Photo courtesy of Ed Bangs- Ed Bangs and his daughters Tara, 6, and Erin, 3, trapped and radio-collared a wolf for research on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska in 1988, a month before he came to Montana.They caught two wolves that day.

Photo courtesy of Ed Bangs- Ed Bangs is pictured with a wolf he darted for immobilization in Yellowstone Park in 2002 that he shot from out of the helicopter door. Once the animals were sedated he would put radio collars on them for research.

Eliza Wiley Independent Record - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services wolf recovery coordinator, Ed Bangs, will be retiring from his post after 23 years. Bangs has been at the fore front of the wolf discusssions writing the original Environmental Impact Study and putting together multi-agency teams in an effort to protect the wolf.

Montana's 'wolf man'

Sunday, April 17, 2011 

By EVE BYRON
Independent Record

Ed Bangs, who for 23 years led the effort to reintroduce and recover healthy wolf populations in the northern Rocky Mountains, is retiring from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in June.

As the federal agency’s wolf recovery coordinator, Bangs was the face of the polarizing wolf reintroduction, conducting thousands of international, national, state and local interviews and holding hundreds of highly charged meetings, all to explain the effort as part of a massive public outreach effort. At various times, depending on the stage of the reintroduction, he was heralded as a hero while simultaneously being denounced as a wolf lover or hater, depending on people’s perspective.

Yet somehow he managed to charm many on both sides of the wolf wars, with a mix of humor tinged with a reputation for fairness.

“He would get in front of a group trying to ridicule and criticize him, and Ed would beat them to the punch,” recalled Carter Niemeyer, a former Wildlife Services supervisor who worked closely with Bangs for decades. “One time, we were in Grangeville, Idaho, in front of a hostile crowd, with one guy leading the charge. He said ‘Tell me what the hell good the blankedly-blank wolves ever did.’ Ed chimed up and said ‘They gave me this cushy job’ and the whole audience cracked up. The man got up and left because he was so angry.
“He would win the crowd over, because they thought he was kind of funny, and that would get things going.”

Suzanne Stone with the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife also worked with Bangs on the wolf reintroduction, and said he had a huge impact on the effort, writing the environmental impact statement — which drew more than 180,000 comments from throughout the world — and fighting for federal funding.
“He set the course,” Stone said. “He was willing to work with us, but not much would deter him from the course he had in mind.”

Jay Bodner with the Montana Stockgrowers Association noted that Bangs always brought a lot of professionalism to the wolf reintroduction debate and never shied away from controversial issues.
“He didn’t take things personally, and when he provided his point of view he was all right when folks disagreed with him,” Bodner said. “You might not agree with everything he said, but he knew how to move discussions forward.

“He was able to reach a standpoint where people respected him. He would make the call and make it fairly quickly to either remove problem packs or to do nothing.”

Bangs laughs at people’s impression of him, noting that “wilderness groups loved me” when he was reintroducing the wolves, and the ranchers hated him. That flipped once he decided the science showed that wolf populations had recovered enough to take them off the list of animals protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“Now (environmentalists) say I’m in the ranchers’ pocket and the ranchers say I’m not such a bad guy,” he joked.

He came to head the gray wolf reintroduction in a roundabout way. Bangs grew up in Ventura, Calif., and worked through high school and college as a chemical plant laborer, a cattle ranch/feedlot hand and an oil field roughneck. He also loved to hunt and fish.

“I was going to be a welder, but my dad said that by god, I was going to be a college-educated welder,” Bangs said. “So I went to a junior college to be a welder, took some biology classes and said, ‘You mean you’ll pay me to walk in the woods and hunt and fish?’”

 After earning a degree in game management from Utah State University, he got a job at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge as a seasonal biological technician in 1975.

“The reason they hired me was they had a new garbage truck with hydraulics, and I was the only guy who applied for the job who knew how to work those,” Bangs said. “So they said I was going to do biological studies, but my first job was picking up garbage in the campground. The refuge was a Quonset hut where we’d get snowed in some days and have to take a snowmobile to work. It was a great life.”

He helped reintroduce caribou in Alaska, studied the effects of oil and gas development on wintering moose and worked on lynx conservation and management, and recalls jumping from helicopters in the morning to tag brown bears, and return to town in time for breakfast. It was a dream job, but when he heard about a new position being created to help states, the federal government, tribes, ranchers and others figure out how to deal with what seemed to be a growing population of gray wolves in northwestern Montana, he was intrigued.

At that time, gray wolves were listed as an endangered species, and only about 10 wolves were known to live in the Glacier National Park area in the Northern Rockies. Then wolves started killing livestock in 1987, and no one knew how to handle it. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was looking for someone to figure out how to deal with depredations and to do research, outreach and education, which was right up Bangs’ alley. He applied, two days before the application deadline, and changed the course of his life.

Around that time, Carolyn Sime was in Kalispell, doing a study on radio-collared deer for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Bangs, the USFWS service project leader for wolf recovery, approached the department and proposed a swap: he would help find federal funding if they would help monitor radio-collared wolves.
“So I started flying to check out the Murphy Pack and any other collared wolves in the mid- to late-1990s,” Sime said. “What struck me then, and it’s been that way throughout Ed’s tenure, is his amazing ability to engage other people, both professionally and personally.”

She eventually became Montana’s wolf management coordinator until the position recently was discontinued.
“He always pushed us to really make data and science the basis of the state plan, and that set us up to succeed,” Sime said.  “It was a real privilege and honor to work with him. I’ve learned so much and it’s been a priceless experience.”

Mike Jimenez, who is now in charge of Wyoming’s wolf recovery program, also worked with Bangs in the early years, and said he created the blueprint for bringing together people with a wide range of interests to work out the issues.

“He set the template for what came later on, creating a tightly knit organization, with a general policy for interaction on the ground with everybody,” Jimenez said.

Bangs led the team that captured wolves in Canada and released them, in the mid-1990s, in Yellowstone National Park. Niemeyer recalls how Bangs would fend off the bureaucrats and deal with all the “unpleasantries” in the pre-introduction arena.

“I consider him to be the guy who made it happen,” said Niemeyer, who recently released a book called “Wolfer” about his experiences. “I admired Ed for his tenacity in dealing with bureaucrats and politics. I don’t think anybody wanted that part of the job.”

Bangs said he felt a personal responsibility to reduce conflict and damage caused by wolves, but believes that their reintroduction to the landscape was the correct route to take. He jokes that wolves are actually kind of boring — calling them “just big dogs” that have been studied to death — but that people are fascinating, which is one reason he didn’t hesitate when walking into rooms filled with angry people.

“I’m a big believer in interaction with the public, so I made a special effort to reach out to hunting groups, livestock groups, environmental groups; I’ve probably given 500 presentations myself,” Bangs said. “I’ve met some really interesting people. You have to face people and hear their concerns firsthand to help resolve the conflicts.”

He notes that one of the biggest issues he initially faced was the sense from the public that the wolf reintroduction in the Rockies was forced on people here by bureaucrats back East. So he empowered his people to make decisions on the spot regarding how to handle problem wolves, and had few reservations about shooting those that preyed on livestock repeatedly. Those same practices continue today.

“The first thing we did was try to make it a local person with faces that they could call, and the field person had full authority to deal with the problem right here and right now,” Bangs said. “I think that helped recover wolves while it minimized the damage.”

Bangs said another important part of his job was to keep science at the forefront of the emotionally charged political debate and keep the reintroduction and recovery effort moving forward. With the removal of wolves from the list of endangered species in Montana and Wyoming this week by an act of Congress, Bangs said he feels he’s successfully completed his job.

“The bottom line is science is being followed,” Bangs said recently, sitting behind his desk still covered with scientific journals, studies and reports, many of which he’s authored, and walls dotted with awards and art. “The heavy lifting is over, and that’s cool. My upbringing was to complete your job; when we started there were 10 wolves near Glacier. Now there’s 1,700 in six states and they’re being delisted. That’s pretty rewarding.”

As he prepares to walk away from his life’s work, Bangs knows that he’ll always carry it with him, in a sense. In an e-mail, he explained a statement posted on his office wall from someone saying how wolf scars are sexy — which, in his classic self-deprecating manner, the bachelor noted that apparently they aren’t.

Bangs said the statement was given to him as a joke after he was bitten on the wrist by a wolf in Wyoming. One canine tooth went through his wrist and he had a few crush marks, but luckily it didn’t break his arm. He finished the day’s work before getting it checked out in the emergency room.

“I did learn a valuable lesson (that) next time someone asks you to hold a wolf down for them ask if it is immobilized,” Bangs wrote. “But I am an especially fun date during full moons!”

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