Scientists Differ on Wolf Management

Wolf advocates say turning management over to the states will lead to a slaughter of wolves and a dramatically lower wolf population than today.

Wolf opponents say wolf numbers have grown so high the population will never quit growing and will decimate big game herds.

But what does science tell us about the future of wolves in the Northern Rockies? Two wolf biologists with the best of credentials — David Mech and Doug Smith — have two different views of how wolf management will proceed in the region.

Mech, senior research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey and a University of Minnesota adjunct professor, is regarded as the pre-eminent wolf biologist in the United States, if not the world.

His study of wolf-moose relationships on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior, redefined science’s understanding of predator-prey relationships.

He has argued for decades that for wolves to be recovered in the lower 48 states, they need to be controlled, hunted and legally killed when they continually kill livestock.

They are very prolific and actually become more productive in the face of rising mortality.

Once their numbers become large, such as the current 1,500 wolves that live in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, their population will continue to grow as long as it can expand and it has a healthy food source.

“They may never go down,” Mech said. “I don’t know any way you’ll get them down legally.”

Smith is the chief wolf researcher in Yellowstone National Park. He has studied Yellowstone’s wolves since they were reintroduced in 1995. A former student and colleague of Mech, he disagrees that the growth of the wolf population cannot be halted or reversed.

“They stopped population growth in Wyoming through legal killing outside Yellowstone Park,” Smith said.

The situation is different in the West than in the Midwest and the Arctic, where Mech has most of his experience, Smith said.

“Wolves are a lot more vulnerable here than they are there,” Smith said. “They all have to come down to valley bottoms here, and everybody knows it.” Despite his differences with Mech, Smith said he is in philosophical agreement with the philosophy of reducing wolf conflicts and allowing them to thrive where they aren’t causing problems.

Mech agrees.

“I think that’s a good approach,” Mech said. “We’ve been advocating that for years.

“There are places where wolves can’t live with humans, there are places wolves should be, and places in between.”

From the Idaho Statesman

Yellowstone River Receives Favorable Flow Forecast

The Yellowstone River should be running cold, high and more robust than last year when snow starts to melt this spring.

Mountain snowpack that feeds the river that flows out of Yellowstone Park all the way to its confluence with the mighty Missouri stands at 100 percent of average and around 140 percent of last year.

Forecast for April to July, assuming normal moisture, predicts stream flow on the Yellowstone of 89 to 101 percent of normal, said Roy Kaiser, water supply specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Bozeman.

The Upper Yellowstone has slightly better snowpack at 105 percent of average. Stream flow forecast for that part of the river, from Yellowstone Park to Custer, is for 89 to 106 percent of average. The Lower Yellowstone, the stretch from Custer to the Missouri, has 96 percent of normal snowpack and a stream-flow forecast of 88 to 102 percent of normal.

Stream flow forecasts, based on the amount of snow water in the mountain pack, are released by NRCS on the first of each month as the snow builds in the winter and melts in the spring. Kaiser said that by Feb. 1, 60 to 65 percent of winter snowpack should be in the mountains.

Snowpack in the Yellowstone Basin reaches its peak about the second week in April. It’s usually melted out in the first week or so of July. In the last several years, the snow has disappeared two to three weeks early. Kaiser has hopes for a more normal melt this year.

“It’s been a nice cool year,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

From the Billings Gazette

37 Bison Headed to Slaughter; More Expected to Meet Same Fate

Thirty-seven bison from Yellowstone National Park were shipped to slaughter on Monday, and dozens more may be shipped today.

The bison were captured Friday and Sunday along the park’s northern border as part of an 8-year-old plan by federal agencies and the state of Montana intended to reduce the risk of bison spreading brucellosis to cattle in the area.

The Park Service captured 54 bison on Friday and put them in the Stephens Creek capture facility near Gardiner. Of those, 17 calves that tested negative for exposure to brucellosis were set aside and will be sent to a state and federal research facility at Corwin Springs.

The rest were not tested for the disease and were trucked to slaughter Monday morning.

On Sunday, 41 more bison were captured near the park’s northern edge. Any calves that test negative will be taken to Corwin Springs, and the rest will be shipped to slaughter, probably today, Al Nash, a Yellowstone spokesman, said Monday afternoon.

The bison are being managed under the Interagency Bison Management Plan approved in 2000. The intent is to keep a viable, wild bison herd and maintain Montana’s brucellosis-free status, Nash said.

About 1,000 bison were taken out of the herd in 2005 during a busy year for bison hazing and capture, especially along the park’s northern edge.

The population rebounded, though, and aerial surveys last July and August estimated there were about 4,700 in Yellowstone. Inclement weather has kept crews from conducting similar surveys this winter.

Nash said the latest activity won’t have an impact on the herd’s overall health.

“Removal of some animals from this population is not a threat to the long-term viability or genetic diversity of this herd,” Nash said.

The Buffalo Field Campaign, a bison advocacy group, criticized the Park Service for again “caving in” to livestock interests over the interest of Yellowstone’s bison herd.

By the end of this week, more bison will be shipped to slaughter than are killed in Montana’s bison hunt, predicted Mike Mease, the group’s co-founder.

“They’re going to kill every buffalo that comes out of the park this year,” Mease said. “It’s really insanity.”

Forests Under Assault

Photo of Avalanche Peak area of Yellowstone Park taken 7/14/07, showing decimation of whitebark pines from mountain pine beetles. Courtesy Ecoflight.

These are good days if you’re a tree-killing bark beetle.

In 2007, the native pests ate deeper into the region’s drought-weakened forests, choking the life out millions of trees in one of the largest outbreaks in decades.

In some places, the rate of spread slowed down, but that may be primarily because the insects ran out of live host trees, said Ken Gibson, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Missoula.

Elsewhere, the bark beetles have kicked it up a notch, including in high-elevation whitebark pine trees, which are an important food source for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park and which help control the flow of the region’s melting snowpack.

The end of the infestation may not come with the end of the drought, which is now in its eighth year, but when the rapacious beetles, each smaller than a grain of rice, run out of trees to ravage, Gibson said.

The beetles in parts of Montana and Wyoming have been in a frenzy since the late 1990s, part of a larger trend from Arizona to Alaska, where milder winters allow them to survive and breed faster to attack thirsty trees that don’t have the same defenses as they would during wetter periods.

The beetles are one of nature’s native regulators, perpetuating life-and-death cycles and spurring nutrient recycling.

They typically kill a tree by boring through the bark and mounting a large-scale occupation that stifles the flow of nutrients.

They go through periodic outbreaks, including those in the Yellowstone area in the 1930s and 1970s, but the latest event is odd because so many species are flourishing at once: mountain pine beetles, Douglas fir beetles, western balsam bark beetle and others.

“It seems like it’s usually one or the other,” said Roy Renkin, a vegetation expert in Yellowstone.

Forest officials thought the bugs might be on the decline after parts of Western Montana and Idaho saw near-normal amounts of precipitation in 2005 and 2006.

But last year, warmer and drier conditions set in again and more than 1 million acres were beset by beetles, said Gibson, who compiles an annual tally of aerial surveys looking at beetle kills.

The actual number is probably higher because only about 70 percent of the region was surveyed, Gibson said.

The shiny black-shelled mountain pine beetle is doing the most damage, occupying more than 891,000 acres and killing about 2.7 million trees, mostly lodgepole pine, including in Yellowstone.

“What struck me about the mountain pine beetle is the increased activity in the lower-elevation lodgepole,” Renkin said.

Of particular concern is the effect the beetle is having on whitebark pine stands in and around Yellowstone.

In some places, such as around Avalanche Peak in the park’s southeastern corner, the beetles killed more than 170 whitebark pine trees per acre, roughly 96 percent, within two to three years.

Effects of Yellowstone Drought Multifaceted, Cumulative

During Glenn Plumb’s first summer in Yellowstone National Park in 1999, he stopped at a small lake east of Mammoth Hot Springs and watched in wonder as a moose, standing in water up to its withers, munched on submerged plants.

“I was blown away,” said Plumb, a biologist who is now chief of Yellowstone’s natural resource branch.

The roadside lake has since dried up and disappeared along with the trumpeter swans and other animals that made the watering hole a regular stop.

No wonder it’s called Phantom Lake.

An eight-year drought has left scores of other ponds and wetlands dry and thirsty in Yellowstone. It also stands to force shifts in wildlife, the frequency of wildfires, the timing of mountain snowmelt and the growth of nutritious vegetation.

“Drought inherently is not a bad thing,” Plumb said on a recent visit to the snow-covered lakebed. “But with long-term drought you start to see these accumulating signals.”

Casual visitors to the park may have picked up on some of them.

Parched streams and high temperatures last summer killed hundreds of fish and prompted park officials to temporarily close some waters to fishing.

Pothole wetlands in some areas have vanished, stealing prime habitat for the park’s struggling trumpeter swans.

There’s less vegetation in the Gardiner basin for wildlife to munch on.

Drought-weakened conifers have fallen victim to increasing numbers of tree-killing bark beetles.

Drought also opens the door for non-native species to gain a foothold.

“Any time there’s a shift, there are winners and losers in every ecological community,” said Bob Garrott, a professor of ecology at Montana State University who has studied Yellowstone’s ungulates for about 20 years.

That’s not to say that anything is simple.

The effects of drought can be difficult for scientists to tease out and isolate in a place as complex as Yellowstone, where drought is nothing new.

The area’s history is rife with rapid swings between long stretches of wet and dry weather and a few years in between that make up average conditions, according to a study published last year.

Researchers in that study pieced together Yellowstone’s climate history over the last 800 or so years by examining rings from old trees in and around the park.

The work revealed regular wet and dry phases lasting 10 to 15 years.

Precipitation levels in the latest drought roughly match dry periods back to the year 1173, he said.

What’s different now, though, is that summertime temperatures are, on average, warmer and winters are milder, allowing snowpack to melt weeks earlier than normal, said Steve Gray, who worked on the study when he was a U.S. Geological Survey scientist before he was hired as Wyoming’s state climatologist.

“That can really stress these natural systems,” Gray said.

But those are some of the kinds of changes that can be expected if predictions for a warming global climate play out in the West, he said. Yellowstone will probably see more subtle signs of climate change than Glacier National Park with its shrinking glaciers.

“The consequences of long-term drought and long-term climate change will be in many cases slow-rolling events,” Gray said.

Public Invited to Comment on State Wildfire Management

In the wake of one of the most costly fire seasons on record, a Montana legislative committee wants ideas from the public about how the state might improve the way it manages wildfires.

The Montana Legislature, during a September 2007 special session, created the Fire Suppression Interim Committee to investigate issues including the use of firefighting resources, fighting fire on public and private land and forest management policies, among other things, according to the Legislative Information Office in Helena.

“We hope a broad spectrum of Montanans will get involved in this dialogue, because we need their help and advice.” Sen. John Cobb, of Augusta, who chairs the committee, said in a press release.

The deadline for submitting ideas for inclusion on the list is Feb. 1.

The committee will compile a list of the citizen recommendations to consider during public hearings in the spring.

Last year, 1,763 fires burned about 740,000 acres across the state. The cost of fighting the fires surpassed $100 million for the first time in years, according to the release.

Submit comments by e-mail lheisel@mt.gov; or by regular mail to Fire Suppression Committee, c/o Leanne Heisel, Legislative Services Division, P.O. Box 201706, Helena MT 59620-1706.

FWP Extends Wolf Hunt Comment Period

The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks has extended the public comment period on its proposal to establish a wolf hunting season contingent upon federal delisting.

Public comment will be accepted until Feb. 13, the agency announced Friday.

In December, FWP proposed a wolf season, if and when the gray wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — and parts of Washington, Utah and Oregon — are delisted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The USFWS said last year that since the wolf population had exceeded recovery goals and all the potential threats to it had been resolved, it would seek to delist the wolf in 2008.

Details on the wolf hunting proposal, and opportunity to comment, are available here.

Send comments by mail to: Montana FWP, Wildlife Division, Attn: Public Comment, PO Box 200701, Helena MT 59620-0701.

Lawmakers Urge Delay on Wolf Delisting

Five congressmen from the House Natural Resources Committee want to delay a plan to remove gray wolves in the Northern Rockies from the federal endangered-species list.

In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the congressmen wrote that states “hostile to wolf conservation” could reduce today’s 1,500 wolves to “as few as 300″ if the predators lose protected status.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which Kempthorne oversees, plans to announce the delisting of wolves in the Northern Rockies next month.

That would allow Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and Montana to host public hunts for the animals. The states already are setting hunting seasons and quotas.

The Dec. 17 letter to Kempthorne was signed by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va.; Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.; Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.; Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.; and Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J.

Top Scientists Meeting to Discuss Yellowstone’s Mysterious Microbes

For years, it was assumed that nothing could live in Yellowstone’s bubbling, boiling thermal features that were as forbidding as they were fascinating.

But in the 1960s, a microbiologist named Thomas Brock isolated a heat-loving bacterium called Thermus aquaticus from Mushroom Pool that in the late 1980s was key to development of DNA fingerprinting. The technique is now a central part of understanding the human genome, diagnosis of genetic defects and identifying criminal suspects.

Since the early 1990s, interest in Yellowstone’s bizarre superhot systems, and the tiny organisms that find a way to survive in them, has only intensified. Ever-improving technology to explore and understand them has also paved the way for new discoveries.

“This is the research that has the potential to change people’s lives,” said Tom Oliff, head of the Yellowstone Center for Resources.

The lives of tiny organisms that survive in some of the planet’s harshest environments provide tantalizing clues about the origins life on Earth, the possibility of life on other planets and offer a dizzying array of implications for advancements in medicine, reducing pollution and even growing fruits and vegetables in warming climates.

On Thursday, about 100 of the world’s top geothermal scientists arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs for a three-day conference about Yellowstone, which hosts the largest and most varied collection of geothermal features in the world.

“For microbes, Yellowstone is a treasure trove of diversity,” said Matt Kane, of the National Science Foundation. “It’s really the jewel in the crown of microbial habitats.”

One estimate says that less than 1 percent of Yellowstone’s microbial life has been explored. Some quibble with that figure, but it’s nonetheless an indication of the vast number of discoveries waiting to be made.

There used to be only a handful of researchers interested in Yellowstone’s heat-loving critters. Today, about 20 percent of the park’s 200 or so annual research permits involve geothermal work.

“It attracts people interested in different things,” said Bill Inskeep, director of the Research Coordination Network at Montana State University. Inskeep is a geochemist and organizer of the conference, the third since 2003.

Much of the work focuses on understanding how the microbes - millions could be scooped up in a spoonful of water - survive in an environment that can be hot, acidic and sometimes lacking in oxygen.

“These microbes are living in a world that’s beyond harsh,” said Tim McDermott, microbiologist at MSU. “It’s just nasty - and they’re thriving in it.”

Wolves in the Crosshairs

With gray wolves in the Northern Rockies poised to come off the endangered species list in the coming weeks, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are moving ahead with plans to begin hunts as early as this fall.

It’s still unclear, though, how the states will use the hunts to manage the population in the long term and how many people will plunk down the money for a tag.

“It’s certainly uncharted territory for Montana, at least in recent times,” said Quentin Kujala, management bureau chief for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wildlife division.

There are more than 1,500 wolves in the Northern Rockies, but hunting and other measures will likely keep the population between 880 and 1,250 after delisting, according to Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Federal officials said wolves in the three states are recovered and ready to come off the endangered species list. The delisting rule is expected to be published around Feb. 20 and take effect 30 days later.

The decision will mean that Montana, Wyoming and Idaho officials will take over management. A key part of all three states’ plans is instituting a hunt.

It’s up to states to decide how the hunts will be carried out, Bangs said.

“The only issue we care about is they made a commitment to manage at or above certain levels,” Bangs said.

In Montana, where there are about 400 wolves, hunting would be allowed if there are 15 or more breeding pairs in the state. At the end of 2006, there were 21.

The Legislature set wolf tags at $19 for residents and $350 for nonresidents.

The hunting season would run from Sept. 15 to Nov. 30. A trapping season would be Dec. 1 to Dec. 31.

So far, it’s unknown what the level of interest is.

Kujala said there hasn’t been an outpouring of inquiries about the proposed wolf hunt but that may change after a series of public meetings that kick off this month.

“It’s a little early in the process,” he said.

Sometime this summer, FWP officials will look at establishing the number of wolf tags that will be available based on how many wolves there are in the state.

Wolf kills will have to be reported within 12 hours and the hide and skull will have to be shown to an FWP official within 10 days.

Public meetings have been held in Idaho for that state’s proposed hunt. Reaction was predictably mixed. Rules are expected to be near completion around the time a delisting rule is finalized.

“If delisting were to happen, I believe we’ll be ready,” said Ed Mitchell, a spokesman for the Idaho Fish and Game Department.

In Wyoming, the Game and Fish Department later this month will begin setting up the rules to allow for a wolf hunt.

All three states could be implementing a hunt this fall.

In Idaho, where there are more than 600 wolves, hunters will probably kill the most wolves of the three states, Bangs said. Montana, though, with its open plains and more territory accessible to hunters, may see the highest percentage of harvested wolves, he said.

The biggest wrinkle, though, could be a lawsuit after the delisting rule is finalized — a development that most everyone involved says seems inevitable.