Friday, August 22, 2014
By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer
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The Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation will soon
distribute up to $50,000 in federal funds to reimburse livestock
producers for money spent on nonlethal predator deterrents.
Office Administrator Dustin Miller said application criteria will be announced in a few weeks.
“We’re still fine-tuning the details of the program,” he said.
The money came from legislation passed by
Congress in 2009 creating the Wolf Livestock Loss Demonstration Project.
The bill provided states and Indian tribes with $1 million annually for
five years, divided equally between compensation funds and money to
help ranchers undertake prevention activities. The federal funds pay for
up to half the cost of the activities.
Last year, the state of Idaho distributed
$72,000 in federal funds to ranchers as compensation for losses.
However, it held until this year $50,000 specified for deterrence
projects, Miller said.
For the past seven years, the Wood River Wolf
Project has worked with local ranchers to protect 27,000 sheep annually
over a 1,000-square-mile area using guard dogs, noisemakers and visual
deterrents to keep wolves away from flocks.
Producers involved in the project include Lava
Lake Land & Livestock and Flat Top Ranch, both based in southern
Blaine County, as well as Faulkner Livestock, which is based in Lincoln
County. All graze on public land in the Wood River Valley.
The project also has representatives from the
nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, Blaine County and the nonprofit
Sawtooth Society.
During a meeting of project members Monday at
the Sawtooth National Recreation Area headquarters north of Ketchum,
project Field Manager Fernando Najera said there have been no instances
of wolf depredation on sheep in the Wood River Valley so far this year.
He said there have been two instances of depredation by bears—in the
Lake Creek and Baker Creek areas—and one by a domestic dog, in the Fox
Creek drainage.
Najera said five to 10 sheep have been lost to
other causes, possibly from eating poisonous plants. He said he has been
putting sheep carcasses in plastic bags to reduce their attraction to
wolves.
Project Coordinator Suzanne Stone said only 30
sheep have been killed by wolves in the project area over the past six
and a half years.
“That makes our loss to wolf predation among the lowest in the state,” she said.
Stone said the project’s loss rate of less than
0.03 percent is far below the typical rate in wolf country of 3 to 5
percent.
She said no wolves have been killed in the
project area as the result of depredation on sheep. Wolves have been
killed by government hunters due to livestock losses on the Flat Top
Ranch property near Carey and in the Sawtooth Valley.
During the meeting, project members agreed to
pursue expanding their effort to include cattle herds in the Stanley
Basin, west of the town of Stanley. However, Flat Top Ranch owner John
Peavey expressed doubts that cow-calf pairs could be protected.
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