Congressman Sean Duffy (R-WI) and Congressman Dan Newhouse (R-WA) released the following statements after bipartisan legislation they introduced to return management of gray wolves to state control advanced in the House of Representatives. The House Natural Resources Committee approved the legislation in a committee markup today.
“Wisconsin farmers are now one step closer to having the legal means to defend their livestock from gray wolves,” said Congressman Duffy. “I’d like to extend a big thank you to the members of the Natural Resources Committee who also agree that states should be the ones to responsibly manage their own gray wolf populations – not Washington bureaucrats.”
“I thank Chairman Bishop and my colleagues on the House Natural Resources Committee for advancing this important legislation to delist the gray wolf,” said Congressman Newhouse. “The best-available science used by the U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows that the gray wolf has recovered and is no longer endangered. I continue to hear from and work with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, which has been asking for the federal delisting of the gray wolf since 2013. We must return management of the species to states to allow for more effective and accountable management that responds to the needs of the ecosystem, other species, and local communities.”
Background: Management of these gray wolves was transferred from the state to the federal level following two 2014 U.S. District Court decisions that reinstated gray wolves under the protections of the Endangered Species Act. These designations leave farmers and ranchers in those states without a legal avenue to protect their livestock from wolves.
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A Washington state judge on Friday rejected efforts to temporarily block the killing of wolves that are preying on livestock in Ferry County.
Thurston County Superior Court Judge Carol Murphy turned down a request from a conservation group for a temporary restraining order to block the killing.
The Center for Biological Diversity contended that killing wolves ignores science, causes long-term environmental harm and goes against the wishes of the great majority of state residents.
“We’re disappointed this kill order remains in place but we’re hopeful the courts will eventually stop this tragic string of state-sanctioned wolf killings,” said Amaroq Weiss, wolf advocate for the center.
She said Washington had a “trigger-happy approach to wolf management.”
It was not immediately clear when the wolf hunts would begin.
The state Department of Fish and Wildlife on Wednesday approved killing one or more members of a new wolf pack that had attacked cattle near the Canadian border in northeast Washington. Wolves had killed a calf and injured five others on federal grazing land in Ferry County since Sept. 4, the agency said.
The new wolf pack has been dubbed the Old Profanity Territory Pack because the attacks occurred in an area once occupied by the Profanity Peak pack. The Profanity Peak pack was killed by the state in 2016 for preying on cattle.
Wolves were killed off in Washington early in the last century. But the animals started returning to the state early in this century from Idaho and Canada. There are at least 122 wolves in 22 packs in the state, according to the latest annual survey.
The agency contends that killing off some or all of the new pack will not harm recovery efforts.
Wolves are protected as an endangered species throughout the state. But a protocol developed by the agency and others to reduce conflicts between wolves and livestock allows the state to kill wolves if officials confirm a certain number of livestock attacks within a certain time period.
The state has killed a total of 19 wolves in recent years, including a member of the Togo pack earlier this month.
Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind announced plans Wednesday for the agency (WDFW) to kill at least one of the wolves reportedly responsible for a recent rash of attacks on cattle in Ferry County, according to a department news release.
WDFW will not be able to kill members of the new wolf pack until Thursday afternoon, and new legal challenges loom. Amaroq Weiss, a wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said her organization will seek a temporary restraining order to prevent the killing.
The wolf pack WDFW plans to target has tried to prey on cattle six times this month on federal grazing lands, killing one calf and injuring five others, according to WDFW. The pack, which was first identified by the department in May, is so new it does not have an official name. The agency believes the pack is made up of three or four adult wolves and two pups. WDFW biologists were able to collar the new pack’s adult male earlier this summer.
Because it’s the third year in a row the agency intends to kill wolves in the area, some conservation organizations, including those that have supported lethal removal in the past, wonder if it’s time to try something new.
“It’s a really highly desirable landscape for wolves to be in. They keep coming back,” said Paula Sweeden, policy director for Conservation Northwest. She said the area is thickly forested, steep and often roadless. Cattle there are widely dispersed, which makes it difficult for range riders to keep track of them.
Sweeden said it was clear that the nonlethal methods employed by ranchers to prevent wolves from preying on cattle were clearly not working, but killing wolves there was not working, either.
“Three times in the same place indicates that combination is not working,” she said. “We want to call for a step back.”
The Ocean Cleanup, dubbed System 001, began its journey to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from San Francisco on Saturday after years in development.USA TODAY, Wochit
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyoming – Yellowstone’s wolves are back, helping revive parts of the ecosystem that changed drastically when this top-of-the-food-chain predator was killed off nearly a century ago. But Yellowstone is still not 100% back to normal – and it may never be.
“You put the predator back, that’s great, but conditions have changed so much in the intervening decades that putting the predator back is not enough to restore the ecosystem,” said Tom Hobbs, a Colorado State University ecology professor. “There’s not a quick fix for mistakes like exterminating apex predators.”
It’s a sign of both the promise – and the limitations – of a multi-decade wildlife recovery effort. The reintroduction of the wolf nearly 25 years ago to the country’s first national park has brought change: Overpopulated elk herds have thinned, allowing some willow and aspen groves to return and thereby creating better habitat for songbirds and beavers.
But even as this ecosystem shows signs of recovery, a complete restoration is nowhere to be found.
“In some places, I don’t expect a full recovery of the ecosystem,” said Bill Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, who started working in Yellowstone in 1997. “It’s going to be a mixed bag for the longer term now in coming decades.”
Yellowstone’s vanishing wolves
The park radically changed after humans exterminated the gray wolf from Yellowstone in the mid-1920s due to predator control efforts. Elk herds ballooned over the next 70 years, overgrazing vast tracts of land and trees such as willow and aspen. Fewer trees sent the songbird population into decline. Beavers lost their food source and the lumber to build their dams. The lack of those dams caused streams to erode, making them deeper and not as wide and further degrading the conditions willow need to grow.
Today, nearly 25 years after wolves were reintroduced into the park, the top predators have helped parts of the ecosystem bounce back. They’ve significantly reduced elk herds, opening the door for willow, aspen, beaver and songbird populations to recover. But the wolves haven’t been a silver bullet for the ecosystem as a whole.
“This idea that wolves have caused rapid and widespread restoration of the ecosystem is just bunk,” Hobbs said. “It’s just absolutely a fairytale.”
Yellowstone’s partial recovery has set off a heated debate in academia over how much bringing back an apex predator, such as the wolf, can help restore a devastated ecosystem. It’s one with consequences stretching from the U.S. to India and Africa, where naturalists have pinned their hopes on keeping fragile ecosystems as intact as possible by avoiding the elimination of lions, tigers, sharks and other top predators.
“Maintaining intact ecosystems may be easier than fixing them after you’ve lost some of the parts,” Hobbs said.
Fewer elk, more songbirds
Most ecologists agree that Yellowstone has rebounded some. When Doug Smith, Yellowstone National Park’s wolf biologist, first arrived in 1994 shortly before wolves were reintroduced, some willow and aspen trees only came up to his knees. “Now I can’t see through it,” he said. “It’s like a forest.”
But the trees aren’t coming back in every corner of the park: In many spots willow groves haven’t returned. Because willows need beaver to keep the streams from eroding and beavers need the willows to build their dams, it’s rather hard for both to come back simultaneously and in large numbers, said Hobbs, whose team has been conducting a long-term willow growth study in the park for 17 years.
The decrease in elk hasn’t allowed willows to recover because the streams changed significantly when wolves were absent.
“It doesn’t really matter very much whether they’re being browsed or not. They don’t have adequate habitat to thrive,” Hobbs said. “The conditions that changed while wolves were absent created conditions that made it very difficult to restore willows.”
Grizzly population rebound
It’s not all about the wolves, even if they get the most attention. Over the past several decades, the number of other carnivores like the grizzly bear and mountain lion have also climbed, multiplying the impact of the top predators on the ecosystem.
“As a scientist, the challenge is to figure out how much ecological change since wolf reintroduction is attributable to wolves and how much of that change is due to other forces,” said Dan MacNulty, an associate professor at Utah State University who studies the ecology of wolves and elk in the park.
How large the wolf’s impact on the Yellowstone ecosystem is difficult to tease out in part because of nature’s complexity and capacity for frequent change, he said. But money also plays a large role: It is difficult to adequately monitor all the potential drivers of change when funding for long-term research is so limited, he said.
“One of the grand challenges in ecology is to understand the consequences of predator removal and restoration in large-scale systems like Yellowstone. But the resources aren’t there. That really limits our power to know what’s going on,” he said. “A key reason why there’s so much scientific disagreement is that we haven’t been able to take all the necessary measurements over a long enough time and over a large enough number of organisms to come up with a more definitive answer.”
Despite all the disagreement, most ecologists say removing predators today would be a mistake.
“The way ecosystems put themselves back together after such a problem is still something that scientists are trying to understand,” Ripple said. “The lesson is let’s not let things get as bad as they did with 70 years without wolves.”
But there’s an even broader question that needs to be addressed: Can we restore apex predators and coexist with them?
“There’s not many places in the rest of the United States where this is happening,” Smith said. “There are lessons here that we can do this on human-dominated landscapes in other places, but I don’t know because it might involve more wolves, cougars and bears, and right there you have a problem because people have trouble living with those three carnivores.”
This Togo pack wolf, an adult male shown when he was radio-collared in early June, is now marked for death by WDFW.
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Washington state government marksmen now have clearance to go out this weekend to shoot a wolf from a pack that has been preying on cattle in the Colville National Forest. A judge on Friday declined to extend a temporary stay on the killing won by several environmental groups last week.
“There is a high burden that has to be met,” said Judge Carol Murphy in issuing a denial from the bench. “That burden has not been met at this time.”
The new Department of Fish and Wildlife director, Kelly Susewind, watched from the back of the courtroom. After the ruling, he said he was “glad” the agency can proceed.
Still, inside and outside court Friday, the wildlife agency faced questions about the necessity of hunting down the male wolf, given that he is already limping from an existing bullet wound in a rear leg and probably not currently a threat to livestock.
“In order to change pack behavior, it’s still appropriate to lethally remove the collared male,” Susewind said in an interview.
The West Coast wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity predicted the disruption of the pack structure from killing its leader could increase — not decrease — problems for ranchers in the mountains near the Canadian border.
“In killing that wolf, that leaves his mate on her own to hunt and feed herself and her two pups,” said Amaroq Weiss. “If she’s hunting by herself, she’s not going to be able to take a big, wild prey animal like an elk down by herself. The most vulnerable prey that is in the area is livestock. So this may actually exacerbate the conflicts and result in more livestock losses, which no one wants.”
Weiss called the courtroom outcome “a tragic result” for the wolf, his pups and mate.
Susewind’s authorization to take lethal measures against one or more members of the Togo pack came after the pack preyed on cattle on six separate occasions in the Kettle River Range since last November.
Late last week, a cattleman shot and injured the Togo pack male in an incident that remains under investigation by Fish and Wildlife. The rancher told the agency’s staff that he shot in self-defense after encountering the growling wolf, who may have been protecting the pack’s pups.
Environmental groups in the Pacific Northwest other than those that brought the lawsuit are grudgingly going along with killing problem wolves as a last resort policy.
“Lawsuits and polarization haven’t worked out well for wolves elsewhere, so we see little upside in spreading those tactics to Washington, where wolf recovery is going relatively well overall,” said Mitch Friedman, executive director of the Bellingham-based group Conservation Northwest, in a statement critical of the legal challenge.
He said collaboration between conservation groups, government agencies and livestock producers “is leading to less social conflict concerning wolves.” It’s also making ranchers more willing to adopt non-lethal wolf deterrence techniques, Friedman said.
Politicians and ranchers in northeast Washington are chafing after two environmental groups from outside of the state temporarily blocked the legal killing of members of the Togo wolf pack.
In response, county commissioners from Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille counties met Friday in Colville.
“The meeting today was to try and develop, I guess, a strategy to go forward figuring out how to give the people in these counties a little bit of relief,” said Stevens County commissioner Don Dashiell.
Commissioners discussed, among other things, taking legal action.
Of particular concern was whether a judge will extend the temporary restraining order blocking the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife from killing members of the Togo pack.
The Thurston County judge is scheduled to make a decision next Friday.
“When the judge put the restraining order on the department he didn’t put the restraining order on the wolves,” Dashiell said.
On Monday, WDFW ordered the lethal removal of wolves from the Togo pack in northeast Washington. However, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity and Oregon-based Cascadia Wildlands filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order to stop the killing. The lawsuit alleges that WDFW “relied upon a faulty protocol and failed to undergo required environmental analysis.”
The lethal removal order came after six documented cattle depredations in the past 10 months by the Togo pack. Three of those cattle kills occurred within the past 30 days. The most recent documented depredation occurred when one or more wolves injured a calf on a U.S. Forest Service grazing allotment in Ferry County.
WDFW’s policy allows killing of wolves if they prey on livestock three times in a 30-day period or four times in a 10-month period. That policy was developed in 2016 by WDFW and its 18-member Wolf Advisory Group, which represents the concerns of environmentalists, hunters and livestock ranchers.
“Lawsuits and polarization haven’t worked out well for wolves elsewhere, so we see little upside in spreading those tactics to Washington, where wolf recovery is going relatively well overall” said Mitch Friedman, Conservation Northwest executive director in a news release. “Instead of polarization, our focus is on collaboration and long-term coexistence.”
All three Ferry and Stevens county commissioners attended the meeting. One Pend Oreille county commissioner also joined, as did state lawmakers, including Rep. Joel Kretz and Rep. Shelly Short.
Ferry County commissioner Johnna Exner said the commissioners are considering legal action and will be working with county prosecutors to see what those options are.
Exner pointed out that the hearing on the temporary restraining order was filed in Thurston County, too far away for any ranchers or northeast politicians to attend.
“It was held way too far away for anyone to even get to the court date,” she said.
The commissioners discussed other ways of alleviating the pressure on ranchers who they say are struggling to stay afloat because of wolf predations, Dashiell said.
One idea floated Friday was for WDFW to trap members of the Togo pack and hold them until the judge rules on whether the wolves can be killed or not.
Dashiell acknowledged that plan likely wouldn’t work.
Another possibility, Exner said, would be if wolves were delisted at the state level which would give the counties more flexibility. Wolves remain federally protected in the western two-thirds of the state and protected throughout the state under state law.
SPOKANE, Wash. — The state of Washington will take steps to kill members of a wolf pack that have been preying on cattle in the northeast corner of the state.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife says members of the Togo pack have preyed on cattle three times in the past 30 days, and six times in the past 10 months.
In the most recent depredation, state officials say one or more wolves were responsible for injuring a calf on a federal grazing allotment in Ferry County.
The department says it will use humane hunting methods, with likely options including shooting from a helicopter, trapping, and shooting from the ground.
The wolf hunts have sparked controversy in the past, with environmental groups saying the state is too quick to kill wolves.
Wyoming hunters were successful tracking down and killing smart, stealthy wolves as the season began Sunday.
A dozen wolves were legally harvested in the first 40 hours of the three-month season. It’s a number that amounts to over a quarter of the total wolves that can be killed in the state’s managed hunt area. Wyoming Game and Fish Department carnivore manager Ken Mills attributed the considerable success to the opener falling on a weekend, winter weather pushing lots of sportsmen into the field, and also a species that may temporarily have lost its fear of mankind.
“Three years have gone by since the last hunting season,” Mills said. “In wolf generation time, it’s getting close to an entire generation of wolves. So there’s almost a whole new generation of wolves out there and they’re naive to human hunters.”
“I think they’ll learn over time,” he said. “I would expect them to adapt relatively quickly.”
Wolf hunters found swift success in Upper Green River country, where they exceeded a three-animal quota by one and triggered the closure of the zone Sunday.
Wolves were also killed Sunday and Monday around Jackson Hole. Game and Fish harvest reports showed one wolf killed in area 8, which encompasses the Leidy Highlands and has a quota of seven animals. A hunter also was successful in area 10 southeast of town, which runs from Cache Creek to past Bondurant.
In its “trophy game management area,” Game and Fish is permitting a total of 44 wolves to be killed in a season that ends Dec. 31.
Technically, there is no statewide limit on the number of wolves that can be hunted in Wyoming. That’s because of an expansive area outside the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where wolves are managed as a predator that can be killed by any means throughout the year. Some 17 wolves, as of Monday afternoon, had been reported killed in that zone since Wyoming gained jurisdiction over its wolf population this spring.
Wolf hunting opened with a relative bang, judging by the pace of harvest in years past.
The state’s first modern-day wolf hunt dates to 2012, a year hunters managed to kill four animals in the first 40 hours of the season, according to the Jackson Hole News&Guide archives. The next year, 2013, hunters shot three on the opener.
There’s been a wolf hunting hiatus in the Equality State ever since, owing to a 2014 court decision that fell a week before the wolf hunting season would have started. Two and a half years later, a U.S. Court of Appeals’ opinion overturned the ruling.
Game and Fish’s intent for the wolf hunt is to slightly reduce the population, last estimated at 380 statewide. A little over half those animals are believed to reside in the trophy game area that just opened to hunting. Another approximately 50 animals were thought to live in the predator zone. The balance of Wyoming’s wolves — an estimated 117 animals — live in Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation, where hunting is not allowed.
It is wolf hunters’ responsibility, Mills said, to check to make sure the hunt area they set out for is still open. Game and Fish has 12 wolf hunting units, and each closes individually as its quotas are met. Harvest reports are updated “constantly,” he said, and posted online at WGFD.wyo.gov.
Wolves were wiped out in Washington state in the early 20th century — the victims of bounty hunting as ranching and farming expanded in the state. Over the past two decades, however, under the protection of state and federal wildlife authorities, wolves have been reclaiming their former turf. But as new research shows, the wolves now living and hunting in Washington’s forests are different from those that lived there more than a century ago. These new wolves are hybrids — crossbreeds of inland wolves from the interior United States and a unique, beach-loving subspecies from as far north as Southeast Alaska.
The ancestors of the wolves now recolonizing the Pacific Northwest include a coastal subspecies.
Chris Darimont / raincoast.org
The researchers who made this discovery think the hybrid wolves’ DNA could help them thrive in a changing landscape.
Conventional wisdom holds that the wolf packs slowly recolonizing not only Washington but Oregon and California are the descendants of animals that migrated west from the interior — from the mountains, plains, and forests of Montana and Idaho. But when researchers analyzed DNA samples from wolves throughout the Pacific Northwest, the results told a different story. Sarah Hendricks — now a computational biology doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho — was a research assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles when she and her colleagues amassed genetic samples from the region’s wolves. A recent analysis shows that some of the wolves have unique genetic markers that could have only come from the distinct coastal wolves of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska.
Coastal wolves differ from their interior cousins in a number of important ways. Unlike interior wolves, which stalk large mammals such as elk through forests and fields, coastal wolves spend much of their time on beaches, hunting salmon and marine mammals such as seals. Coastal wolves also look different — they’re smaller and their fur has a red-brown tinge.
So far, the hybrid wolves are sticking to the lifestyle of their ancestors from the east. “As of right now, the wolf packs are mostly in the habitat that’s suitable for interior wolves, but we think over time they’ll begin to establish in habitat that’s more suitable for coastal wolves,” says Hendricks. As the climate continues to change, Hendricks suspects the hybrid wolves’ genetic diversity will allow them to adapt better than if they just had genes from interior wolves.
Even without the benefits of genetic mixing, wolves are generally quite adaptable animals, says Jay Shepherd, who leads the wolf program for the nonprofit organization Conservation Northwest. In Yellowstone Park, for instance, wolves hunt bison. These wolves are much larger than those in surrounding regions, but their size is the consequence of a diet driven by learned behavior rather than genetics. Still, he agrees that hybrids could have an advantage in areas with a mix of habitats.
The coastal wolves of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska are a distinctive subpopulation with red-brown fur and a hunting style adapted to coastal life.
Chris Darimont / raincoast.org
The finding also offers a life preserver of a sort to the coastal wolves of British Columbia and Alaska, whose populations are dwindling in many parts of their range. For example, Hendricks points to a population in Southeast Alaska that is declining quite drastically. The hybrids may serve as a genetic reservoir, protecting some of the coastal wolves’ distinctive traits.
But while the hybrid wolf population may act as a reservoir, there could be complications if the Alaskan coastal wolves became protected under the United States Endangered Species Act. In that case, wildlife managers in the Pacific Northwest would find themselves charged with managing wolves that share genetic traits with federally protected animals. “The problem is that the Endangered Species Act doesn’t have a lot of language regarding how to deal with hybridization,” says Hendricks.
Hendricks hopes her findings will inspire biologists and policymakers to focus on sorting out the unanswered legal question of what should be done when the ancestor of a hybrid animal is an endangered species, whether these mixed-lineage descendants should be protected as well or left vulnerable to hunting and habitat loss. Either way, she thinks the hybrid wolves’ mixed heritage will be an asset as they continue to reclaim their species’ old haunts across the Pacific Northwest.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind, left, addresses the Fish and Wildlife Commission Aug. 10 in Olympia as Deputy Director Joe Stohr listens. Susewind, barely a week on the job, canceled a plan to withhold wolf-collar data from ranchers.
Washington wildlife managers have canceled for now a plan to withhold the exact locations of radio-collared wolves from ranchers.
Fish and Wildlife had planned to switch off the GPS data this week in favor of a new system that more generally shows wolfpack movements. The department’s new director, Kelly Susewind, said he heard from producers concerned about the change, especially during summer grazing when livestock are most exposed to wolf attacks.
“We pretty quickly came to the consensus that this is not ready for prime time,” Susewind told the Fish and Wildlife Commission at a meeting Friday in Olympia. “We heard loud and clear — don’t be switching things up in the middle of a grazing season.”
Fish and Wildlife shares collar data with ranchers who agree to keep the information confidential. A month ago, the department introduced a system that quickly became known as the “blue blob.” The department said the new method of depicting pack movements will be more useful than knowing the recent locations of wolves with collars. The department also said GPS coordinates could be misused to track wolves to dens in the spring and where pups are later stashed for the summer.
The department planned to stop sharing GPS coordinates Aug. 14. Susewind said it was the top issue when he went to northeast Washington and met with producers, county commissioners and state lawmakers.
“We had long talks about wolves, and it was absolutely universal, every single person we talked to, this was their biggest concern, the switch in data-sharing,” he said.
The department still believes the blue blob can help ranchers, he said. The department will review its data-sharing policy over the winter.
“We recognize we need to work with people. We need to make sure they understand it, and we need to make sure we’ve adjusted it so it works for everybody,” Susewind said.
The introduction of the blue blob on July 16 was another friction point between ranchers and wildlife managers. The department had planned to continue sharing the collar data for only 30 more days while ranchers learned the new system.
Cattle Producers of Washington President Scott Nielsen said he was pleased Susewind, barely a week on the job, reversed the department’s course.
“I think that was a very good sign,” Nielsen said. “All it was doing was limiting the information, and the notion of limiting information on this issue was incredibly misguided.”
The Fish and Wildlife Commission agreed with Susewind. Earlier in the meeting, Stevens County rancher Jeff Dawson told the commission that collar data was “probably the most important tool for dealing with wolves.”
“We’re not out there to track the wolves, but we are out there to try to manage where the cattle are (in relation) to the wolves,” he said.
The GPS coordinates are better than the new system for minimizing conflicts, Dawson said.
“The original information is what’s working the best for us,” he said. “What was added, maybe in the department’s mind was to make it better, but it’s not making it better.”
Exposing the Big Game 