By Emi Gruender
Pictured above, a Colorado Wolverine.
Starting in 2026, the Department of Natural Resources’ Colorado Parks and Wildlife plans to reintroduce this apex predator in several national parks across Colorado, including the Rocky Mountain National Park, the Elk and West Elk Mountains, and the San Juan Range. For centuries prior, the wolverine had been completely extinct in wild Colorado, largely due to unregulated hunting, trapping, and poisoning in the early 1900s. But with Bill SB24-171, backed with bipartisan support, Colorado is moving to slowly reintroduce wolverines to an ecosystem that they have been absent from for over 100 years.
Wolverines are medium-sized members of the weasel family, about the size of a labrador. With sharp talons that inspired one of the most beloved DC Heroes of all time, the wolverine ironically is only a scavenger, specializing in carcasses and corpses and all that jazz.
However, reestablishing a relatively “new” predator to the ecosystem is a delicate process. “It’s really never been formally tried before, so there are a lot of unknowns about how exactly this should work. There is no blueprint or recipe for how to do this,” says Bob Inman, coordinator for the wolverine reintroduction at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Though there might not be any urgent ecological disaster that must be addressed with the reintroduction of a very tenacious predator, it is still crucial to many conservationists that the last few specimens of the wolverine species survive—not necessarily for humans’ immediate benefit, but for the environment. Though legislation passing through the highly divided General Assemblies of States may be difficult, at least they can agree on one thing: our habitat as we found it should be what we strive to protect.