Conservationists Elated, Ranchers Irritated by Wolf's Comeback

By KIM MURPHY

June 6, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK —

The wolf known as B45 trudged from Salmon, Idaho, through forests and down verdant valleys. She traversed the Snake River and loped across brush and cattle ranches. She crossed Interstate 84 and ventured into the Blue Mountains of Oregon.

Not in 36 years had there been a wolf in Oregon--not until this 2-year-old female, caught up in the ancient urge that drives lone wolves deep into the forest to seek their own kind, crossed 150 miles of wilderness and a political divide as big as any in America.

Outraged Oregon legislators demanded that the wolf, a breakaway from a pack reintroduced by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service into central Idaho, be trapped and removed. Ranchers threatened worse. Conservation groups, elated to see a wolf again in Oregon, took out gleeful ads in the newspapers: “SF [single female] looking for sharp-fanged SM who’s not afraid to fight for what he wants.”

In March, B45 was caught in a net and hauled back to Idaho. But the story of the ranging wolves wasn’t over. Last month, biologists documented evidence of a new breeding pair near Jackson Hole, Wyo., miles from the packs reintroduced in 1995 to Yellowstone.

Success Beyond All Imagining

The 4-year-old program that brought wolves back to the northern Rockies has been a wild success. Idaho now has 115 adult wolves and a dozen litters of pups; Yellowstone has 110 adults, with 10 or 11 new litters. Northwest Montana, where Canadian wolves established a foothold on their own around Glacier National Park, has eight litters.

In fact, packs have become so big that wildlife officials predict this year will mark a turning point in the federal reintroduction program: a major dispersal of juvenile wolves ranging into new lands, joining to form new packs.

Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado could all expect wolves to return if the natural migrations are not checked, wildlife officials say. Based on current trends, California’s northern Sierra could see wolves again within a few decades.

The recovery is so marked that the Interior Department has said it will likely remove the strongest federal protections for wolves under the Endangered Species Act later this year, downgrading their status in much of the West from endangered to threatened.

In California and Nevada, all protections for wolves would be removed this year under a draft plan being circulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, even though it recognizes that the wolf has been largely extinct in those states for much of this century.

The move has sent early shock waves throughout the Pacific Northwest, where states have been caught without any management programs to deal with the likelihood of wolves at their doors. Oregon held its first public meeting on the wolf issue just last month.

Several decades after being trapped, shot, poisoned, gassed and bludgeoned out of existence throughout the West, the gray wolf has reproduced, thrived and taken over nearly all available territory in Yellowstone National Park.

Wolves here are heavier than their counterparts in Alaska and the Midwest, and many packs are so large that it is virtually certain that juveniles will begin breaking away next fall, searching for new territory, said Ed Bangs, head of the wolf-recovery program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We can expect this next fall a big flush of these young wolves looking for empty spots to set up new packs,” Bangs said. Although Yellowstone can accommodate a few additional packs, “a lot of the growth in the wolf population that’s going to occur in the next four to five years will be in . . . lands outside Yellowstone and in Idaho. Increasingly, the wolves that disperse are going to have more of a chance of coming in conflict with people than they have in the past.”

Typically, young wolves dispersing to form new packs don’t fare well at first. Straying too far from established wolf populations makes it harder to find a mate. Running into human settlements more often than not results in the wolf’s demise--two-thirds of the human-caused deaths of Yellowstone wolves have occurred outside the park--or relocation.

But eventually, dispersals take hold. Most wildlife officials agree that the next Oregon wolf, assuming it’s not attacking livestock, won’t be recaptured. Nor do Washington wildlife officials have plans to relocate wolves they expect to stray inside their borders.

“Over time . . . we are going to see wolves dispersing from Yellowstone and Idaho, and with that we’re going to see an increase in livestock depredation where we haven’t seen it before,” said Tom France of the National Wildlife Federation. “On the positive side, I fully expect to see wolves finding habitats where they can live and thrive and repopulate the West. As I look at my map, I see places in Oregon, Utah, northern Colorado, southern Colorado, where clearly we can have healthy wolf populations. So part of the next challenge is to fashion management protocols to deal with that.”

The question of how rapidly the wolf repopulates the West depends heavily on how these state management programs take shape. Should Wyoming decide to declare open season on wolves near livestock herds, for example, which it could easily do once Endangered Species Act restrictions are lifted, “the chances of a wolf living and making it to Utah are probably close to zero,” Bangs said.

Idaho, Montana and Wyoming all have adopted draft wolf-management programs but have never put them into effect, in part because of political opposition and in part because they didn’t want to assume costs for wolf management from the federal government.

Most called for allowing no more than twice the number of wolves set out in the federal government’s recovery goals. Under those targets, wolves can be considered recovered once there are 10 breeding pairs in three successive years in all three recovery areas: Yellowstone, Idaho and Montana. But some biologists say there needs to be many more wolves before the species has a permanent foothold.

Several conservation groups, including the Montana-based Predator Project, have cautioned against moving this year to downgrade federal protections. “If the wolves can largely be left alone and tolerated to live in areas where they can find sufficient territory and prey to reach recovery targets, wolf recovery appears to be within our grasp, ahead of schedule and under budget,” the group said in a new report.

“But if we intervene by aggressively controlling wolf distribution and wolf behavior, we will hobble recovery efforts and jeopardize all of the success attained to date. To allow just a few token wolves in isolated protected areas would mean a perpetual struggle, where wolves are never far from the edge of extinction,” the group said.

The future of the recovery program fell into doubt last year when a federal judge ruled it illegal because it relaxed federal endangered species protections against the very few native wolves that remained before the relocation program. To deal with concerns of livestock owners, the relocation program established a special designation for the relocated wolves, allowing them to be moved or shot if they attacked livestock.

The judge ordered the wolves removed, which likely would result in their demise, since there is nowhere to relocate them. But he stayed his order pending an appeals court decision, expected later this year.

That isn’t soon enough for ranchers whose livestock already has fallen prey to wolves ranging outside the relocation areas. They want the wolves removed now, before they can begin extending their ranges next fall.

“We’re just going to see, I think, an explosion, and because they have no natural enemies, except man . . . they figure out pretty quick this whole place is one big lunch counter,” said Jake Cummins of the Montana Farm Bureau.

Elk, Deer on the Menu

Wolves have subsisted primarily on elk and deer, program biologists say. The federal government says livestock killings have totaled 270 in all three states since 1995, substantially lower than original predictions. The Defenders of Wildlife has compensated ranchers at full value for all confirmed kills.

But Cummins said livestock killings actually have been 10 times the government estimates, because ranchers rarely can provide a freshly killed carcass as evidence. More often, they said, a carcass is devoured before the rancher finds it, or a calf simply fails to come home from winter pasture.

Dubois, Wyo., rancher Stephen Gordon says he found 25 calf carcasses last year, and another 25 didn’t come home. He got paid for the two he could prove.

“They come and look at the kill and say, ‘Well, it has all the signs of a wolf kill, there are wolf tracks everywhere, and it was obviously eaten by a wolf, it’s 99% certain it’s a wolf--but you can’t prove it, can you?’ ” said Gordon, who has sued the government in an attempt to prove the wolf predation constitutes a taking for which he should be compensated.

”. . . It’s easy for people in the city to say how wonderful it is to have wolves in Yellowstone Park,” Gordon said. “But they don’t have to deal with what we do. We hear these wolves every night. I can’t walk out of my house with my dogs anymore.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Return of the Wolf

A gray wolf tht migrated into Oregon from Idaho caught state officials offguard, since Oregon has no wolf-management program. Wolf-recovery programs in several states have boosted the number of wolves in recent years.

States with the most wolves:

Alaska: 6,000

Minnesota: 2,567

Michigan: 205

Wisconsin: 200

Yellowstone*: 85

Central Idaho: 75

Northwest Montana: 75

Arizona: 7

* Idaho, Wyoming, Montana

Wolf Facts:

Body length: 39-59 inches.