, settlers systematically tried to exterminate gray wolves in the region. Their programs were devastatingly effective, and by the time gray wolves were officially listed as an endangered species in the mid-1970s, only a few hundred breeding pairs remained in the lower United States.

A vote decides

When Lambert arrived at CU in 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had recently delisted gray wolves as an endangered species in the Northern Rockies. This sparked controversy among conservationists, who argued that gray wolf populations were nowhere near the levels needed to justify delisting.

“Colorado is arguably the best place in the U.S. to reintroduce gray wolves,” Lambert said. “We have around 20 million acres of protected public lands, the most abundant elk population anywhere in the country, and a prime location to enable full latitudinal distribution.”

The lack of government support particularly troubled Mike Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, who was previously a state senator of Montana and former biologist with the National Park Service. When Lambert arrived in Boulder, Phillips was cooking up a plan to put the reintroduction of gray wolves in Colorado to a state vote. 

Lambert jumped on board and spent the next five years working with a political campaign team of scientists, nonprofit partners, pollsters, lawyers and citizen volunteers known as the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project (RMWP). By 2019, RMWP had enough signatures to get the initiative on the 2020 General Election ballot. Along with several RMWP colleagues, Lambert herself delivered those signatures to Colorado’s secretary of state.

She was also a spokesperson for the campaign. “Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be in television ads for a political campaign,” reflected Lambert. “I’m happiest in wild landscapes running around after animals, and there I was in the trenches of a campaign.”

The result was Proposition 114, which was voted into law by Coloradans in 2020. Beginning in 2023, it committed the state to releasing around ten gray wolves per year for the next three to five years.

Into the wild

The initiative was a landmark moment for ecological conservation, and it passed by the narrowest of margins — 50.9% in favor. When considering why some would be opposed to the measure, Lambert says that a lot of the opposition stems from concerns about personal safety (though gray wolves almost never attack humans) and impact on livestock producers.

For Lambert, these concerns echo the fears that once nearly drove gray wolves to extinction. 

“We’ve lived with wolves and other apex predators through virtually all of our evolutionary history,” said Lambert. “That’s one thing humans are very good at — we’ve got a big brain and the tools to cope. It will just take time to attenuate the inherent fear that many folks have about these predators and to relearn how to share a landscape with them.” 

Today, one of Lambert’s major research initiatives is investigating the different evolutionary trajectories of gray wolves and coyotes, the closest living genetic relative to the gray wolf. Unlike gray wolves, coyotes are increasingly co-existing with humans in urban environments. The question for Lambert is why, and the answer may have a lot to teach conservationists about how to tilt the odds in favor of successfully reintroducing the gray wolf throughout the American West.

In the meantime, Lambert believes that Colorado taking the reintroduction of gray wolves into its own hands bodes well for future conservation efforts in the state and across the nation. The journey, however, could be a long and winding one. In August, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials announced that two of the gray wolves released last year — along with three of their pups — would be relocated following a spate of attacks on livestock that local ranchers blamed on wolves.

While Lambert acknowledges this was a blow, she doesn’t see the relocation as a setback and says it’s important to keep sight of the bigger picture.

She says fewer than 0.01% of cattle in the northern Rockies are attacked by gray wolves, and that cattle are far more likely to die from eating larkspur weeds or even being struck by lightning than a wolf attack. And the majority of the reintroduced wolves, she says, are not causing any problems. 

“The fundamental reality is that we are living through the sixth extinction crisis and we must learn how to live with wildlife,” said Lambert. “We are turning into a state that represents an alternative way of thinking about how to manage wildlife, and this should be a source of hope for everyone.”

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Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha