Thursday, May 24,2012
Who's afraid?
By Elizabeth Miller
Almost
40 years passed before anyone thought to miss the gray wolf. Wolves,
along with grizzlies, had been deliberately eradicated in western states
in the name of protecting people and their livestock. The last wolf in
Colorado was killed in the 1930s. By the time they were added to the
list of endangered species protected by the Endangered Species Act in
1974, they existed only in a small corner of northeastern Minnesota.
In the decades that
followed, humans would undertake concentrated efforts to undo the damage
of their ancestors, reintroducing gray wolves in Idaho and at
Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming in 1995 and 1996. But the move has
been met with polarized responses: for every conservation group that
would have howled in celebration, there was a hunter or a rancher
loading a round into the chamber.
Although Colorado
residents have long expressed positive feelings toward having wolves
returned to the state, Colorado’s Wildlife Commission has come down on
the opposite side, leaving Colorado out of deliberate reintroduction
efforts. Were wolves to return to Colorado, they’d have to arrive on
their own, migrating from the reestablished packs in neighboring states.
And as Wyoming once again puts forward a wolf management plan which, if
approved, would deprive wolves in that state of the protections of the
Endangered Species Act, that path becomes more harrowing, and the
likelihood of wolves gaining a foothold in the southern Rocky Mountains
decreases.
Wolves now occupy more
than 110,000 square miles in the northern Rocky Mountains, most of it
public land. By December 2009, there were at least 1,706 wolves and more
than 100 breeding pairs in 242 packs, and in April 2010, an estimated
600 new pups were born. That number is five and a half times the target
recovery goal from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of 300 wolves and 30
breeding pairs over the three states.
The return was so
robust that the states of Idaho and Montana were able to successfully
argue in 2009 that the gray wolf was established in the northern Rocky
Mountains — Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and Oregon and a
small part of south central Utah. Federal protections for the species
under the Endangered Species Act were removed — except in Wyoming,
because the state did not have an adequate management plan for
maintaining wolves. Wolf hunting was allowed for the first time since
the 1930s in the fall of 2009 in Montana and Idaho — 206 wolves were
killed, in addition to the 270 killed for attacking livestock that
year.
But a year later, in
August 2010, a Montana district court ruled that the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service had unlawfully delisted wolves from the Endangered
Species Act and those protections were restored and hunting stopped.
But last year, while Congress was repeatedly stumbling over passing an
appropriations bill that would keep the United States from defaulting
on its loans, Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson tacked Sec. 1713 onto
the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011. Without ever
mentioning the words “wolf ” or “endangered species,” the bill
reinstated the 2009 decision on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service to delist gray wolves in Idaho and Montana.
So now Wyoming wants in on the action.
They’ve crafted a plan
that calls for wolf protection — in a “Wolf Trophy Big Game Management
Area,” a corner of the state encircling Yellowstone National Park, in
which wolves can only be hunted down to 100 individuals and 10 breeding
pairs. That area may have as many as 200 wolves now and the state some
350. In the rest of the state, wolves will be classified as predatory
animals — along with coyotes, jackrabbits, porcupine, raccoons, red
foxes, skunks and stray cats, according to Wyoming statutes. Any gray
wolf caught doing damage to private property can be immediately killed
by the property owner, and if a wolf is caught harassing, injuring,
maiming or killing livestock or domesticated animals, or just
“occupying a chronic wolf predation area,” the owner may notify the
Wyoming Fish and Game Commission, which can issue a Lethal Take Permit.
Public comment has
just closed on the latest draft of the plan. The first draft was
rejected because it presented a “substantial risk to the population” of
wolves in Wyoming. The new addendum argues that of course wolves will
be managed to prevent a population drop below a certain level. If only
to keep the federal government from reassessing the decision to delist
wolves.
“In large part, it’s a
plan to contain wolves and greatly contract their range and greatly
reduce their numbers,” says Michael Robinson, conservation advocate at
the Center for Biological Diversity, which has come out strongly
opposed to the idea of delisting wolves. “It will, in effect, end the
possibility of recovery in Colorado.”
Douglas Smith, team
leader for the wolf project at Yellowstone National Park, has spent
more than three decades studying wolves. About 100 wolves live in
Yellowstone National Park. If a wolf leaves the park, it falls to the
state officials to monitor the wolf, and its chances of survival
decline.
“In the past it was conflicts — illegal killing and livestock control, and now it’s illegal killing and livestock control and legal
hunting,” Smith says. “So wolves survive less well outside of
Yellowstone National Park, and I don’t think that’s a secret.”
Given their propensity to move to areas without wolves, the wolf-free Colorado landscape looks like pretty ripe wolf habitat.
“But it’s a long way,” Smith says.
“Wolves have gotten there from the Yellowstone area, so they can make it. It’s just that they don’t survive very well.”
It’s possible, but
unlikely, that wolves could relocate here without gradually moving into
areas south of Yellowstone and dispersing as younger generations set
out to look for mates and territories to call their own.
“Wolves typically
disperse and travel as loners, so to have a breeding pair in Colorado
would take an individual male and an individual female both leaving
where they came from and making it to Colorado and then meeting there,”
Smith says. “If that happened, they’d probably pair and have pups. The
likelihood of that happening is low.”
But, it’s even less likely that an already established breeding pair would relocate. Wolves tend to settle near where they meet.
“It’s the loners that
travel a long way, and part of the reason they’re traveling a long way
is they’re looking for an opposite-sex wolf to settle down with,”
Smith says. “Part of the reason they go so far is they don’t find them,
so they keep going, and they usually end up dead.”
When the plan for
reintroducing wolves to the United States was crafted in the mid-’90s,
Colorado wasn’t invited to the party. Whether Colorado wanted to be
depends on who you ask — a 1994 mail survey conducted by the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service in Colorado showed strong support for reintroducing
wolves with some 70 percent in favor.
But a 1989 resolution
from the Colorado Wildlife Commission states that, because humans had
moved into the habitat needed for grizzly bears and wolves, and the
reintroduction of either could present conflicts with the livestock
industry and humans as well as presenting a “management problem,”
reintroduction of wolves and grizzly bears was opposed.
“There won’t be any
reintroductions,” says Eric Odell, species conservation program manager
for carnivores with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “Our Wildlife
Commission has given two resolutions that said that they’re opposed to a
wolf reintroduction to the state for a variety of reasons — social and
agricultural and all that kind of reasons.”
Wolves in Colorado
are still managed by the federal government via the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service as long as they are considered endangered in this
state. Colorado drafted a plan in 2004 for managing wolves in the event
they were ever delisted, but meeting that criteria, according to the
Endangered Species Act, means having a substantial and self-sustaining
population.
Though reports of
wolves have come out of a ranch in the northwestern part of Colorado,
the High Lonesome Ranch, DNA testing has either indicated that the scat
collected was coyote or been inconclusive.
“In the whole state,
there are no known wolves or wolf pack established,” Odell says. He
receives reports, sometimes several a week, from people who say they’ve
seen wolves. “Everything that we’ve received and followed up on has
shown that there are no known wolves at the moment.”
Two wolves have been
killed here, one on I-70 and one in northwest Colorado, and another was
videotaped near North Park, but those were several years ago.
“That was the last
time we knew of any wolf for sure in the state, and those were
individuals,” Odell says. “There’s no established population or
anything like that in the state.”
Most of North America
was once home to wolves, which are considered a keystone predator.
Their presence shapes an entire ecosystem: Studies have shown wolves
keep elk and deer on the move, which allows for healthier tree and
shrub growth, providing habitat for other species, and wolves cull
sick, weak adult deer and elk, possibly preventing the spread of
communicable diseases, including the mad cow variant that ungulates
carry. Rocky Mountain National Park has been allowing hunting to manage
the overpopulation of elk there. But a hunter’s aim, while precise,
doesn’t have an eye for the sick and weak — the kills are more arbitrary
than those chosen by wolves.
In Colorado, people play the part of that keystone predator.
“We’ve been doing
that for the last 100 years or so and we do manage our game
populations, our deer and elk populations, through our hunting
regulations pretty specifically,” Odell says. “We take that role of
managing the game populations to benefit the ecosystem.”
The densely populated Front Range makes it tough to contemplate other options in this part of the state.
“When you’ve got that
many people, where are you going to put the wolves?” Smith says. “They
can’t live year round in the mountains, because the winter hits and
the elk come down and the deer come down and the wolves follow them.
And where they do, the deer and elk go in the backyards of people —
that’s a problem, and people don’t like it, but it’s a much different
problem when you’ve got a wolf in your backyard.”
Despite an elk
population so abundant the park has needed to issue permits to hunt
some of them down and has fenced in aspen groves to protect them from
lingering elk, Rocky Mountain National Park doesn’t provide a good
location because it’s so high in elevation. The elk may be able to
winter over near the ice cream and t-shirt shops and mini golf courses
in Estes Park, but the wolves can’t.
“You would have
people, elk and wolves all thrown together and we know that doesn’t
work,” Smith says. “It’s not that the wolves don’t tolerate the people,
it’s that the people don’t really tolerate them.”
Southern Colorado’s
stretches of public land near the San Juans might provide a better
habitat for wolves, but the act of getting there is still tough.
“Assuming wolves
could make it through a lot of Wyoming — I mean those are a lot of
ifs,” Smith says. “Right now all the wolves are in northwest Wyoming,
and they won’t be allowed in a huge area just south of Jackson, so
connectivity between that area and Colorado is going to be your first
problem.”
But the connectivity
is precisely what the Endangered Species Act was meant to provide. Its
purpose, as defined by the Act itself, is “to provide a means whereby
the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species
depend may be conserved.”
And preserving the
ecosystem, according to conservation organizations like the Center for
Biodiversity and the American Society of Mammologists, which have both
come out opposed to Wyoming delisting wolves, requires allowing species
to successfully maintain themselves.
“Connectivity between
the wolf subpopulations … not only is that vital for long-term genetic
maintenance, but allowing that connectivity to exist is one way of
measuring whether that ecosystem exists,” Robinson says. To do
otherwise thwarts the purpose of the Act and the definition of an
endangered species. A recovered animal is one that can maintain itself,
according to the Endangered Species Act. An animal that needs to be
carted around in order to find a mate — as Wyoming’s plan proposes doing
if necessary to maintain genetic diversity in its wolf population — is
not maintaining itself.
“One would hope that
the Fish and Wildlife Service would say, ‘We’re moving way too fast,
this doesn’t make sense. It’s not consistent with the law and it’s not
consistent with the public sentiment,’” Robinson says. Robinson’s book,
Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West, charts
the history of the eradication of wolves from North America, a move
that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s predecessor organization was
pressured to make.
The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service still carefully monitors the impact wolves have on
livestock and compensates ranchers who lose animals to wolves. The
organization reported that between 1987, when Canadian wolves first
denned in upper Montana, and 2009, more than 1,301 cattle, 2,584 sheep,
142 dogs, 31 goats, 25 llamas and 10 horses had been killed by wolves
and nearly $2 million had been paid in damages by private and state
wolf damage compensation funds. Wolves were relocated 117 times and
killed more than 1,259 times to reduce conflicts.
“The Fish and
Wildlife Service has a history as an agricultural service. In large
part what we’re seeing is a reversion to form,” Robinson says. “They’re
allowing the proposal of the destruction of most of the wolves in
Wyoming and they are likely to close the door on reintroduction in
Colorado altogether.”
From ranchers to conservationists to casual observers, the response to wolves is rarely a moderate one.
“Some people think
it’s the coolest thing in the world, and other people think it’s the
end of their life, my life just got ruined,” Smith says. “There’s very
little in the middle. … And that’s part of the problem. You go from one
private holding to the next and the welcome mat changes from ‘Welcome’
to ‘Don’t step on this place.’”
The hackles raise to
the point of either side sending death threats. A photo of a trapped
wolf from Idaho that shows the wolf still limping through a circle of
pink snow behind the smiling Nez Perce Forest Service employee who
trapped, and would later shoot, the wolf, earned the hunter death
threats. The anti-wolf trapping nonprofit that reposted his photo and
complained of his cruel practices also received death threats in
response.
“I think wolves are a
symptom of bigger things in our society,” Smith says. “In the last
10-15 years, we’ve become more polarized about the environment, what’s
the purpose of the environment. Is it here for us, or is it here for us
to coexist in, or is it here for us to use, and the wolf symbolizes
that conflict. It’s really a lightning rod for the disagreement
surrounding how we coexist with nature. They’re very symbolic with
wildness, and some people think we don’t need wildness, we don’t want
it because it’s inconvenient and it gets in our way, whereas other
people think how dare we remove every shred of the earth that has
nothing to do with us. So they’re very symbolic about a larger debate
about just economics, do we use the land, do we conserve it, how do we
live on it, versus how do we deal with life separate from human life.”
http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-8743-whos-afraid.html
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