Colorado is the first state to intentionally bring back wolves by popular vote. But voting was just the beginning. From the ballot box to paws on the ground, join us for Gray Territory, a new limited series that takes a deeper look at wolf reintroduction and explores the complicated reality of coexistence. 

The series is season five of the award-winning podcast, Laws of Notion, hosted by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. For more information and resources from this episode, check out the episode summary page. Enjoy the transcript, and to listen to the audio version visit institute.dmns.org/gray-territory.

 

Episode 4 – Solutions to Coexist

Wolf Sighting

SHELBY NEIBERGER: So this is technically the State Rabbit Ears Trust Land.

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: This is Shelby.

SHELBY: I'm Shelby Neiberger. I work for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and I am the Northwest Region non-lethal mitigation specialist, also known as a range rider full time for the state of Colorado.

KRISTAN: About 45 minutes ago, she sent me a pin to meet at the gate of a state property in North Park, Colorado. We’re a few miles west of Adam VanValkenburg’s ranch, who you heard from in Episode One and will hear from again later. Shelby had just been notified that a wolf was spotted in a pasture with cows.

SHELBY:  So Pat, who is Adam's cousin, I'm guessing he was haying; he was in his tractor and he said he saw it over in one of the neighbor's cows. He said he drove his tractor over there, but it really wasn't afraid. I'd be surprised if it's still around, but it's pretty odd behavior for it to be out in the middle of the cows in the day. Maybe early morning when the sun's out a little bit, but usually they're pretty nocturnal.

KRISTAN: We head down a dirt road through some sagebrush to see if the wolf is still hanging around. Within a few minutes, we see the local CPW District Wildlife Manager, Jacob Way. Who also came out to see what was going on and if he could do anything.

SHELBY: Hello!

JACOB WAY: How are you?

SHELBY: Good, how are you?

JACOB: Good. Off it went.

SHELBY: I didn't figure it'd still be here.

JACOB: No, it apparently just ran off as I got here too. But, Pat and Jake are still down there. It was across the meadow there. That fence line that goes up...

SHELBY: Yeah.

JACOB: It was just to the west of that, kind of down that low spot.

SHELBY: Okay.

JACOB: I think there was a ridge line, just a small ridge in front of it that Pat was down the bottom and it went over that top and he lost sight of it.

SHELBY: They sent me one picture; I don't know if they got multiple pictures. I mean, the picture was kind of turned, but it looks like it's probably big enough to be a wolf.

JACOB: I don't doubt that it is.

SHELBY: Yeah, I mean, I imagine these guys by now know what a wolf looks like.

JACOB: Yeah, they’re figuring it out.

SHELBY: I'll obviously just make sure nothing's dead that's attracting them. I know that you looked at a bear kill that maybe they smell or something...

KRISTAN: They are talking about a calf that was found dead due to what was likely a bear attack and whether the carcass was still out in the pasture. The One Ear Pack is denning in the area, and it’s possible a wolf was attracted to the scent. As of this summer, CPW has confirmed at least six pups in the pack.

SHELBY: I like to think so far that this is a good behaving wolf pack.

JAKE: Fingers crossed.

SHELBY: That's what I just keep hoping continues. They scavenge and they eat small things. I'm sure they ate some elk. I guess someone saw them going after some antelope, but I don't know.

JAKE: Time will tell, I suppose.

KRISTAN: Welcome to Gray Territory: The Return of Wolves to Colorado. I’m your host, Kristan Uhlenbrock, and this is Season Five of Laws of Notion, where we push against our preconceived beliefs and think critically about the world around us.

In this episode, we hear what it’s like to learn to coexist with wolves and the solutions on the ground to reduce conflict – from traditional range riders to modern-day technology like AI.

Out on the Range

KRISTAN: When someone says range rider, you might conjure up an image of a cowboy, leather chaps, a gun holster, racing across the west on a horse. There is even a 1950s black and white TV series by the name.

[Theme from The Range Rider show]: …and who could be more at home on the range than The Range Rider…

KRISTAN: The modern-day version still exists, with some similarities and differences. Colorado has just established a new range rider program, making it one of three state-supported programs in the U.S. It’s a partnership between the Colorado Department of Agriculture, known as CDA, and CPW. Range riders add a human presence to the landscape, and wolves don’t like to be around people. They also take some of the pressure off ranchers by adding capacity. If there is wolf activity in an area with livestock present, then a range rider can be deployed, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on an ATV, or sometimes in a truck. It really depends on the landscape.

When I met up with Shelby, she was in her white CDA state truck with a four-wheeler in the back.

SHELBY: A four-wheeler is louder, you can go faster, cover more ground. In an area like Pitkin County right now, it's forest, so there's certain areas where you're not allowed to take a four-wheeler or any motorized device, so you do have to either hike or ride horses.

KRISTAN: Shelby’s area is the entire northwest quadrant of Colorado, so she’s covering a lot of territory: thousands of square miles. A couple of days ago, she was down in Pitkin County, which is more central Colorado, and where the Copper Creek Pack has been active. Now she’s here in the northern part of the state. She is one of two full-time range riders employed by CDA, alongside about eleven contractors from CPW. The contractors are seasonal, typically working from April to October when livestock are out and in more open range areas. There is also a bit of federal funding available for ranchers to hire their own range rider.

SHELBY: Typically, I try to get here during the day. I'll drive around my four-wheeler, at least in this country, and check cameras and look for tracks and stuff like that. We're up here so often, we know which ones are fresh and not. But also a lot of us are trained; we took tracking classes. But usually, we're driving over these trails so often that it's like, "okay, that's fresh."

And then from the wolf's feces, we can tell what they've been eating, so we can tell if they've been eating protein and then what color hair is in their feces, if that's elk hair or cow hair or wool. And then that lets us know if the wolves are healthy too and if they're eating well.

KRISTAN: She’s also tracking wolf collar data, talking with producers, and checking in with other range riders.

SHELBY: It's kind of the range rider's job to take in all that data and determine, okay, what's my plan for today or tonight? Because if there is a carcass, we want to find it as soon as possible so the producers can claim that. Or get either Jacob or one of the damage specialists out here to examine the carcass and determine how it died so they can get paid for that calf or cow.

KRISTAN: Range riders are like detectives. They’re often holding a pair of binoculars and scouting the valleys, hillsides, and dense patches of forest. Looking for signs that could tell them something is off.

SHELBY: Sometimes I'll start my day, maybe in the evening, go check all the cameras, and then it'll get dark and then I'd hang out maybe until 3:00 AM and then go back to the hotel, get some sleep, and then start my day over again. It's important to mix it up, at least when you're by yourself, because otherwise, if the wolves catch on to your schedule, they're smart animals. They'll know, "okay, it's 4:00 AM, she's not around. Let's go out now."

KRISTAN: Spotting a wolf is quite hard, especially at night, so Shelby relies on specialty tools like thermal vision.

SHELBY: The CDA range riders have thermal vision. That's why we do a lot of the night work because obviously we can see at night.

KRISTAN: This came in handy a few nights ago when she was in steep terrain, and a thick forest made it complicated to get to the herd.

SHELBY: In that case, I could be up on this ridge and see a lot of the cows. But if something were to happen, like say you saw a wolf attacking a cow there, you'd have to get out, hike down this steep ridge, and then hike back up the other ridge to even get to the cows. And by then it could be too late. But for that producer, he realized that, and he said, if you could either record them with your thermals, or even if you try to help us find carcasses as soon as possible so we can get an investigator out there before the carcass deteriorates.

KRISTAN: Colorado, geographically speaking, is enormous and complex.

SHELBY: People don't realize that when you do get in terrain or bigger acre areas that the tools that you can use for non-lethal hazing or non-lethal deterrence for wolves and predators get limited pretty quickly. When something happens, it might be easy for somebody to say, “well, they didn't do X, Y, and Z.” Well, you don't know what the terrain looks like, and that's not even something that would make sense to do.  So I think if there's any kind of misconception about the landscape, it's that people think that more tools will work in areas when they just won't.

KRISTAN: And while no deterrence mechanism is perfect, Shelby’s eager to work with ranchers on how to be most effective, to be one more tool in a rancher’s toolbox.

All the Tools

KRISTAN: I first learned about Shelby during spring calving season. I had joined Adam VanValkenburg at his ranch in North Park. It was late April, and he was deploying an arsenal of tools and tactics to deal with some wolves hanging around his operation.

ADAM VANVALKENBURG: This is my bucket of tricks. This is a fox light, which we're not going to deploy yet; we're going to wait until we get a little bit more activity. I'll carry a camera: cell phone cameras these days are great, but 20 megapixels versus 16 megapixels or even 10, it helps make the difference. This is all my game camera checking stuff: SD cards, card readers, stuff like that, some extra game cameras. And then I've got six critter getters in here. So we'll go hang this up and I'll turn it on and it'll make a lot of noise for you.

KRISTAN: Adam and I jump into his side-by-side with his dog Waylon to go check out some of what he’s done. On the way to look at some turbo fladry, electrical wire with colored flags, he talks through all the organizations he’s been partnering with, from government agencies to universities to NGOs.

ADAM: Working Circle has been the primary one. I've done some work in the past with Western Landowners Alliance, a lot of stuff with CPW, and now CDA’s come on board. When we were in the willows down there earlier, that fence on the east side, it's such a bugger to get the fladry through and it's such a struggle. We're working potentially with Defenders of Wildlife, and CSU, their Carnivore Coexistence Program, to get in more of a permanent wolf fence right there.

Last year we actually lost a calf due to fladry during a snowstorm. It's so important for those calves to get up and get that first milk. Trying to get up, it crawled underneath the fladry and the cow couldn't get to it to work on it, and it ended up dying of hyperthermia. But at the same token, we sat at the kitchen table and we talked about whether it worth it, and yeah, still the fladry was worth it. The problem is now we've just got to change some of the landscape a little bit to make it so the fladry will be more beneficial.

KRISTAN: Fladry can be very useful in the short term, as wolves are often fearful of new stuff. But it requires around weekly maintenance, as the flags can blow off or the wire can short out. And it’s not cheap: one site I found charges over $4,000 for a mile of it.

ADAM: This is our third year of fladry. Our first year, it was kind of training for CPW and training for everybody to put up fladry. So with that, we got to have the fladry put up and it actually deterred bears. That's what we were wanting to start with is deterring the bears because we'd lose one or two calves a year to a bear. And then the other day, I got a picture of a mountain lion up there. Anything with paws and claws is pretty prevalent around here. We’ve got a lot of them.

We've put up a mile and a half of fladry. We're actually an ideal ranch for fladry because it covers the horses, the bulls, the houses... every livestock that we own is within the fladry right now. Right at 85 acres is what we've done. It’s from CPW. It's from their emergency stash.  

When we tested it, it was nine kilovolts. So yeah, it'll sting you, it wakes you up better in a cup of coffee in the morning.

KRISTAN: We get out on top of a hill not too far from his barn to check out a section of fladry.

ADAM: So you can hear it kind of pop… you can see that little spark too.
Last year I got a picture of a wolf that had hit the fladry and was running away on a game camera, and you could see where he was rubbing his nose. And then [CPW got] the collar data, they called the next morning and said, “what the hell? what'd you do? what happened?” And I said, “well, he hit the fladry.” And he went eight and a half miles that way through some very rough country. So he hit it and kept on trucking.

KRISTAN: Adam likes to experiment. He’s testing a whole suite of deterrence tools to see what works for his operation, like shooting off cracker shells to make some noise, working with the range rider program, finding the right location for his carcass management pit, and installing both game cameras and motion-activated noise makers, commonly known as critter getters.

ADAM: I’ll show you this spot right quick because we had a pretty interesting wolf encounter over here on this fence corner. CPW gave us, they're called critter getters. I had one on this corner and a wolf had walked up, set the game camera off. I got a picture of him. And then that critter getter went off on him. And you could see in the fresh snow where he jumped like 15-20 feet, because it scared him so bad.

KRISTAN: Even though Adam warned me about the sound, I might have jumped when I accidentally, yet very easily, set one off.

[critter getter noise and laughter]

KRISTAN: It’s sensitive, that’s for sure.

ADAM: Yes, it is.

KRISTAN: Wow, that is some intense noise…

KRISTAN: And because they’re pretty sensitive and annoying, he puts them out only when necessary.

ADAM: I've got game cameras all over the perimeter. If I start seeing wolves come in, I'll set up a critter getter. I won't deploy them until I absolutely have to. So it kind of goes in stages. You break stuff up, make everything kind of interval on them so they're not used to it. So start with fladry, call it phase one. If I get a picture of them, I'll start hanging these critter getters, and then I've got fox lights, stuff like that. So just kind of mix it up, break it up on them so it's not a standard practice.

It works, and the million-dollar question is, how long until it doesn't? These wolves here have seen fladry, they've seen longhorns, they've seen burros, they've seen everything that we can throw at them. And just the million-dollar question is what day is it going to be where they're used to it, and it's no longer effective.  Fladry in itself, they say its usefulness is about six to eight weeks.

KRISTAN: Adam’s risk management feels like a complex mathematical equation. How much does something cost? How much time does it take to install and maintain? What will work on this section of property? And at what time of year? How long will it last? And if he can figure out this customized equation, it should hopefully bring him a little more sleep at night.

We head back to the house for a bowl of chili and to see some wolf paw prints Adam has cast in plaster. They’ve proven to be a valuable educational tool. He just lent a few of them to the range riders who are in training this week.

ADAM: The range rider found a big track in a mud puddle, and I poured some plaster of paris in there and it just made a perfectly good form of the wolf track. It covers up my hand, which is seven and a half inches.

The time I spend on this stuff is just absolutely huge. All last week was just dedicated to wolves, so it takes a lot of time. And then the amount of money the state's poured into the wolves just on this ranch alone is just absolutely huge. So at what point does that money run out too?

KRISTAN: What’s challenging for Adam and many ranchers is living under uncertain conditions: if wolves show up, if deterrents stop working, what if funding runs out? Adam's world has shifted from statements to questions, from routines to experiments.

ADAM: I think the wolves are here. They're here to stay. It's unfortunate because life before wolves as a rancher was definitely a lot more predictable. We got a lot more sleep. Now you're leaving yourself at the mercy of whatever Colorado wants to vote for anymore. Which is unfortunate because it's here, it's our backyard. It's not Denver's backyard. What if the law stated, "what if we introduced wolves to Washington Park in Denver?" Would it have passed then? Probably not. It's here, so we're the ones dealing with it.

Range Riders in Full Swing

KRISTAN: Back with Shelby in her truck, we drive farther into the hills and pastures just west of Adam’s property.

SHELBY: It would make it a lot easier if the cows were just in open pasture like this, next to the mountains, but we have cows that are up in those trees. I don't even know how they find them all when they get them out of there.

KRISTAN: She wants to scout a few different ranchers’ cows out grazing for the summer, not far from the One Ear Pack den site. We pull through a gate and drive into a large open valley. As soon as we stop, a herd of young cows immediately scurries over to see what’s going on.

SHELBY: Cows are very curious, especially the yearlings. It makes night watch really easy because you can literally just park like this and they'll generally just gather around the vehicle, so you don't have to worry about them being spread out for miles trying to watch everything.

KRISTAN: The life of a range rider is not for everyone, but Shelby feels drawn to it.

SHELBY: I grew up in Northwestern, Colorado, and my family has ranched, and we actually used to raise quarter horses as well as cattle. I went to school at CSU for animal science and ag business.

KRISTAN: Before becoming a range rider, she was a brand inspector for the state, making sure people were selling and transporting animals that they actually owned. Now, she spends her days not looking at just one animal at a time, but multiple herds.

SHELBY: I don't know if it's just that you have to own livestock or whatever, but we'll sit out and watch animals for hours, whether it's wildlife or your own cows. There's just some enjoyment that comes from just watching your animals do whatever they're doing.

KRISTAN: What she is watching for is animal behavior patterns. She’s collecting as much information as she can, trying to note what's normal so she can spot when something’s not.

SHELBY: Every wolf pack is going to have their own personality. I'm learning their behavior, what they're eating, where they're going, and just the things that they're interested in.

KRISTAN: She says that these wolves seem to be into sage grouse and marmots.

SHELBY: They seem to really like to scavenge.

KRISTAN: This whole process is one of learning: learning about the unique dynamics of a wolf pack, how livestock or wildlife respond to a new carnivore, and what a rancher’s needs might be.

SHELBY: We’re constantly learning along the way and really care about the producer's input. If there's a better idea on how to do something better, we're more than open to accept the criticism and try to change. It's not like we came up with a plan and think it's perfect.

KRISTAN: She’s been on the job for less than a year, and it’s been a roller coaster.

SHELBY: It can be very busy. When I started here, before I got to go home for more than 24 hours, I think it had been like 24 days.

When I first started, it was really stressful. I stayed up all night because I didn't want anything to happen to these cows. I have cows myself. Obviously, nobody wants to see an animal suffer or die. So, I just wanted to help the producers, especially knowing what they had been through the year before. It was just kind of this anxiety of, I wouldn't want anything to happen because I wasn't there. And then I realized quickly that the energy that I had started wearing down, and I realized I've got to start strategizing my sleeping a little bit differently.

KRISTAN: Like many of us, she’s trying to find balance and trying to build stamina in a career where success means that nothing happens.

SHELBY: A lot of range riders never see wolves. They're very sneaky, smart animals, and obviously the point of a range rider is to go out there and create a presence. So, I guess that's a good thing if they're not seeing wolves. But I think that it can also be a little bit discouraging because if you're not seeing them, you could feel like you're not doing your job. There's no good way of really capturing what good we're doing, if that makes any sense. There's no easy way to say, “Oh, well we did this, and it worked because they didn't show up.”

KRISTAN: How do you prove you prevented something? It's the central paradox of Shelby's job. There's no easy way to capture the value of work that operates in the negative space.

SHELBY: But I think I get enough satisfaction out of the fact that I'm still catching them on camera. I'm still getting their tracks, so I know I'm on their tail.

KRISTAN: The value of a range rider is not strictly about deterrence. One study from Montana found that range riders were perceived as beneficial for both their ability to quickly help identify a carcass and for providing ranchers with some peace of mind. They seem to create socio-political benefits, like empowering and reducing stress on ranchers, building trust, and influencing public perception, such that ranchers are not simply perceived as just hating on wolves but seen more holistically for their efforts to reduce conflict in non-lethal ways. So Shelby focuses on the things that matter.

SHELBY: We do a lot of outreach events and stuff like that and education, but what I like the most is the producer one-on-one. It's building that connection, and it's a connection that I enjoy. I wish more people could come out here and witness what producers do on a daily, because I guess that sometimes they portray that they're tough cowboys that don't have any feelings.  But it really does take a toll on them, and it's because of the animals. It makes ranchers and farmers extremely sad, whether it's their fault or not, if an animal dies.

KRISTAN: One of the worries from both ranchers and the range riders is that if you’re pushing a wolf away from one herd, you might be pushing it towards someone else’s animals.

SHELBY: If I move them off of my place, are they going to go to the neighbors and cause them havoc? So they're thinking about their neighbors.

 This whole wolf thing has clearly been very emotionally taxing on the farmers and ranchers that are having to deal with it. And I think part of being scared is not knowing, and that's also why I think being transparent about all this is important. The more we know, maybe the less that will be scary about it.

KRISTAN: And while Shelby can't prove that her presence saved any particular animal, can't quantify the value of transparency, or measure the impact of a rancher feeling heard, she can point to something else: trust where there was suspicion, collaboration in place of conflict. Range riding can be a very physically demanding and stressful job. But Shelby likes being part of the solution.

SHELBY: All those over there are yearlings. And so they're much more curious and just jumpy and giddy... I watched a couple coyotes go in there, and just the whole group of yearlings got in a herd and were just running after the coyotes, because they're just so curious. They're just like, “woo, what's that?” They're funny. I mean, they're just like teenagers. [laughs]

Minimizing Conflict

KRISTAN: With the promise of the range rider program, minimizing conflict makes coexistence feel possible, which is also at the root of what drives Courtney Vail.

COURTNEY VAIL: The long game is to hopefully help humankind evolve in such a way that we can coexist side by side with wildness.

I'm Courtney Vail and I'm the chair of the Board of Directors of Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. We're an all-volunteer board, and we are focused specifically now on promoting coexistence to reduce conflict between wolves, livestock, and humans.

KRISTAN: Courtney's passion to protect wildlife started when she was young, seeing baby harp seals clubbed on TV in the 1970s.

COURTNEY: That etched in my mind forever and motivated me at a really young age to want to protect wildlife and to protect the innocence from humankind that seems to have the upper hand with nature.

KRISTAN: This motivation led her to a career combining science, people, and advocacy for a broad range of wildlife issues.

COURTNEY: My early career was focused on terrestrial wildlife, protecting tigers and rhinos. And I've worked with the dolphin captivity industry to encourage them to not source dolphins from the wild. I've worked with local communities that still hunt whales and dolphins, so most of my career academically focused on a nice mix of biology and the social sciences. But my field experiences are with conflict, with human wildlife conflict, and trying to broker understanding and dialogue, and co-creating shared solutions to get at what really resides underneath the issues, the human element. And while we might think that wolf restoration is purely academic or purely ecological, we know that it's a social issue and a political issue, and I think that's where the complexity lies.

KRISTAN: In 2019, she got a call to see if she could come help with the campaign for the ballot initiative.

COURTNEY: Since the passage of Proposition 114, we've been really active on the ground in the state, trying to build relationships and mobilize resources for livestock producers.

KRISTAN: The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project was one of the main actors in getting the ballot referendum passed, but that was just the start for Courtney and her colleagues. What came next was finding pathways to ensure wolf reintroduction was successful in Colorado and mobilizing resources for producers. In May 2023, she celebrated one of the key initiatives they organized – the passage of legislation that created the “Born to be Wild” license plate.

COURTNEY: So that plate generates $50 from every plate directly to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, specifically earmarked for non-lethal conflict prevention and reduction.

KRISTAN: The license plates feature the white iconic mountain range seen on most Colorado plates, but with a black sky and a grey wolf staring out from it. As of fall 2025, more than 20,000 plates have been sold, generating more than a million dollars in revenue for CPW.

COURTNEY: Colorado Parks and Wildlife has decided to use the majority of those funds to support the range riding program here in the state.

KRISTAN: CPW estimates that the range rider program will cost the state about half a million dollars in 2025.

COURTNEY: So that plate allows us to tap into the willingness to pay of the Colorado community who loves wolves, while allowing revenue to be directed to those that may be impacted most by wolves, and that's the agricultural community.

KRISTAN: Colorado State University researchers recently did a study on people’s willingness to pay for wolves in Colorado. Willingness to pay is an economic concept: it’s the maximum price someone is willing to pay for a product or service. What the researchers learned is that the costs and benefits of wolf reintroduction are highly uneven. The costs are mostly hitting ranchers on the West Slope, whereas what is seen as a benefit – such as the knowledge that wolves now exist in the state – falls mostly to people on the Front Range. And so, could a willingness to pay help make the costs and benefits feel more equitable?

When they looked specifically at the people who had voted yes on wolf reintroduction, which was 177 people in the survey, they found an average willingness to pay between $27 to $100. This number varied based on where the money would go – would it go to ensuring a sustainable wolf population? Or would it be used to help compensate ranchers for their losses? When extrapolated to all yes-voting households, this potential willingness to pay becomes significant, somewhere between $31 to $115 million annually.

Courtney wants to harness this willingness to pay on behalf of those on the frontlines of the reintroduction.

COURTNEY: We underestimated the impact of a ballot initiative, where it seems that this was forced upon communities with very differential impacts. Front range gets to sit behind their computer and think about wolves romantically and idealistically, and may never encounter one in Colorado. And then you have those communities where fear is building, not knowing exactly what the impact's going to be, and just one more predator. And most of the ranchers have very slim and small margins. They're very modest ranches.

If you're looking at the ranching community or western livelihoods generally, I think we all can agree that we revere and appreciate open landscapes and landscape that is not full of condominiums and has space for wildlife. And ranchers and ranching provide that.

KRISTAN: For Courtney, wolves bring both deep meaning and value. It’s why she wants to see resources dedicated to this effort, whether it’s through revenue from a license plate, our state budget, or other methods.

COURTNEY: The rest of it's just the hard work of finding ways to raise money for the livestock community because, at the end of the day, that's going to help increase tolerance, and hopefully people can get used to making a little bit of additional effort to make room for the wolf. Already, they are coexisting with other predators, mountain lions and black bears. They know the drill. There are deterrents, there are tools, there are methods to reduce your vulnerability to predators on your operation, on your ranch. They're working with CPW now to do that. They get compensated for that. So this is just another species that has a few additional tools.

KRISTAN: And she’s hoping that the conversation can move into a deeper space than just the negative-framed stories.

COURTNEY: Wolves bring out the best in us and the worst in us in ways. I'm encouraged by the growing collaboration, but I'm discouraged by the ongoing vitriol.

KRISTAN: The path she's been on has had its ups and downs. The excitement for the passage of the bill was followed by a swirl of disagreement, conflict, and frustration. But she remains dedicated to the cause…

COURTNEY: When you get to meet a rancher and to see their humanity and to have that empathy for their condition, it’s a game-changer really in what strategies we use to encourage communities to meet us in that place where we can agree on, yes, wolves have a place here in the state.

KRISTAN: And she wants to create allies by finding commonalities.

COURTNEY: We look at, at the human level, a desire for a sustainable livelihood that we all want to be able to provide for our families and have a safe home and a safe space for our children. And so those ideas around security are also common ground. Ranchers don't necessarily hate wolves. They are concerned about the problem wolves, the ones that show up and depredate, but they are not out to oppose or exterminate wolves. And that's more common ground.

KRISTAN: Moving forward for Courtney means addressing how the wolf is seen as a symbol in our society and how that influences people’s reactions.

COURTNEY: I mean, there are so many issues wrapped up in this complex being known as the wolf, and we've placed it upon the wolf. It's embedded in our childhoods, you know, little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, and Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. They're so much like us in so many ways in that they have these really tight-knit families, and they work collaboratively to hunt. They help each other. They are our companions, in the form of a domestic dog. Why we revile the wolf... the simple answer is that we've been taught to hate the wolf.

What I'm concerned about is how do we not scapegoat the wolf. And dismantling this false mythology around the wolf and removing it from that scapegoat list as this proxy for all of the other grievances that people have in this state and in this world, whether it's lack of autonomy, government overreach, inability to sustain the same income they had last year, to what the future of the West looks like.

KRISTAN: Knowing that this issue continues to be fraught, she remains hopeful about the future of wolves in Colorado.

COURTNEY: Tolerance and acceptance that wolves have the right to be here. That they belong here, that we made a grave mistake in removing them from the landscape. That we have compassion for each other, that when wildlife does cause hardship for certain communities or certain individuals that we can rally together to acknowledge that and then help to support those families that are impacted. It's celebration and joy around having this incredible, beautiful creature in our state, and that we have succeeded in allowing that space, protecting that space, revering that space.

I know that in my lifetime, we're not going to save everything, but I hope that we can change something and improve our little bit of the world or a big piece of the world in my lifetime. And in that time, I hope that we can evolve to be better. We've got to be better. Nature needs a helping hand. I mean, that's the bottom line. And we’ve got to keep trying.

Deploying New Tactics

KRISTAN: In July of 2025, while Shelby was out range riding in North Park, Adam was staying busy. For any rancher working thousands of acres during grazing season, finding the right set of tools to keep wolves at bay that actually scale to the landscape requires some effort. So when I heard Adam had signed up to test a couple more technologies, I wasn't surprised. This time, one of the technologies involves AI-connected cameras, and the other is essentially fitness tracking features built into a version of an AirTag – you know, those tiny devices that many of us use to find missing keys.

I met up with Adam at his ranch, along with the person who brought the new gadgets.

CHIP EISENHART: I'm Chip Eisenhart with Wild Ranch, and I’ve been working with Adam for the past couple of months up here doing all kinds of cool stuff with wolf livestock conflict.

KRISTAN: We're standing in Adam's 19th-century house – built by his great grandparents – and all kinds of 21st-century tech is spread out on the dining room table. Sun ripples through the lead glass windows. It's a juxtaposition of modern innovation fitting into a landscape with deep history. Here’s Chip and Adam talking about this history.

CHIP: This building we're standing in right now is five homesteads sledded together in the winter.

ADAM: Every reservoir you look around here within a five-mile radius, my great-grandfather built with his brother with a team of horses and a slip sled.

CHIP: And you can see the thresholds are out of code. I tripped and just about fell on my face first time I came in here. And yet here we are with this really high-tech layer that Adam is experimenting with. And it's really a story of old meets new, and there aren't many families who can probably bridge that and do that effectively to create the traction that other producers would say, “wow, I should try that.”

KRISTAN: For Adam, embracing these new tools is strategic for his business and community. Deploying any sort of deterrence tool can bring credibility to a conversation about what works and what might not for a rancher living with wolves.

ADAM: That's the hand we've been dealt. We could beat on the table and say, “shoot, shovel, and shut up” all day long, but nobody's going to engage with you. They're just going to say, you're a grumpy old rancher that wants to do all this bad stuff, yada, yada, yada. But when you say, “I've done all this non-lethal, I've done this, I've done that,” and be more proactive on what we've been dealt, then that gets to the point where you can have people engage with you in conversation and say, “Hey, this is what it really looks like when a wolf depredate on a cow. This is what wolves really do.  It's not the Disneyland version that you're assuming.”

KRISTAN: “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” is an old saying about how landowners might choose to deal with an unwanted animal on their property. But Adam’s focused on a different path, one that helps showcase the story of what ranchers are up against to hopefully get to a broader awareness, especially for people in more urban environments who may not know what this all looks like on the ground.

ADAM: I've had people say, “God, I wish I would've never voted for that.” Or, “I'm sorry I voted for this. What can I do to help?” And then that comes back full circle to say, okay, now let's put more funds towards this non-lethal.

CHIP: Our goal is to work with producers like Adam to create new ideas that the public can really get behind in a crowdfunding way. They might be able to send ten tags to somebody, or adopt a livestock guardian dog, or hop on a producer tour and come up here and learn from people like Adam.

KRISTAN: This growing awareness of how producers are being impacted was one reason why Chip got involved.

CHIP: Wolves are debated as to their full impact on their operations. It's a fraction compared to the total number of cattle in Colorado. But at the same time, when you get a sense of the time that they're putting into this, and the stress and the indirect costs, that's what people don't understand. So we're trying to increase that perspective-taking.

KRISTAN: This all really got started for Chip last summer when the Copper Creek Pack killed livestock on ranches not far from his place in Grand County. Instead of picking a side in the wolf debate, he decided to combine his lifelong interest in conservation education, and his skills as a museum exhibit designer with his love of rural Colorado.

CHIP: I work a bunch with sensors in my day job as an exhibit designer for museums and such. We use sensors to tell where people are in a room and trigger other things, and I wondered, why can't we put a sensor on a cow to tell what's going on in relation to a wolf?

KRISTAN: So he founded Wild Ranch, a nonprofit built on a simple premise: working landscapes need working solutions. Actual tools that ranchers can deploy when wolves show up on their land.

CHIP: So this is one of our smart tags that we have on cattle here at Adam’s. It's about the size of a small pack of matches, and it goes on with a button that's attached to the cow's ear. It's essentially like putting a smart watch on a cow in that it's got an accelerometer inside that can tell, like if it was on your wrist and it was an Apple watch, it might say, are you rowing? Are you biking? Are you throwing a ball? It can tell if a cow is ruminating. It can tell if it's drinking. It can tell if it's mounting another cow. It will give calving alerts.

ADAM: So right here, she's done 1.59 miles, and that is within two days.

KRISTAN: I love it. It said steps too. This is very much like those people who are step counters. It's a Fitbit.

CHIP: Yeah, it's a Fitbit on your cow.

KRISTAN: Like anyone working with new technology, Chip is starting from scratch – from trying to understand what baseline is to how to keep something attached to a free-roaming animal out in nature.

CHIP: Essentially, this tag arrives with zero baseline data on the animal, and every animal has a different kind of activity pattern. If you're younger, you might be more rambunctious and run a lot more. If you're older, you might not walk as much. And so over the course of time, it took about a month to calibrate to each animal, to where now in ten minutes, if the animal's normal activity baseline is exceeded by 9x, we get an alert, which basically means it's running.

I'll get a ping, or an alert for a high activity, and it's always concerning to me, and I'm like, “Adam, what's going on?”

KRISTAN: The idea is to put more control into the hands of ranchers when a wolf might be among their cattle, because, as we’ve learned, the wolf collar data are delayed and not always a great source for certainty. Chip is also developing an app to track all the data and manage the various tools being deployed.

CHIP: So this app, for instance, Adam has helped to design with me and Wildlife Protection Solutions. You can see his tags here, range riders can breadcrumb their patrol routes on here so he can see where they've been. You can go right here, push this button, and you can look at wildlife. You can make observations about tracks and bone piles and scat and others and take geo-located photos on that.

And then this whole section is on deterrents. We’ve got categories for range riders, guard dogs, guard donkeys, fladry, fox lights, this WPS cam, which we'll be installing today, critter getters, mitigation boxes, acoustic deterrents, cracker shells, and others. And Adam's deployed a lot of these.

ADAM: I mean everything on that list, but the guard donkeys is something that we're actively engaged in.

CHIP: But this is really a reflection of Adam's knowledge.

KRISTAN: Piloting and testing all these tools and technology will hopefully lessen the burden in the future.

CHIP:  Adam's on his sixth range rider this season, number six.

ADAM: Number six.

CHIP: And he has to train everyone up like an intern. So basically, at the end of the season, he can wrap this up, and the next grazing season, he can roll it out and use it as a training tool.

KRISTAN: The idea of pairing this new technology with other options, like range riders, seems to be helping, but there are no “silver bullet” solutions that will take all the pressure away.

ADAM: The mental and emotional side - it's a struggle. But now knowing that there's range riders on the ground, or out with our cattle, that's been a huge relief. But by the same token, there are still wolves in our cows, and there's nothing we can do about it. So, this is just one more tool autonomously that we can say, “Hey, I'm over here, but there's wolves or there's something happening in our cows.” I can get a hold of somebody and say, “Get over here. Something's happening.”  Or with the cell phone game cameras that we're going to set up today, I can be here and I can get a picture of our wolf five miles away that's going to our cows, and I can call the landowner and say, “Hey, get your butt over there. Start making noise. There's a wolf coming to our cows.”

KRISTAN: In addition to these fitness-tracking smart tags, Adam and Chip are also releasing a series of new game cameras that use AI image recognition to spot wolves. Typically, game cameras are used to record something that is viewable later. The goal here, though, is to make them more immediately useful: immediate information that Adam can use to act, or even automatically deploy a deterrent.

CHIP: And this mitigation box that we're just putting out today, that's connected to the camera traps, but that camera trap will send an image up to this AI discerning model that has been trained on thousands of wolf images. And if it sees a wolf, it will then automatically trigger deterrents on the ground, so Adam doesn't even need to be there. And we're talking about strobe lights, different colors, different patterns to randomize it. We're talking about MP3 players that could play Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Alice Cooper, gunshots, people murmuring in the distance, whatever. We even have a human scent dispenser that we are going to deploy later this summer. Wolves are very sensitive to human scent. So this kind of thing could do all kinds of stuff in keeping those wolves guessing.

ADAM: Talking to a few people that have dealt with wolves in other states, what was surprising to me, they said the number one thing that the wolves couldn't stand was Christian music. [laughs] Go figure. Because it's more on that tone that they don't like, it's more projection, the voice and stuff. That's what he swore up and down.

KRISTAN: [laughs] God's coming to get you.

ADAM: Yes, exactly. [all laugh]

CHIP: Alice Cooper.

KRISTAN: You’re doing Alice Cooper?

ADAM: Yeah. Metallica too. Just a touch of Metallica.

“You don’t have to be here”

KRISTAN: After learning about all the backend stuff, it was time to put it into action. So we grab the gear and head out to install the first AI-enabled game camera and check on some of the smart tags.

ADAM: So Chip, this came up green and then said it was connected.

CHIP: We were picking cattle that Adam knew had a protective instinct and would run at a coyote or a wolf.

ADAM: Right. Like E19, green C21: there are three or four cows that their protection is just through the roof.

KRISTAN: We look at the app to see what type of signal shows up. These cows are not exactly excited to see us walk up.

ADAM: So what I'm seeing, what I like right now too, is these cows, now that we've disturbed them, see how fast they're pairing up. The cows are finding their calves and the calves are nursing.

What we're finding out is it takes a little bit of everything. That's what we're finding; that seems to be the model with the wolves. It's a little bit of everything. Not everything all at once, but everything in right stages.

So, as we were standing here, this is what I love about the cell phone game cameras. As we're standing here talking about this, there was a deer right over here, and it popped up on camera. So, that goes to show you, if that was a wolf, we would be hauling butt over there, or getting something going to haze it.

KRISTAN: As the long summer day drags on, we head to one more site, driving farther back into some aspens and conifers, crossing public lands and then onto Adam’s property.

ADAM: And that is also the Continental Divide Trail.

KRISTAN: We get to a spot that Adam thinks will work for a camera, both for being a strategic place that might deter wolves and for having a cell signal.

CHIP: Got a little notch in the aspen.

ADAM: I like that.

CHIP: Perfect. That's great.

ADAM: Moment of truth. Don't fall off the ladder.

ADAM: Multi-carrier searching… we got three bars of something. Good.

KRISTAN: Standing in this area of North Park, watching Adam adjust solar panels and calibrate cameras, hoping for some sort of cell connection, you can see the work it all takes. He isn't just protecting his cattle, he's testing solutions that might help ranchers across the West navigate life with wolves. And he’s got Chip here to help provide some support.

ADAM: It's a lot of stars to align, but we're definitely gonna try.

CHIP: Colorado, via this ballot introduction, has stirred the pot, and ranchers are dealing with the effects of that: good and bad. But it's also interesting to see the efforts in Colorado to address these issues in an innovative way.

ADAM: There needs to be a mechanism that gets the people that voted for it to help support it. And that is with non-lethal tools, with other costs associated with it.

CHIP: I think the tools are starting to rise up that can be funded by the public, and in doing that, it's going to show across both sides of the divide where that middle ground can be.

KRISTAN: Adam’s looking at the long game, at any sort of tool that can be automatically deployed so he can spend his time on other things.

ADAM: It gives me an opportunity to go do something else other than being [with] our cows 24/7.

KRISTAN: From cracker shells to Metallica playlists, from range riders to AI-powered deterrents, there are a lot of tools being deployed and tested. But beyond all the technology, what strikes me most is how human this story remains. It's Shelby, staying in the field for 24 days straight because she doesn't want anything to happen on her watch. It's Courtney’s belief in the compassion for one another to bridge divides and give wolves a chance. It’s Chip, showing up to help problem-solve. It's Adam, exhausted, but still willing to try one more tool, test one more solution.

ADAM: I like the motto on this camera: “You don't have to be there.”

KRISTAN: Next time on Gray Territory, we bring you the final episode on a story that is still unfolding, along with the hopes and fears about what lies ahead.

ERIC ODELL: Wolves don't recognize political boundaries. These are straight lines on a map. Wolves react to what they see on the landscape.

BECKY NIEMIEC: We're looking for these quick fixes. But I think we need a collective mindset shift away from thinking of conflict as something that one group can win over the other or something that we can quickly fix.

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute for Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. To learn more visit lawsofnotion.org. I’m your host Kristan Uhlenbrock. This episode was produced by me, Tricia Waddell, and Jordan Marks. Sound design by Seth Samuel. Additional support from Kate Long and Max Neumeyer. Original music composed and performed by Brett Kretzer with Andy Reiner and by Dr. Joy Adams. Additional tracks by Epidemic Sounds. For a full list of credits, check out the show notes.

Episode 3: Can We Coexist with Wolves?

Episode 5: Beyond the Divide