Wolf Delisting Becomes a Reality

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Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies were removed from the endangered species list Friday, turning management over to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

The delisting follows a dramatic 13-year recovery effort that drew international attention and generated a wide spectrum of emotions, from elation at seeing the animals back in the wildlands around Yellowstone National Park to fury over the wolves preying on livestock and other wildlife.

Several environmental groups have filed notice that they intend to sue to restore federal protection. They contend there are too few for public hunting, and that the animal could be driven toward extinction.

State wildlife officials have said that wolf-hunting licenses will not be sold in Montana until the looming lawsuit is resolved.

“It’s important to understand that wolves are now an official part of the Montana wildlife environment,” Jeff Hagener, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks director, said Friday in a prepared statement. “The wolf will be managed like Montana’s other wildlife species.”

The intention is to ensure that wolves can only be “purposely killed legally” during official hunting or trapping seasons, when killing or harassing livestock or to protect human life, Hagener said. However, such incidents will have to be reported to FWP within 72 hours.

Both those who argue that federal protections should have been removed from the wolf long ago, and those who say lifting them was premature, agree on one thing: For the wolf to survive under state management, it’s critical for the state to pay the bills of ranchers who pay the price for its return.

“This piece needs to work for the overall wolf management plan to work,” said John Edwards, Montana’s first livestock loss mitigation coordinator.

Throughout history, people have had a love-hate attitude toward wolves, said Carolyn Sime, the state’s wolf program coordinator.

It’s the goal of the state, she said, to prevent a pendulum swing in the other direction by keeping the wolf population from getting too large and compensating landowners who are making sacrifices to have wolves back.

“If people are not willing to live with wolves, they kill them,” she said.

As Europeans began settling the U.S., they poisoned, trapped and shot wolves, causing a once widespread species to be eradicated from most of its range in the Lower 48. They were gone from Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, as well as adjacent southwestern Canada, by the 1930s.

“People hated them,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, when the government announced in February that wolves were being delisted. “We came from areas from Europe that hated wolves.”

Values changed, and the wolf was given federal protection in 1974. At that time, only a few hundred wolves remained in Minnesota. Those animals were delisted as “threatened” last year.

Bangs came to Montana from Alaska in 1988, to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort to restore the “endangered” gray wolves in the West.

Recovery efforts first began in Canada in the 1960s. Wolves there began dispersing into Montana, with the first two packs denning in Glacier National Park and on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in the late 1980s.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced wolves from Canada into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995.

With federal protection limiting human-caused mortalities, wolves flourished. Nobody was surprised. If mortality is kept in check, the number of wolves can more than double in just two years, officials said. Today Montana has about 420 wolves in about 73 packs, including 39 breeding pairs. Regionally, there are thought to be about 1,500 wolves.

“Wolves are just pretty incredible animals,” Bangs said.

The cost of the wolf recovery effort in the Northern Rockies was $27 million. Bangs said he believes too much was spent, but says the public demanded it.

Managing wolves will cost the state about $1 million a year, said Sime, who added that the state is hoping the federal government will help fund management efforts. Montana, she notes, is one of the few places in the country where Americans who called for restoring the wolf can see the animals.

“We’d like the American public to help,” she said.

Montana has been managing wolves, using federal guidelines, since 2004, so the transition between state and federal rules that began Friday will be “seamless,” Sime said.

What is new in the state’s wolf management effort are a seven-member Livestock Loss Reduction and Mitigation Board, and the role of Edwards, who will work closely with that board.

The price the state will pay for livestock animals killed by wolves kill be determined by how much they would have likely sold for at the Billings auction.
Under state management, USDA Wildlife Services will continue to verify whether wolves were responsible for losses. The size of the prey, tracks, and canine teeth marks are part of the forensic science conducted at a depredation scene.

Ranchers will get 100 percent compensation for both confirmed and probable losses. Under the old compensation program, which was privately run by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, ranchers received 100 percent for confirmed kills and 50 percent for “probable” losses to wolves.

“There’s always losses that can’t be verified, and this program is supposed to help with that also,” said Elaine Allestad, chairwoman of the Livestock Loss Reduction and Mitigation Board.

The state Legislature allocated $30,000 to fund reimbursements and created a $5 million trust fund. But to date, that trust account is empty. The eventual goal is to build it up through private donations and use the interest to fund operations.

The basis behind the state’s program is the same idea Defenders of Wildlife had when it launched its compensation campaign in 1987: Sharing the responsibility for restoring wolves to the landscape while fostering greater tolerance for wolves in the ranching community.

“Compensation was a critical component of the program of wolf restoration,” said Suzanne Asha Stone, a Boise, Idaho-based wolf conservation specialist for Defenders of Wildlife. “It helped people overcome their fears and certainly overcome the financial risk of having wolves back.”

Over the last 21 years, Defenders of Wildlife doled out approximately $1 million to ranchers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Defenders, which is discontinuing its compensation program in Montana but continuing it in other states, has pledged to contribute $100,000 to help Montana begin its program.

As the Montana program evolves, property damage losses as a result of wolves, such as broken fences and veterinarian bills for injured livestock, will be funded.

Money also will be made available for livestock producers to purchase guard dogs, hire range riders and install electric flags called fladry, which have shown promise in keeping wolves away from vulnerable livestock in pastures.

“If you just rely on lethal control, more wolves die, more livestock die,” said Stone, noting that Defenders of Wildlife spent $81,000 on conflict prevention efforts last year in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

Lane Adamson, the director of the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, said range riders have been effective in monitoring summer grazing operations threatened by wolves. The riders spend four to five months in the area. Last year, the riders discovered a wolf den in the middle of a grazing allotment, but because of the riders’ presence, there were no depredations or wolves killed, Adamson said.

He said prevention efforts such as range riders are critical if wolves and ranchers are to share the same landscape.

Statewide, wolves killed 75 cattle in 2007, up from 32 in 2006, while confirmed sheep losses rose from four to 27, according to FWP.

Wolves account for a fraction of total livestock deaths, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Montana cattle producers reported losing 66,000 cattle and calves to all causes in a 2005 survey, with 3,000, or 4.5 percent, lost to predators. Coyotes were responsible for 54 percent of the 1,300 calves lost to predation, while all predators, including an unknown number of wolves, were responsible for the rest.

The state’s 2007 wolf-activity report points out that the restored wolf population represents a new source of livestock mortality, and the state’s wolf population increased 34 percent in 2007.

Wolves also can lead to indirect losses through missing livestock or poor livestock performance because of the stress of having wolves in the area, the report states.

“What we’re always hoping to do is decrease the risk that livestock producers have now that wolves are back on the landscape,” Sime said.

Of the 102 known wolf mortalities in Montana in 2007, 73 were killed for killing or chasing livestock. Seven of the wolves were illegally killed, according to FWP.

From the Great Falls Tribune

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