(Tom Gannam | The Associated Press)
In this July 1, 2010 photo, one of five eight-week-old Mexican Gray wolf
pups gets a quick check-up at the Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka,
Mo. The wolves are bred in captivity and released in New Mexico and
Arizona, and now Utah officials fear their state will be included.
Utah’s governor and wildlife
chief are sounding the alarm about wolves on a second front, fearing the
federal government is about to classify Mexican gray wolves for
protection in the southern part of the state.
Gov. Gary Herbert and Division of Wildlife
Resources Director Jim Karpowitz wrote to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel Ashe, respectively,
in late September, protesting what they say is the federal wildlife
agency’s apparent plan to expand protections from Arizona and New Mexico
into southern Utah and Colorado.
Herbert’s letter, obtained through an
open-records request, asserts that Fish and Wildlife officials are
telling the state they will reclassify the Mexican wolf as a subspecies —
granting it full protections wherever it roams — and include Utah in
its recovery zone. The governor disputes that the lobo’s range, mostly
in northern Mexico, ever reached here.
“The only explanation they give,” Herbert
wrote, “is that Utah and Colorado have unoccupied wolf habitat, and
therefore must contribute to the recovery of the Mexican wolf.”
Utah officials and lawmakers have made clear
that they want wolves kept out or minimized in an effort to protect
livestock and big game.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, insisting it
hasn’t yet chosen how to advance a recovery program, is sending its
Southwest regional director to Salt Lake City for a meeting with
Karpowitz on Thursday.
State officials’ nightmare scenario,
Karpowitz said, is that Mexican wolves moving in from the south would
trigger statewide protections even if the recovered Rocky Mountain gray
wolves from the north have no Endangered Species Act safeguards.
A state wanting control over Rocky Mountain
wolves could be thwarted by a look-alike protection clause in the law.
Although generally smaller, Mexican wolves would be hard to distinguish
from their northern cousins.
“There are wolves in Utah now,” Karpowitz said, “and if they try to recover Mexican wolves in Utah, who’s who?”
Wendy Brown, Fish and Wildlife’s Southwest
Region recovery coordinator, said the agency is considering options but
has not yet issued a draft plan for public comment. Even if the plan
ends up including Utah as potential Mexican wolf habitat, she said,
there wouldn’t be any reintroduction without a separate public process.
In an Oct. 28 letter responding to Karpowitz,
Ashe said his agency has not made any decisions about reclassifying the
wolves. He wrote that Karpowitz had “mischaracterized the facts of the
matter, the choices before us and their implications and also implied
that the service has already decided how we intend to proceed.”
“We hope to move forward in a collaborative
partnership with the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the other
states,” Ashe wrote, “as we chart a path for management and recovery of
this species.”
Mexican wolves were nearly extinct in the
1970s, when the U.S. began a captive-breeding program. In the early
1980s, the government established a goal of 100 wolves living in the
wild in the Blue Mountains of New Mexico and Arizona, but there was no
clear plan for recovery or thresholds for removal from the list of
endangered species.
The agency now is working with interest
groups and states to write that official recovery plan, and Utah’s
participation in the process is what led state officials to assert that
the Beehive State would be included.
A major concern for Karpowitz is the plan’s
potential to reclassify Mexican wolves as a subspecies, giving them
continuing protection regardless of whether the larger gray wolf
population is deemed recovered.
Karpowitz also objected to the agency
excluding historic Mexican wolf range in West Texas, apparently for lack
of local support or federal lands, while including potentially new
range in Utah. “They want to recover them in an area where they never
were,” Karpowitz said.
Wolf advocates say it isn’t so simple. Western
wolf populations overlapped and interbred before settlers and the
government largely eradicated them, said Kirk Robinson, executive
director of the Salt Lake City-based Western Wildlife Conservancy.
“That’s part of their natural domain,”
Robinson said of southern Utah, “whether it’s Mexican wolves or whatever
subspecies can make it there.”
Brown said genetic samples from wolves killed
in Utah, Colorado and Nebraska show similarities with Mexican wolves,
indicating possible interbreeding.
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