Less Than Half of Colorado’s Reintroduced Wolves Have Survived — So Far

Colorado’s wolf reintroduction effort just took another hit. Colorado Parks and Wildlife confirmed on March 13 that gray wolf 2310, the maternal member of the King Mountain Pack, died after the agency received a mortality signal on March 11 in northwest Colorado.

With that death, 14 of the 25 wolves translocated to Colorado since the program began in December 2023 are now dead. That leaves a 44% survival rate among the wolves that were brought into the state through the reintroduction effort.

CPW said it is leading the mortality investigation in consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency has not released a cause of death, and said a final determination will not come until the investigation and necropsy are complete.

Another Loss for the King Mountain Pack

Wolf 2310 was one of the 10 wolves Colorado brought in from Oregon during its first release wave in December 2023. She was also part of the King Mountain Pack, one of the state’s known packs to successfully reproduce.

This is the second known loss this year tied to that pack. In January, a breeding male from the King Mountain Pack died while CPW biologists were attempting to fit it with a new tracking collar. The pack had produced three pups in 2025.

The 44% figure refers to survival among the 25 wolves Colorado physically translocated into the state, not the total number of wolves currently on the landscape, which could be higher because of reproduction. Still, as a scorecard for the reintroduction effort itself, the trend is rough.

The Program Already Under Pressure

Colorado voters approved wolf reintroduction through Proposition 114 in 2020, requiring the state to begin releases west of the Continental Divide by the end of 2023. CPW released 10 wolves from Oregon in December 2023, and then moved 15 more from British Columbia during the second release season in early 2025.

The broader plan called for moving roughly 30 to 50 wolves into Colorado over a 3- to 5-year window. But in January, CPW announced it would not conduct another release in 2026. That decision came after federal pressure tied to the British Columbia source population, and CPW acknowledged that high mortality could make it harder to establish a self-sustaining population.

CPW Wolf Program Manager Eric Odell said in a January update that if mortality remains high, “the risk of failing to achieve a self-sustaining wolf population in Colorado increases.”

A Warning Sign Was Already in the Original Plan

None of this is entirely outside what Colorado’s wolf plan anticipated. The state’s management framework says a survival rate below 70% in the first 6 months after release would trigger a protocol review.

What’s changed is the scale. More than half of the wolves translocated into Colorado are now dead, and the state is not adding more wolves this year. That does not mean the program is dead in the water, especially with reproduction already documented, but it does mean Colorado’s path to a stable wolf population is getting narrower, not wider.

What Comes Next

For now, the biggest unanswered question is the cause of death. CPW has released almost nothing beyond the wolf’s ID, pack affiliation, and the fact that the agency received a mortality signal in northwest Colorado.

Until that necropsy comes back, this latest death adds one more data point to a reintroduction effort that was already taking heat from all sides — from ranchers, wolf advocates, and policymakers alike.