What do wolves mean for Colorado?
Editor’s note: This article was originally written for High Country News. To read the full article, click here. Last April, in a narrow mountain valley in northwestern Colorado, Cristina Eisenberg was searching for scat. The biologist and two members of her field crew had set up a kilometer-long transect through elk habitat. It was a raw day, cold and windy with spells of freezing rain, and the biologists had been moving through meadows for hours, looking for signs of elk, deer, coyote, and mountain lions, through their droppings. This was old-fashioned wildlife biology — hardly glamorous work — but in it lay the story of the landscape, of the pursuers and the pursued. Finally, on the edge of an aspen grove, one of the biologists spotted a banana-sized scat, perhaps two months old. Eisenberg had seen thousands of droppings like this one, but not here, not in Colorado. Everything about it indicated a creature that had been extirpated from the state more than 70 years ago. Everything abo
