Yellowstone wolf updates

Here is a recent NY Times story updating the Yellowstone wolf project:

January 2, 2008
A Divide as Wolves Rebound in a Changing West
By KIRK JOHNSON

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.

The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.

Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the State of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming’s hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)

During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes — that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy — once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near Yellowstone National Park, where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.

The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago — which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that blood-letting might not be quite as popular as it once was.

“If they’d delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now people will say they’re murderers.”
From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.

Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, according to a report earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana, and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.

For the rest of the story, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/02wolves.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

For some of the passion surrounding wolves, check out the comments (not included here) attached to this NY Times blog: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
January 24, 2008, 5:40 pm
Howling Over Federal Plan to Expand Wolf Killing

The gray wolf has been trying to reclaim its place as alpha predator in parts of Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone Region ever since 65 members of this endangered species were reintroduced in the 1990s. The wolves are doing too good a job, perhaps.

Under pressure from another alpha predator, human hunters (along with state officials eager to keep hunters happy), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has changed a rule in a way that has wildlife campaigners howling.

The complaints are not about the section allowing someone to kill a wolf attacking, say, a dog or livestock. It’s the part about states and tribal governments having the right to allow greatly expanded killing of wolves in “non-essential” populations where local officials determine that wolf packs are taking too big a share of deer and elk herds also coveted by hunters.

In a news release, the Fish and Wildlife Service said the states needed more flexibility to allow them to “manage” and “remove” wolves (euphemisms for shooting them) where their predatory skills are too effective.

“The states have done an excellent job managing wolves, and this revision will provide the extra flexibility they may need to manage wolves for some time in the future,” said Jay Slack, acting regional director for the service’s Mountain-Prairie Region, in the release.

The Sierra Club complained bitterly today in its own release, estimating that the action could result in the killing of all but 600 of the approximately 1,500 wolves in the region.

“If we call open season on wolves now, we could soon find ourselves back at the starting line. It’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Sierra Club representative Melanie Stein. “Deer and elk populations are thriving in this region. There’s absolutely no reason to begin slaughtering wolves, other than to please a handful of special interests.