From another list:
January 14, 2015 12:01 a.m.
The date was Jan. 14, 1995, when Moon Star Shadow, a 90-pound, silver-tipped black male, stepped out of his cage at Corn Creek and urinated, marking his new territory in Idaho.
Moon Star Shadow and three other wolves released at the edge of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness were the first of 66 wolves brought to Idaho and Yellowstone National Park from Canada in 1995 and 1996.
By 2009, the wolf population had grown to more than 1,500 in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and today has spread to Washington, Oregon and Utah — even California and Arizona.
In 2011, Congress delisted the populations in Idaho, Montana, northern Utah, western Oregon and western Washington. That removed them from protections under the Endangered Species Act and led to wolf-hunting seasons. Today more than 600 wolves are thought to live in Idaho and the haunting howl of a pack of wolves is an almost common sound in Idaho’s back country, pleasing the people who pushed to restore them.
Idaho hunters and trappers harvest hundreds of wolves every year, but many complain that traditional elk-hunting areas no longer are as productive because wolves kill, move or stress the big game.
Ranchers have the right and means to kill wolves that attack their livestock, but they remain bitter that they aren’t compensated for losses that can’t be definitively linked to wolves. Ranchers also say elk and other big game are streaming out of the backcountry to raid their pastures and haystacks as they get away from the wolves.
But what if the federal government had decided not to reintroduce wolves to Idaho and Yellowstone in 1995?
Folks who love wolves would have fewer to see or hear. And the folks who hate wolves might have fewer options to manage wolves or kill wolves that come into contact with humans and livestock.
A mind of their own
Wolf biologists and managers who led the recovery program that began a decade before the wolves were released agree that Idaho would have wolves today, possibly hundreds, even if the reintroduction never took place. But they doubt that Yellowstone National Park — the place the public associates most closely with the new population of wolves — would have a wolf population today.
Wolves were moving on their own from Canada into Montana and Idaho, beginning in the 1960s. But a lack of safe corridors for the animals between Northwest Montana and Yellowstone would have hindered or stopped natural recolonization of wolves from Canada there. Today, 400 to 450 wolves live in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
“There would be wolves in northwest Montana, there would be wolves in central Idaho, but I doubt we would have more than a few (scattered) in Yellowstone,” said Ed Bangs, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gray wolf recovery coordinator in charge of the reintroduction.
They were reintroduced under a legal provision that allowed relaxed rules for an “experimental population.” That enabled federal officials to kill wolves that repeatedly attacked livestock and exempted officials from requiring that every federal action in the habitat be shown not to hurt the wolves.
That approach was based on the premise that there was no wolf population — no breeding pairs — in the areas targeted for reintroduction.
As the wolf population in British Columbia and Alberta grew in the 1980s, several packs showed up in Northwest Montana, making that area ineligible for reintroduction. Many wolf sightings also were reported in Idaho.
An Idaho plan
The drive for reintroduction in Idaho came from Republican U.S. Sen. James McClure.
McClure believed the return of the wolf to Idaho was inevitable. He wanted to put in place rules that would protect ranchers from the powers of the Endangered Species Act that restrict the killing of depradating wolves and other management. In 1988, he proposed federal legislation that would have reintroduced a few packs and stipulated that no wolves would be allowed to live outside of Yellowstone and Idaho’s wildernesses. His bill would have restricted wolf expansion more tightly than did the final reintroduction rules.
“He wasn’t a wolf-lover,” said David Mech, an internationally known wolf biologist who was one of the early voices for reintroduction.
McClure not only feared the costs to ranchers if more wolves showed up in Idaho. He believed loggers, miners and recreationalists would end up facing stricter limits under the full powers of the federal Endangered Species Act.
Ranchers weren’t convinced.
Brad Little, who today serves as Idaho’s lieutenant governor, came from a long line of sheep ranchers. In 1988, he was active with the Idaho Woolgrowers and an opponent to McClure’s bill, which went nowhere because of strong opposition from Wyoming ranchers and lawmakers.
“He was pretty darned convinced that his bill would have been far and away superior to what we eventually got,” Little said.
The return of wolves forced Little, like most ranchers, to change the way he operates. He gave up private grazing leases in the Cascade area due to the rate of depredation on his cattle. But he said ranchers in Custer and Lemhi counties that deal with the largest wolf populations have had the hardest time maintaining their livelihoods.
“The central Idaho ranchers are in the same place that the West Coast loggers were with the spotted owl,” Little said.
‘The sweet spot’
Suzanne Stone, now with Defenders of Wildlife, was contracted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the early 1990s to look for wolves in central Idaho.
Stone soon learned how difficult life would be for wolves in Idaho, both then and now. Biologist Steve Fritts was teaching her to howl in 1991 near Warm Lake east of Cascade.
“On my second howl, we literally (had) rifle bullets go over our heads so close I could hear them whistle,” Stone said.
She wanted reintroduction to be called augmentation, because she knew wolves already were living in Idaho. But she also believes that if the naturally moving wolves had been given the full protection of the Endangered Species Act, we would have wolves in Idaho, Yellowstone and at least Wyoming without reintroduction.
The wolf recovery program today would not be as divisive, Bangs said, had the delisting occurred several years earlier — before wolf populations had reached their peak and affected so much livestock and big game.
“We lost the hunting constituency because of that,” he said.
Steve Alder agrees.
Alder heads Idaho for Wildlife — the group that sponsored this month’s wolf- and coyote-hunting derby in Salmon.
“From our perspective, (the delay in delisting) really got people rallied,” he said.
So what ended up happening?
Wolves captured in northern Alberta were released Jan. 14, 1995, after a federal judge lifted a temporary restraining order.
In Idaho, the 35 wolves simply were released from cages into the wild.
At Yellowstone, packs captured together were kept in enclosures to allow the animals to acclimate to their new environs. The enclosures were opened in March and the wolves reluctantly left to take over their new home. More wolves were released in 1996.
From the beginning, Idaho’s great wolf habitat — lots of undeveloped spaces and lots of food such as elk and moose — meant that the wolf population grew faster here than anywhere else.
By 2001, the Idaho population had reached the 10 to 15 breeding pairs that federal biologists said was necessary for recovery.
After years of debate, lawsuits and failed efforts to remove Idaho wolves from protections under the Endangered Species Act, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson added a rider to a fast-track federal budget bill in 2011. The rider inserted language to allow Idaho and Montana to manage
Exposing the Big Game 
Yellowstone Ecology and Greater Yellowstone Ecology: Wolves and Elk and Bison and Forage: Let NPS manage Yellowstone bison and elk and other wildlife and leave the ecology alone as much as possible. Myth: Wolves have not decimated or unnaturally trimmed Yellowstone elk herds, not there or anywhere else. Nature has had millenniums to work out predator-prey ecology; let it be The Park brought in wolves to get back to a natural prey-predator balance, to re-establish it after wolves were wiped out motivated by hunter and rancher mythology of the big bad wolf. The elk herds had grown to an unsustainable high after some wet years in the 1980’s and an abundance of forage in and outside the Park. There never have been too many wolves in the Park. They peaked at 174-175 around 2005 and are now range from around 100 to 130. Wolves will manage their own populations in relation to other packs and prey and naturally achieve a healthy balance, in Yellowstone and elsewhere. MT FWP allowed continued hunting, fall and spring, of elk coming outside of the Park and continued to do so until 2005, and may have resumed it. Wolves were reintroduced in 1995-1996. Two severe winters (1995-1996, 1996-1997) followed then several drought years. Nature has had millenniums to work out natural predator-prey relationships. It is man, weather, forage, that are the 3 factors responsible for elk population waning and waxing; and the animals make adjustments and migrate. Wolves and other predators have helped and increased the health of prey for millenniums. Sport killing/hunting is an unnatural destructive additive factor and the first thing that should be managed, maybe the only thing. The rest is nature. Elk numbers in Yellowstone Park are at historical levels after coming to an all time unsustainable high due to factors mentioned above. There are wolves in Canada that specialize in bison hunting and wolves in Yellowstone are likely to turn more to bison hunting in the future. Wolves, like bears and lions and coyotes, are omnivores and are not locked into any particular prey for survival. Wolves around the world hunt different prey, what is available in different environments. Wolf hunting is a wolf cultural phenomenon and heritage with 25% of young wolves’ lives being education by their elders of what and how to hunt prey and prey selection. Wolf numbers in Yellowstone stabilized mainly in relation to other wolf and pack numbers, not just available prey, such as elk. There is plenty of prey and variety. Wolves have been good for Yellowstone ecologies, flora and fauna, and balance as they are everywhere; just as the Park hoped and even more than they hoped for in positive effects. Let NPS manage the Park and hopefully they will not attempt micromanagement as the state wildlife agencies do with wildlife for hunters and ranchers and political pressures and let the ecology of predator and prey mostly manage itself. False balance reporting usually repeats the mythology of ranchers about wolf depredations on cattle, really about 0.002%, and on sheep, really less than 1%; and false balance reporting repeats hunter folklore/mythology on elk depredations; really elk numbers are about 38% higher since wolf reintroductions in MT and WY has had 10 years in a row of record elk takes. MT FWP reports elk populations at or above targets in all parts of the state including wolf territories. Sometimes statistics are used from USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) which are inflated up to 4000 % as ranchers self-report. I report to this service since I have a few horses and used to have a menagerie of critters. NASS numbers are way overblown. Mythology, folklore about the big bad wolf are just that and wolves belong on the landscape and are good for ecology and the economy and the wanton killing of them to drive the numbers down is not scientific management, not ethical or moral or sporting.