FAIRBANKS
— The new National Park Service study concluding that killing park
wolves reduces the success of wolf viewing by park visitors is an
intuitively obvious conclusion and confirms what has been known for
decades. In fact, this simple fact was the primary basis for over a
dozen citizen proposals to the Alaska Board of Game and the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game Commissioner asking to close the boundary of
Denali to wolf hunting and trapping. Unfortunately, the state has
ignored the facts of the situation for many years and continues to do
so.
The number
of wolves in Denali has declined from 147 in Fall 2007 to only 49 now,
and the number of wolf family groups (“packs”) has declined from 20 in
2008 to only nine now. Visitor wolf-viewing success has declined from 45
percent in 2010, when the (inadequate) buffer was eliminated by the
state, to only 5 percent last year. More than 530,000 visitors come to
Denali each year — about 50,000 of these are Alaskans. Many cite the
opportunity to see wolves as one of their primary objectives for
visiting the park. The park is responsible for more than $500 million in
economic activity each year in Alaska.
The
drop in wolf viewing success just since the state eliminated the buffer
has cost as many as 200,000 visitors each year the opportunity to view a
wolf in the park. In fact, some Alaskans now travel to Yellowstone to
see wolves in the wild. Throughout this period of wolf decline, scores
of park wolves have been killed along the park boundary and inside the
park by hunters and trappers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to
connect the dots.
Yet,
as with the state, the park service remains reluctant to admit the full
impact of killing wolves, both along the boundary and inside Denali, on
this unprecedented decline. Last year, the park service claimed the
decline may be due to low snowfall, and the News-Miner ran a story
asserting such. When we pointed out to both that there was indeed no
correlation between snow level and wolf numbers, neither corrected their
erroneous assertion. Fortunately, the new park study finally corrects
this error and admits the truth on this point.
But
most disappointing in the new park study is its continued assertion
that killing wolves along the boundary has “minimal impacts on the size
of protected wolf populations.” On this, they are simply wrong.
The
National Park Service and the state consistently neglect to mention the
disintegration of two of the park’s largest wolf family groups due to
the kill of just one breeding female wolf. This happened in 2012 with
the Grant Creek family group, when the trapping of the last pregnant
female led to the group not denning, not pupping, dispersing and
declining in number that summer from 17 to only three. Research has
proven that it is the pups and pup-rearing that provides the cohesion in
wolf family groups. Again in 2015, the same tragic result occurred
with the East Fork (Toklat) group, when the last pregnant female of East
Fork was killed at a bear baiting station outside the park, and the
group declined from 15 to only two. These two events clearly resulted in
more than “minimal impacts on the size of protected wolf populations.”
Although
the park service has now admitted the fact that wolf killing diminishes
visitor viewing success, it continues to be unwilling to concede the
full truth — that killing park wolves along the boundary has contributed
to this spectacular decline in the Denali wolf population. And, of
course, wolf take is about the only cause of decline that we can do
anything about.
The
only realistic solution to this ongoing decline is for the state to
trade a wildlife conservation easement along the park boundary in
exchange for a like-valued federal asset elsewhere. This has been
proposed for several years, yet little action has been taken so far.
Let’s hope this new park study rekindles the sense of public obligation
in both the park service and the state and motivates real action to
secure a conservation easement on the boundary of Denali. This is the
only way to secure the park mandate of protecting natural processes
within the park and to restore and sustain the wolf-viewing resource of
the park for all visitors.
Rick
Steiner was a marine conservation professor with the University of
Alaska from 1980-2010, stationed in Kotzebue, Cordova and Anchorage. He
now consults on conservation issues through Oasis Earth.
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