Wolves, once on the endangered list, are now a growing presence and threat in the state's Upper Peninsula.


IRONWOOD, Mich. -- John Koski grips the old blanket in knobby hands weathered from a lifetime of farming. He pulls it back to reveal the carcasses of two cows, or what's left of them. More than half of each is picked clean, the spine and rib bones almost a polished white, with no traces of flesh. Some of the rib bones are snapped and show evidence of being gnawed upon.

The mutilated cattle, found this spring on Koski's 1,000-acre farm in the tiny community of Matchwood, Mich., in Ontonogan County, are the latest casualties in his ongoing war with wolves. The 68-year-old farmer has had more cattle killed or injured by wolves than any farmer in the state, 119 in the past three years, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Government-paid sharpshooters and trappers for years have killed dozens of the wolves who've taken a liking to Koski's cattle.

"I think this is the last year I'm going to keep cattle here, because I'm losing so many," Koski said, adding that he may move them to his other farmland in Bessemer, about 35 miles away.






STORY: Mich. House passes bill that could allow wolf hunting

There are no records of a human ever being killed by a wolf in the wild in Michigan. But Koski thinks that could change.
"Sooner or later, those wolves are going to kill a person, or a kid waiting for a school bus," he said.
The far western Upper Peninsula is a 600-mile drive from Detroit, farther away than Nashville. Here, the wolf debate is not an abstract one. These are the people who've lost cattle, lost pets, who've encountered wolves in their backyards.

It's uncertain what will result from Michigan's controversial, first-ever wolf hunt, set by state officials for November and December after a series of meetings statewide that featured dozens of hunt opponents. But nowhere does the future of the wolf and the hunt have more relevance than here, among those living sometimes uncomfortably close to them.
Over the last few years, the city of Ironwood, about an hour west of Koski's farm, has seen the nearby wolf population increase, as well as encounters between wolves and people, city manager Scott Erickson said.

"There's a wolf problem in the area — I think everybody understands that," he said. "I've never heard anybody say they want to eliminate wolves, but just manage them in an appropriate manner."
Ironwood hunter Jim Mildren noted wolves are opportunistic hunters that will kill deer in the dead of winter and store their bodies in snow almost like a refrigerator.
"If they can kill all of the deer in a deer yard, they will," he said.
"I love to hear the wolf's howl; I love to see their tracks. But I want there to be a better balance, and I want them to be afraid of people."

Myth and fear

Wolves have been a part of Michigan since at least when the last glacier melted over the land mass that would one day become the state, about 15,000 years ago.
No other apex predator, a hunting animal at the top of the food chain, elicits the fearful emotional reaction wolves do. There are no fairy tales featuring the Big Bad Black Bear threatening a small girl. There is no cautionary tale about the Boy Who Cried Cougar. Horror stories feature werewolves, as no other man-animal combination fills a reader or movie-watcher with the same dread.

Wolves are an integral part of Native American culture. In the Anishinaabe, or Ojibwa First People, creation story, when Gzhemnidoo, the Creator, put Nanaboozhoo, original man, on Mother Earth, he asked for a companion. Gzhemnidoo gave him Ma'iingan, the wolf. The pair were tasked with naming all of the plants and creatures and places of the Earth. When their task was finished, Gzhemnidoo directed that they had to travel separate paths, but that they would remain linked.


"The wolf's mournful howling and bark, that is because of that sorrow. He wishes he still had that communication and partnership with Anishinaabe," said Roger LaBine, chairman of the conservation committee of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
Wolves were all but eradicated in much of the U.S. by the 1930s. Michigan and other Great Lakes states lost almost all of their wolves by the end of the 1950s.

In 1973, Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act and officially protected the wolf that same year. It sparked a resurgence in the wolf population. Michigan's Upper Peninsula was known to have three wolves as recently as 1989. The population today stands at 653 wolves. The wolves have made an even more substantial recovery in Wisconsin (834 wolves) and Minnesota (3,000).

"The reason they became able to thrive were the protections they were given," said Nancy Warren, a resident of the small western Upper Peninsula community of Ewen and the Great Lakes regional director for the National Wolfwatcher Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to wolf conservation. She opposes the wolf hunt.
"Yes, they've done well. But the reason they've done well is we've stopped killing them."

Hunt is just one tool

Wolves were officially delisted as an endangered species in January 2012. Minnesota and Wisconsin quickly established hunts for that fall. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder last December signed into law a bill designating wolves as a game species, leading the way for the Natural Resources Commission's May 9 approval of a hunt for later this year.

"We're looking at a targeted harvest in areas where we've had continuing problems — depredation of cattle, people encountering wolves," said Adam Bump, the Department of Natural Resources' bear and furbearer specialist.
"The department's recommendation is not based on providing recreational opportunities; it's to resolve conflicts."

But John Vucetich, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at Michigan Technological University, questioned whether a hunt will accomplish the department's goals.
"It's dubious to say we're going to take a county or a portion of a county and we're going to remove 10, 20, 30 wolves and resolve a livestock depredation issue," he said.

"These wolves are territorial and they are going to keep other wolves away. They are like the landlords. The thing you can hope for is to train the wolves not to harm livestock in the area. But if you are shooting these wolves, the pack gets disrupted, the wolves get dispersed and other wolves come in. There's a good chance you can make things worse."

Many biologists believe a wolf pack can be discouraged from preying on livestock through nonlethal methods such as fencing, guard animals such as barking dogs, loud noises or flashing lights. When those methods do not work, killing problem wolves may act to deter others from the behavior.

The Department of Natural Resources has killed 89 wolves since 2003 — 62 related to a livestock concern; 27 to a human safety concern. Bump said the agency will not stop using lethal and nonlethal means to deal with problematic wolves in a timely manner. "Hunting is another tool we can add to that whole suite of options that we have," Bump said.

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