During its July meetings, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission made decisions on two long-standing debates around its management of a group of mesocarnivores hunted for their fur.
While the commission voted to reject a ban on the commercial sale of fur and imposed a new daily limit for recreational hunting of the 17 furbearer species, one question persisted throughout the discussions: Does the state have sufficient data on these species?
Furbearers include species like beavers, fox, martens, badgers, mink and more and are grouped together as mesocarnivores — sharing high reproductive output, high natural mortality rates and qualities as habitat generalists.
All 17 furbearer species can be hunted with the purchase of a $10 permit on top of a small game license in Colorado. In its 2024-25 fiscal year, Parks and Wildlife sold 19,620 furbearer permits. While hunting of these species historically had no limits, the agency’s new regulations will now limit recreational hunters to killing two of each species per day during the appropriate seasons.
In a July memo to the commission, Parks and Wildlife Director Laura Clellan wrote that “current annual harvest rates range from 0.6 to 5.8% of the conservative population projections,” and that there is no scientific evidence that the current level of hunting is causing population declines.
The daily limit imposed was a means to develop social tolerance for recreational hunting of furbearers rather than for a biological need, according to the agency staff and commissioners.
Most of Colorado’s data on how many furbearers are hunted each year comes through its annual voluntary harvest survey, which Matt Eckert, Parks and Wildlife’s deputy assistant director, said provides a “statistically robust harvest estimate for each species included.”
Bobcats have been the lone exception, as hunters must report and submit all bobcats killed for inspection. However, in implementing its new Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy, the commission unanimously voted in July to require mandatory checks of recreationally hunted beavers, which the wildlife agency will use to consider annual harvest limits by drainage.
In the discussions surrounding furbearer management, Parks and Wildlife has faced criticism from wildlife advocates that it lacks sufficient population data for some furbearer species to determine that hunting was not impacting populations.
“Good data is essential,” said Sam Miller, the senior carnivore campaign manager for the Center for Biological Diversity, who petitioned the agency to ban the commercial sale of fur, during the meeting’s public comment.
Miller added that having data on all 17 species was “essential to implementing sustainable management of species. The only way to get this data is through mandatory reporting.”
Eckert addressed many of these concerns in a lengthy presentation and said the agency is following best practices for estimates of furbearers.
“Commissioners were concerned about a lack of certainty of population size, or abundance estimates, for any of the furbearer species, and how we can prove that harvest from a population is sustainable, if we don’t know the number of individuals in that population,” Eckert said. “Generally, this is not how wildlife management works, especially for furbearers. We rarely know exactly how many individuals are in a population, and populations constantly change over time.”
Specifically, with furbearers, Eckert said the challenge is that the species’ population size is driven less by hunting and more by factors like habitat changes and death from vehicle collisions, disease and other factors, “to the point that there are often very large population swings year to year.”
This, he added, would likely make any population estimates obsolete by the time they’re finalized, as they take years of scientific study to conduct.
“We use very conservative furbearer densities, published in scientific literature that are relevant to Colorado habitats, and apply those densities to a conservative estimate of the geographic area of habitat that the species uses,” he said.
Conducting more in-depth population surveys for furbearers like it does for other species, Eckert said, would “actually divert limited resources away from on-the-ground conservation efforts like habitat restoration that would benefit species.”
Additionally, Mark Vieira, Parks and Wildlife’s carnivore and furbearer management, said that the data it has on bobcats, which he called the agency’s “most data-rich” furbearer due to the mandatory checks, do not indicate that hunters are having localized or statewide impacts on the species. This, he said, is “instructive” because more bobcats are hunted than other furbearer species and live in lower densities than many of the others.
“So while we do not have mandatory check information to do this exercise with the other 16 species, fortunately, the one that we are using and the exercise that we just described is, by its very nature, more conservative,” he said.
Many public commenters spoke in support of Parks and Wildlife’s biologists and science.
“I can say that the actions of this agency, of CPW, follow very high standards and no wildlife population is ever put in jeopardy,” said Martin Lowney, former state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services in Colorado. “…They’ve been protected by the management of this agency.”
Some commissioners and public commenters did ask the Colorado Department of Agriculture to implement some kind of reporting requirements for the nine furbearer species that can be killed without a permit if they’re causing agriculture or property damage.
Currently, there are no requirements, which Commissioner Gabriel Otero — in making a plea to the Department of Agriculture to find a way to collect information — said has led to a data “gap.”
“Avocational trappers on public lands are kind of getting sandwiched here because there’s this gap, and I know people won’t want to call it a gap, but it is,” he said. “We don’t know what’s being taken from the private land. … We need something there because I feel like that’ll paint a clearer picture of what is affecting the different populations, and then we can address a lot of those concerns.”
As public commenters requested mandatory checks for all 17 furbearer species, not just bobcats and beavers, Eckert said the newly passed requirements for beavers could serve as a pilot for other species.
“This is a great example to start with and then expand from there,” he said. “There’s a lot that has to happen to implement a mandatory check for a single species, so we can report back on how it’s going for beavers and maybe reassess where we are from there.”
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