08/23/2026
The first wolverines born in Colorado in over a century will be born inside a building. Colorado Parks and Wildlife plans to capture pregnant female wolverines from British Columbia and Alberta during midwinter, fly them to the Frisco Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Del Norte in the San Luis Valley, and let them give birth in a facility 1,500 miles from where they were captured. In early June, the mothers and their Colorado-born kits will be released together into the mountains. The mothers have never seen Colorado. The kits will never know anywhere else.
That is half the plan. The other half is wilder. Literally. The remaining pregnant females will be released directly into the mountains in early February, still carrying their young, with a food cache left nearby to sustain them through the weeks before birth and the weeks after, until the snow melts enough for marmots to emerge and the mothers can hunt on their own. Those females will give birth in the wild in dens they dig themselves, in mountains they arrived in weeks earlier, raising kits in a landscape they are learning at the same time their kits are learning it.
Bob Inman, CPW's wolverine species coordinator, described the reasoning for centering the entire reintroduction around pregnant females. Females with young stick to the release area better than females without. A wolverine dropped into unfamiliar territory with no anchor may walk 200 miles looking for something familiar. A wolverine with newborn kits in a den she dug two weeks ago is not going anywhere. The kits pin her to the release zone. They become the anchor.
The kits born in Colorado carry another advantage. A wolverine born at 11,000 feet in the Elk Mountains imprints on those conditions. The snow depth, the temperature swings, the food sources, the denning substrate. That animal does not need to learn Colorado the way a translocated adult from British Columbia does. It is Colorado from birth. Inman said directly that wolverines born in Colorado would have a genetic advantage to survive in the state.
Males are deliberately excluded from the first wave of releases. Adult male wolverines commit infanticide. A translocated male dropped into a release zone where females are denning with newborn kits could kill the kits that the entire program depends on. CPW wants the first male wolverines in Colorado in over a century to be born there, not imported. The mothers will produce them. The first breeding males in the Colorado population will be animals that were born in the Frisco Creek facility or in a snow den on a mountainside to mothers that were pregnant when they "stepped off" a plane from Canada.
The total plan calls for up to 45 wolverines translocated over at least three winters, roughly 15 per year, distributed across three release zones: north of Interstate 70 including Rocky Mountain National Park, the Elk and West Elk Mountains between I-70 and Highway 50, and the San Juan Range in the southwest. CPW estimates Colorado can hold roughly 100 wolverines once the population is established. That number would represent more than 25 percent of the entire wolverine population in the contiguous United States, which currently stands at roughly 300 to 400 animals in Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. One state's reintroduction would reshape the species' continental status by a third.
The releases still await a federal 10(j) rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would classify the reintroduced wolverines as an experimental, nonessential population, giving CPW management flexibility and protecting ranchers from liability. No wolverines have been released yet. The Frisco Creek facility is waiting. The Canadian source populations have been ranked and scored for ecological similarity and genetic diversity. The capture window opens in November.
Nobody has ever formally attempted to reintroduce an extirpated wolverine population. Inman said it plainly: it has really never been formally tried before, so there are a lot of unknowns about how exactly this should work. The plan is to fly pregnant wolverines from the other side of the continent, let some give birth in a building in the San Luis Valley, let others give birth in dens they dig in mountains they have never seen, and trust that motherhood will hold them in place long enough for Colorado to become home.
Image is for illustration purposes only, no wolverine den has been harassed during the making of this post.
Source: Colorado Parks and Wildlife / CPW Wolverine Restoration Plan (2026) / Colorado Sun / Denver Gazette / Aspen Times / Vail Daily / CPR News / CBS Colorado / Denver7.
