Category Archives: Wolves

Rethinking predators: Legend of the wolf

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http://www.nature.com/news/rethinking-predators-legend-of-the-wolf-1.14841?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20140311

Predators are supposed to exert strong control over ecosystems, but nature doesn’t always play by the rules.

by Emma Marris 07 March 2014

copyrighted wolf in water

The return of grey wolves to the western United States has sparked debate over their role in structuring ecosystems.

In 2008, Kristin Marshall was driving through Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Marshall, a graduate student at the time, had come to the park to study willow shrubs — specifically, how much they were being eaten by elk.

She pulled to the side of the road and was preparing to hike to one of her study plots when she ran into two sisters from the Midwest, who were touring the park. The women asked what Marshall was doing and she said, “I am a researcher. I am working in that willow patch down there.”

The tourists gushed: “We watched all about the willows on this nature documentary. We hear that all the willows are doing so much better now because the wolves are back in the ecosystem.” That stopped Marshall short. “I didn’t want to say, ‘No, you are wrong, they aren’t actually doing that well.’”

Instead, she said: “The story is a probably a little more complicated than what you saw on the nature documentary.” That was the end of the conversation; the tourists seemed uninterested in the more-complicated story of how beavers and changes in hydrology might be more important than wolves for willow recovery. “I can’t say I blame them,” says Marshall, now an ecologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, Washington. “What you see on TV is captivating.”

On television and in scientific journals, the story of how carnivores influence ecosystems has seized imaginations. From wolves in North America to lions in Africa and dingoes in Australia, top predators are thought to exert tight control over the populations and behaviours of other animals, shaping the entire food web down to the vegetation through a ‘trophic cascade’. This story is popular in part because it supports calls to conserve large carnivores as ‘keystone species’ for whole ecosystems. It also offers the promise of a robust rule within ecology, a field in which researchers have yearned for more predictive power.

But several studies in recent years have raised questions about the top-predator rule in the high-profile cases of the wolf and the dingo. That has led some scientists to suggest that the field’s fascination with top predators stems not from their relative importance, but rather from society’s interest in the big, the dangerous and the vulnerable. “Predators can be important,” says Oswald Schmitz, an ecologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, “but they aren’t a panacea.”

Predators on top

In the early years of ecology, predators did not get so much respect. Instead, researchers thought that plants were the dominant forces in ecosystems. The theory was that photosynthesis from these primary producers determined how much energy was available in an area, and what could live there. Bottom-up control was all the rage.

Interest in top-down trophic cascades emerged in 1963, when ecologist Robert Paine of the University of Washington in Seattle started to exclude predators from study plots at his coastal research site. He pried predatory starfish off intertidal rocks and hurled them into deeper waters. Without the starfish to control their numbers, mussels eventually carpeted the plots and kept limpets and algae from taking hold in the region. A new ecosystem emerged (see Nature 493, 286–289; 2013).

After this and other aquatic studies, the conventional wisdom in the field was that top-down trophic cascades happened only in rivers, lakes and the sea. An influential 1992 paper1 by Donald Strong at the University of California, Davis, asked: “Are trophic cascades all wet?” As if in answer, ecologists began looking for similar carnivore stories on land.

SOURCE: 1 & 2: Ref. 5; 3: Ref. 7

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They soon found them. In 2000, a review2 tallied 41 terrestrial studies on trophic cascades, most of which showed that predation had significant effects on the number of herbivores in an area, or on plant damage, biomass or reproductive output. These studies were all on small plots involving small predators: birds, lizards, spiders and lots of ants.

Research on terrestrial trophic cascades moved to much larger scales with the work of John Terborgh and William Ripple. In 2001, Terborgh, an ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, reported3 on dramatic ecosystem changes that came after a dam was built in Venezuela. Flooding from the dam created islands that were too small to support big predators such as jaguars and harpy eagles. The population densities of their prey — rodents, howler monkeys, iguanas and leaf-cutter ants — boomed to 10–100 times those on the mainland. Seedlings and saplings were devastated.

In the same year, Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, published a key paper4 on the most famous, and probably the best-studied, example of a terrestrial carnivore structuring an ecosystem: Yellowstone’s wolves. The ecosystem offered a natural experiment because the US National Park Service had the park’s exterminated wolves (Canis lupus) by 1926 and then reinstated them in the 1990s, after public sentiment and ecological theory had shifted. In 1995, 14 wolves from Alberta, Canada, were introduced into the park. Seventeen from British Columbia followed in 1996. By 2009, there were almost 100 wolves in 14 packs in the Yellowstone area. (That number is now down to 83 in 10 packs.)

During the years when there were no wolves, ecologists grew increasingly worried about the aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) in the park. It seemed that intensive browsing by Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus) was preventing trees from reaching adult height, or ‘recruiting’. In the early twentieth century, aspen covered between 4% and 6% of the winter range of the northern Yellowstone herd of elk; by the end of the century, they accounted for only 1% (ref. 4).

“Predators can be important, but they aren’t a panacea.”

When Ripple and his co-authors checked aspen growth against the roaming behaviour of wolves in three packs, they found that aspen grew tallest in stream-side spots that saw high wolf traffic. That pattern hinted at an indirect behavioural cascade: rather than limiting browsing by reducing elk populations throughout the park, wolves apparently made elk more skittish and less likely to browse in the tightly confined stream valleys, where prey have limited escape routes (see ‘The tangled web’). A 2007 study5 by Ripple and Robert Beschta, also of Oregon State, seemed to strengthen the behavioural-cascade hypothesis. It found that the five tallest young aspen in stream-side stands where there were downed logs — a potential trip hazard for elk — were taller than the five tallest young aspen in stands away from streams or without downed logs.

Similar evidence of indirect wolf effects emerged from a study of willows. In 2004, Ripple and Beschta found6 that the shrubs were returning in narrow river valleys, where the researchers thought that the chances of wolves attacking elk were greatest.

More recently, Ripple has been documenting the regrowth of cotton­wood trees. “When we look around western North America, we see a big decrease in tree recruitment after wolves were removed. And when wolves returned to Yellowstone, the trees started growing again. It is just wonderful to walk through that new cottonwood forest.”

Tales from trees

But some ecologists had their doubts. The first major study7 critical of the wolf effect appeared in 2010, led by Matthew Kauffman of the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in Laramie. When researchers drilled boreholes into more than 200 trees in Yellowstone and analysed growth patterns, they found that the recruitment of aspen had not ended all at once. Some trees had reached adult size as late as 1960, long after the wolves had gone. And some stands had stopped growing new adults as early as 1892, well before the wolves left. The aspen petered out over decades, as elk populations slowly grew, suggesting that the major influence on the trees is the size of the elk population, rather than elk behaviour in response to wolves. And although wolves influence elk numbers, many other factors play a part, says Kauffman: grizzly bears are increasingly killing elk; droughts deplete elk populations; and humans hunt elk that migrate out of the park in winter.

When Kauffman and his colleagues studied7 aspen in areas where risk of attack by wolves was high or low, they obtained results different from Ripple’s. Rather than look at the five tallest aspen in each stand, as Ripple had done, they tallied the average tree height and used locations of elk kills to map the risk of wolf attacks. By these measures, they found no differences between trees in high- and low-risk areas.

Questions have also emerged about the well-publicized relationship between wolves and willows. Marshall and two colleagues investigated the controls on willow shrubs by examining ten years’ worth of data from open plots and plots surrounded by cages to keep the elk out. Her team found8 that the willows were not thriving in all the protected sites. The only plants that grew above 2 metres — beyond the reach of browsing elk — were those in areas where simulated beaver dams had raised the water table.

If beavers have a key role in helping willows to thrive, as Marshall’s study suggests, the shrubs face a tough future because the park’s beaver populations have dropped. Researchers speculate that the removal of wolves in the 1920s allowed elk to eat so much willow that there was none left for the beavers, causing an irreversible decline.

“The predator was gone for at least 70 years,” says Marshall. “Removing it has changed the ecosystem in fundamental ways.” This work suggests that wolves did meaningfully structure the Yellowstone ecosystem a century ago, but that reintroducing them cannot restore the old arrangement.

Arthur Middleton, a Yale ecologist who works on Yellowstone elk, says that such studies have disproved the simple version of the trophic cascade story. The wolves, elk and vegetation exist in an ecosystem with hundreds of other factors, many of which seem to be important, he says.

Dingo debate

Another classic example of a trophic cascade has come under attack in Australia. … More: http://www.nature.com/news/rethinking-predators-legend-of-the-wolf-1.14841?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20140311

How to Kill a Wolf

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[Note: I chose to start this piece part way into it in order to spare the reader the gory detail of its title question.]

An Undercover Report from the Idaho Coyote and Wolf Derby

By Christopher Ketcham

…After digging into the wolf-hate literature featured on Idaho for Wildlife’s website, I wondered whether the residents of Salmon were looking to kill wolves out of spite. They hated these creatures, and I wanted to understand why.

Besides killing wolves, one of the group’s core missions, according to its website, is to “fight against all legal and legislative attempts by the animal rights and anti-gun organizations who are attempting to take away our rights and freedoms under the Constitution of the United States of America.” The website also suggested that media coverage of the event was not welcome. The only way I’d be able to properly report on the derby, I figured, was to go undercover as a competing hunter. So I showed up in Salmon a few days before the event, paid the $20 sign-up fee, and officially became part of the slaughter.

The derby called for hunters to work in two-person teams. In the weeks leading up to the competition I recruited pro-wolf activists Brian Ertz and his sister Natalie Ertz, native Idahoans who have worked for local conservation groups. Rounding out our teams was Brian’s friend Bryan Walker, a gnarled former Marine and an Idaho lawyer who has studied shamanism and claims to have an ability to speak with animals.

The nice old man in the bar, whose name was Cal Black, bought the four of us a round of drinks when we told him we were in town for the derby. Cal had grown up on a ranch near town, and his thoughts on wolves reflected those of most other locals we met. Salmon is livestock country—the landscape is riddled with cows and sheep—and ranchers blame wolves for huge numbers of livestock deaths. Therefore wolves needed to be dispatched with extreme prejudice. The derby was a natural extension of this sentiment.

“Gut-shoot every goddamn last one of them wolves,” Cal told us. He wished a similar fate on “tree huggers,” who, in Cal’s view, mostly live in New York City. “You know what I’d like to see? Take the wolves and plant ’em in Central Park, ’cause they impose it on us to have these goddamn wolves! Bullshit! It’s said a wolf won’t attack you. Well, goddamn, these tree huggers don’t know what. I want wolves to eat them goddamn tree huggers. Maybe they’ll learn something!”

We all raised a glass to the tree huggers’ getting their due. I fought the urge to tell Cal that I live in New York part-time, and that in college Natalie trained as an arborist and had actually hugged trees for a living. Her brother, who is 31 and studying to be a lawyer in Boise, Idaho, had warned me about the risks of going undercover when I broached the idea over the phone. As a representative for the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project, which has lobbied for wolf protections, he’d attended numerous public meetings about “wolf management” in communities like Salmon. “Salmon is the belly of the beast,” he told me. “There is not a more hostile place. It’s Mordor.”

Brian’s former boss at the Western Watersheds Project, executive director Jon Marvel, has received death threats for speaking out in favor of wolves and against the powerful livestock industry. Larry Zuckerman, a conservation biologist for the pro-wolf environmental nonprofit Wild Love Preserve, suspects that it was pro-wolf-hunting residents from Salmon who fatally poisoned his three dogs. Many pro-wolf activists across the American West, especially those who have publicly opposed the ranching industry, have reported similar threats and acts of aggression—tires slashed, homes vandalized, windows busted out with bricks in the night. Idaho for Wildlife’s opinion on the situation is made clear on its website: “Excess predator’s [sic] and environmentalists should go first!”

Prepping for the derby, we disguised ourselves according to the local style: camo pants and jackets, wool caps, balaclavas, binoculars, and heavy boots. When he wasn’t mystically communicating with elk, Walker enjoyed hunting them. He didn’t look out of place in Salmon, carrying his M4 rifle with a 30-round magazine and a Beretta .45 on his hip. He loaned me his bolt-action .300 Win Mag with a folding bipod, while Brian carried a .30-06 with a Leupold scope. Natalie, who is tall and good-looking, was armed only with a camera and played the part of a domesticated wife “here for the party,” as she put it.

At the derby registration the night before the killing was to commence, we were so convincing that the organizers didn’t even bother to ask for our hunting licenses or wolf permits. Instead they suggested spots in the surrounding mountains where we could find wolves to shoot illegally.

From left to right: Bryan Walker, Brian Ertz, and Natalie Ertz

In Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature, S. K. Robisch presents the wolf as a “mystical force in the human mind,” one that for thousands of years has been associated with the purity of bloodlust, the unhinged cruelty of nature. The wolf as mythological super-predator brings terror and chaos, devouring our young, our old, the weak, the innocent, and the foolish, operating through trickery and deceit.

From Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Little Red Riding Hood loses her grandmother to a cross-dressing wolf, and the Three Little Pigs pay the price as well. In the late Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church declared the wolf an agent of the Devil, or possibly the shape-shifting manifestation of Satan himself. And of course the werewolf, a human turned beast by the contagion of a bite, also lived in the imagination as a demonic figure, killing for sport under the light of the full moon, indiscriminate and lunatic.

In Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic languages, certain words for wolf—warg, warc, verag—were also used to describe bandits, outlaws, and evil spirits. In Swedish, the word varg simply meant “everything that is wrong.” Even Teddy Roosevelt, the conservationist president and lover of the wilderness, referred to wolves as “the archtype of ravin [sic], the beast of waste and desolation.”

In reality, Homo sapiens shares a long and intimate relationship with Canis lupus. The gray wolf was the first animal to be domesticated out of the wild, long before the cow, horse, or goat. Its direct descendant is classified as Canis lupus familiaris, better known as the common dog, which, despite its wide subset of breeds, is almost genetically identical to the wolf. The bear, the tiger, the lion—feared predators of the human race, even today far more dangerous to man than wolves—never came out of the dark to join the fire circles of early hominids. The wolf did, though the humans in its midst became food on some occasions.

It’s theorized that wolves and humans, some 20,000 years ago, hunted the same prey—large herbivores—and, like us, wolves worked in packs. We fed at their kills, and they fed at ours. Antagonism gave way to mutualism, symbiosis, cooperation.

Around 8,000 BC, however, humans began to domesticate livestock and gather in villages. The wolf was no longer our friend, as it stalked and devoured the sheep and cows we now kept as property. Hatred of the beast was born, and it grew in proportion to our divorce from the wild.

Western man, armed with gunpowder and greedy for land, proved from the moment he arrived in the New World to be a more capable beast of waste and desolation, as predators of all kinds—the wolf, the cougar, the coyote, the black bear, the grizzly, the lynx, the wolverine—fell before his march. Wolves were shot on sight, trapped, snared, fed carcasses laced with poison or broken glass, their pups gassed or set on fire in their dens. “Such behavior amazed Native Americans,” writes wildlife journalist Ted Williams. “Their explanation for it was that, among palefaces, it was a manifestation of insanity.”

The sprawling roads, farms, towns, and cities of the young republic completed the job by systematically razing the wolf’s habitat. By 1900, wolves had disappeared east of the Mississippi. By the 1950s, they could only be found in isolated regions of the American West, with perhaps a dozen wolves remaining in the contiguous 48 states, compared with a pre-Columbian population estimated at several hundred thousand.

The point of this slaughter was not to protect human beings, although this remains the enduring perception. Only two fatal wolf attacks on Homo sapiens in North America have been reported during the past 100 years, with perhaps a few more over the course of the 19th century (the records prior to 1900 are uncertain and the stories undocumented, often embellished and tending toward the folkloric). A 2002 study conducted by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research reviewed the history of wolf predation on humans in Europe, Asia, and the US from 1500 to the present and found that wolf attacks were “extremely rare,” that “most attacks have been by rabid wolves,” and that “humans are not part of their normal prey.” Wolves in the United States died at our hands for the most part because of the ancient grievance: They ate our cattle and sheep, representing viscerally that which could not be tamed.

Then, in 1974, wolves in the United States got a reprieve. The passage of the Endangered Species Act the previous year had cleared the path for Congress to declare the animals endangered, making it illegal to hunt them. Wolves had survived by the thousands in the forests, mountains, and prairies of western Canada, and now, protected from widespread slaughter in the US, portions of the population began a slow march of recolonization, dispersing south from Alberta and British Columbia and into Montana. In 1995, Congress expedited this process by mandating the reintroduction of captured Canadian wolves to the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming.

Thereafter, wolves thrived as never before in our recorded history, and ecologists noted with astonishment the beneficial effects on ecosystems in the West. In Yellowstone National Park, a centerpiece of this reintroduction, wolves pared the overabundant populations of elk, which had stripped the park’s trees and grasses. With fewer elk, the flora returned, and the rejuvenated landscape created habitats for dozens of other creatures: beaver in the streams, songbirds in the understory, butterflies among the flowers.

Such was the perception of success that by 2009 the US wolf population was declared fully recovered. In 2011, when Congress rescinded the wolves’ protected status, scores of biologists, ecologists, and wildlife scientists protested the decision. Critics observed that the removal of Canis lupus from the endangered species list had been accomplished mostly due to the lobbying efforts of the livestock industry. For the first time since 1974, wolves across the Northern Rocky Mountains—in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana—were legally hunted, trapped, and shot with vengeance. The winter hunting seasons decimated whole packs. At the behest of ranchers, the US government joined in the slaughter, dispatching predator-control agents from the federal Wildlife Services.

The view of wolves as vermin bent on stealing ranchers’ livelihood has carried through to the present, though little evidence supports this stigma. The number of cattle and sheep lost to wolves and other predators each year is negligible. In 2010, just 0.23 percent of cattle in the US died from “carnivore depredations” (as wolf attacks on livestock are officially categorized).

And it didn’t matter that aggressive “predator management” has no basis in ecological science. “The myth we’ve been fed is that predators like wolves need to be hunted because otherwise they’ll grow out of control, exponentially,” said Brooks Fahy, director of the nonprofit Predator Defense, in Oregon. “But no scientific study backs this up. Wolves self-regulate if left alone.” Wolf management, Fahy said, “is a form of rationalized madness.”

Proud derby contestants displaying a pair of coyotes

More: http://www.vice.com/read/how-to-kill-a-wolf-0000259-v21n3

Five Blood-Chilling Facts About Wildlife “Services”

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Here are five blood-chilling facts about this rogue agency that have come to light in recent years:

•According to their own records, Wildlife Services killed 3,352,378 animals in 2012 alone. Among the victims: wolves, coyotes, beavers, bobcats, great blue herons, and sandhill cranes.
•The agency’s lethal methods are varied and indiscriminate. They include aerial gunning, cyanide gas, leg hold traps, poison, and neck snares.
•Unintended killings are common, and include thousands of endangered and other imperiled species, domestic dogs and other house pets.
•Cover-ups are routine. Former agency hunters have admitted to doctoring records and burying golden eagles caught in neck snares under orders from higher-ups. In Idaho, they even refused to admit to aerial gunning operations until after 23 wolves had been killed!
•This wanton slaughter is funded mostly with federal and state taxpayer dollars. At a time when federal conservation programs are being cut to the bone, these wildlife exterminators provide subsidized services to ranchers and others who request their help and will hire out their killing skills to the states.

Federal agents indiscriminately kill more than three million animals – from endangered species to house pets – every year.

The Wildlife Services agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently being audited by the USDA Office of the Inspector General. But the killing continues.

Just last week, Wildlife Services sharpshooters killed 23 wolves from a helicopter in a remote area in Idaho.

copyrighted Hayden wolf walking

Idaho Wolf (Eradication) Fund Won’t Receive $2 Million

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http://magicvalley.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/bell-wolf-fund-won-t-receive-million/article_3c9a845e-216c-58fe-935d-a3dbfc9000ca.html

By Kimberlee Kruesi – kkruesi@magicvalley.com

BOISE • A bill asking for $2 million to kill up to 500 of Idaho’s wolves won’t get even half of its requested appropriation, said co-chair of the state’s budget committee.

Instead, an unexpected bailout to make up for missing federal e-rate funds to pay for the Idaho Education Network (IEN) broadband program has taken precedence, said state Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, co-chair of the Joint Finance Appropriations Committee.

“We have some flexibility when it comes to killing wolves,” Bell said. “We don’t have flexibility with IEN.”

JFAC has already approved $6.6 million out of this year’s budget to make up for past-due payments to Education Networks of America, the state’s contractor on the broadband project. It’s money the federal government was supposed to pay for the state’s school broadband program but never did.

The supplemental appropriations bill passed both houses and now just needs the signature of the governor.

“Frankly, based on our discussions with legal counsel, we are obligated for this piece,” said state Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, while debating the bill on the Senate floor. “I need to inform you that this is the first half. The second half we are still arguing and discussing and re-discussing what we do for fiscal year 2015.”

Ever since the news was announced earlier this session, multiple lawmakers expressed their frustration with the state’s Department of Administration for extending the contract with the Education Networks of America through 2019 without informing lawmakers that the broadband vendor was not receiving the federal e-rate payments.

JFAC is expected to discuss the future of IEN next week, which includes a $7.3 million request from Otter and the Department of Administration to cover the federal payments for fiscal year 2015, Bell said.

This means that the wolf bill will also be discussed next week, Bell said, but it won’t get the requested $2 million.

“It will probably get less than $1 million or closer to the $400,000 that was requested last year,” she said.

Bell was referring to a recommendation a committee submitted to Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter last summer on how to fund ongoing wolf control efforts. The recommendation asked for $400,000 annually for five years to kill wolves that preyed on livestock.

Instead, Otter ignored the recommendation and requested $2 million of one-time funding to kill wolves during his State of the State speech in January.

The proposed wolf control bill — sponsored by state Sen. Bert Brackett, R-Rogerson — calls for a five-member oversight board that would manage the requested $2 million. The members would be made up of directors from the state Department of Fish and Game and Department of Agriculture, as well representatives from livestock industry, public at large and sportsmen.

Even if the bill makes it to the governor’s desk, it is up to JFAC to determine the final funding amount, Bell said. Budget writers will also decide if the money should come out of one-time or ongoing funds.

“We weren’t expecting to pay this much to IEN … it’s forced us to change a few things,” Bell said.

One More Wolf in Washington

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copyrighted wolf in river

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Washington-state-wolf-population-grows-by-1-249141411.html

Washington state wolf population grows by 1

By PHUONG LE Associated Press Published: Mar 8, 2014

SEATTLE (AP) – Washington’s wildlife agency reported Saturday that its annual survey tallied 52 endangered gray wolves living in the state at the end of 2013, one more than in 2012. The count’s results come as conservation groups urge the state to pull support from a federal effort to roll back protections for the predators.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife also found five successful breeding pairs in 2013, the same number as reported in the 2012 count.

The wolf population has been a controversial topic since the predators returned to the state much faster than expected in the past several years. In 2008, there were only a handful of wolves. In March 2013, there were an estimated 50 to 100 animals in 10 confirmed packs, all in central and eastern Washington.

Farmers and hunters in the West blame the returning gray wolf population for killing livestock and reducing elk herds.

Wolves are listed as endangered throughout Washington under state law and as endangered in the western two-thirds of the state under federal law.

But federal wildlife officials want to remove wolves from the endangered species list across much the Lower 48 states, including the western portion of Washington.

State wildlife managers support federal delisting of the wolves, saying it would give the state more control over managing conflicts between wolves and livestock.

Phil Anderson, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, has said federal restrictions hamper the state’s ability to resolve those conflicts in the western part of the state.

On Thursday, several conservation groups sent a letter asking Anderson to rescind the agency’s support for federal delisting.

“Wolves are just beginning to recover in Washington and face continued persecution. Federal protection is clearly needed to keep recovery on track,” Amaroq Weiss, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said earlier this week.

Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife expressed concern for the safety of the wolf population.

“The stability of Washington’s wolf population is good news, but the population is still incredibly vulnerable during these early stages of recovery in Washington and wolves have a long way still to go,” she said.

Stone expressed hope that Washington wouldn’t let anti-wolf sentiment come over the border from Idaho and affect wolf management practices.

“We hope Washington is observing the tragic example being set in Idaho, where wolves are treated like vermin,” she said.

Montana Outdoors “Weighs in” on Wolves

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>snip< Varley and his wife run Yellowstone Wolf Tracker wildlife tours, one of a dozen or so guiding operations sanctioned by park officials. These kinds of services are at the heart of a thriving wolf watching tourism that a University of Montana study found pumps millions of dollars into counties surrounding the park each year.

That economic argument is just one used by wolf advocates critical of growing hunter and trapper wolf harvests in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Some are like Varley, who has no gripe with wolf hunting elsewhere but wants a kill-free buffer around Yellowstone. [The old, "not in my back yard" mentality] Others, often from outside the Rocky Mountain West, want to halt all copyrighted Hayden wolf in lodgepoleslethal action on an animal that was classified as federally endangered just a few years ago.

On the flip side are those who demand that Montana kill more wolves, which they say harm ranchers’ bottom line and deplete elk and deer herds. “We’d like the state to take much more aggressive measures in certain areas to bring these predator numbers down to a more tolerable ratio with prey populations,” says Rob Arnaud, president of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association. “We’ve got hunting outfitters around Yellowstone going out of business because of wolves.”

Full article: http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2014/wolves.htm#.UxpKmGeYZla

Whither the Hunter/Conservationist?

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By George Wuerthner On March 5, 2014

Many hunter organizations like to promote the idea that hunters were the first and most important conservation advocates. They rest on their laurels of early hunter/wildlife activist like Teddy Roosevelt, and George Bird Grinnell who, among other things, were founding members of the Boone and Crocket Club. But in addition to being hunter advocates, these men were also staunch proponents of national parks and other areas off limits to hunting. Teddy Roosevelt help to establish the first wildlife refuges to protect birds from feather hunters, and he was instrumental in the creation of numerous national parks including the Grand Canyon. Grinnell was equally active in promoting the creation of national parks like Glacier as well as a staunch advocate for protection of wildlife in places like Yellowstone. Other later hunter/wildlands advocates like Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie helped to promote wilderness designation and a land ethic as well as a more enlightened attitude about predators.

Unfortunately, though there are definitely still hunters and anglers who put conservation and wildlands protection ahead of their own recreational pursuits, far more of the hunter/angler community is increasingly hostile to wildlife protection and wildlands advocacy. Perhaps the majority of hunters were always this way, but at least the philosophical leaders in the past were well known advocates of wildlands and wildlife.

Nowhere is this change in attitude among hunter organizations and leadership more evident than the deafening silence of hunters when it comes to predator management. Throughout the West, state wildlife agencies are increasing their war on predators with the apparent blessings of hunters, without a discouraging word from any identified hunter organization. Rather the charge for killing predators is being led by groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and others who are not only lobbying for more predator killing, but providing funding for such activities to state wildlife agencies.

For instance, in Nebraska which has a fledging population of cougars (an estimated 20) the state wildlife agency has already embarked on a hunting season to “control” cougar numbers. Similarly in South Dakota, where there are no more than 170 cougars, the state has adopted very aggressive and liberal hunting regulations to reduce the state’s cougar population.

But the worst examples of an almost maniacal persecution of predators are related to wolf policies throughout the country. In Alaska, always known for its Neanderthal predator policies, the state continues to promote killing of wolves adjacent to national parks. Just this week the state wiped out a pack of eleven wolves that were part of a long term research project in the Yukon Charley National Preserve. Alaska also regularly shoots wolves from the air, and also sometimes includes grizzly and black bears in its predator slaughter programs.

In the lower 48 states since wolves were delisted from the federal Endangered Species Act and management was turned over to the state wildlife agencies more than 2700 wolves have been killed.

This does not include the 3435 additional wolves killed in the past ten years by Wildlife Services, a federal predator control agency, in both the Rockies and Midwest. Most of this killing was done while wolves were listed as endangered.

As an example of the persecutory mentality of state wildlife agencies, one need not look any further than Idaho, where hunters/trappers, along with federal and state agencies killed 67 wolves this past year in the Lolo Pass area on the Montana/Idaho border, including some 23 from a Wildlife Service’s helicopter gun ship. The goal of the predator persecution program is to reduce predation on elk. However, even the agency’s own analysis shows that the major factor in elk number decline has been habitat quality declines due to forest recovery after major wildfires which has reduced the availability of shrubs and grasses central to elk diet. In other word, with or without predators the Lolo Pass area would not be supporting the number of elk that the area once supported after the fires. Idaho also hired a trapper to kill wolves in the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness to increase elk numbers there.

Idaho hunters are permitted to obtain five hunting and five trapping tags a year, and few parts of the state have any quota or limits. Idaho Governor Butch Otter recently outlined a new state budget allotting $2 million dollars for the killing of wolves—even though the same budget cuts funding for state schools.

Other states are no better than Idaho. Montana has a generous wolf six month long season. Recent legislation in the Montana legislature increased the number of wolves a hunter can kill to five and allows for the use of electronic predator calls and removes any requirement to wear hunter orange outside of the regular elk and deer seasons. And lest you think that only right wing Republican politicians’ support more killing, this legislation was not opposed by one Democratic Montana legislator, and it was signed into law by Democratic Governor Steve Bullock because he said Montana Dept of Fish, Wildlife and Parks supported the bill.

Wyoming has wolves listed as a predator with no closed season or limit nor even a requirement for a license outside of a “trophy” wolf zone in Northwest Wyoming.

The Rocky Mountain West is known for its backward politics and lack of ethics when it comes to hunting, but even more “progressive” states like Minnesota and Wisconsin have cow-towed to the hunter anti predator hostility. Minnesota allows the use of snares, traps, and other barbaric methods to capture and kill wolves. At the end of the first trapping/hunting season in 2012/2013, the state’s hunters had killed more than 400 wolves.

Though wolves are the target species that gets the most attention, nearly all states have rabid attitudes towards predators in general. So in the eastern United States where wolves are still absent, state wildlife agencies aggressively allow the killing of coyotes, bears and other predators. For instance, Vermont, a state that in my view has undeserved reputation for progressive policies, coyotes can be killed throughout the year without any limits.

These policies are promoted for a very small segment of society. About six percent of Americans hunt, yet state wildlife agencies routinely ignore the desires of the non-hunting public. Hunting is permitted on a majority of US Public lands including 50% of wildlife “refuges as well as nearly all national forests, all Bureau of Land Management lands, and even a few national parks. In other words, the hunting minority dominates public lands wildlife policies.

Most state agencies have a mandate to manage wildlife as a public trust for all citizens, yet they clearly serve only a small minority. Part of this is tradition, hunters and anglers have controlled state wildlife management for decades. Part of it is that most funding for these state agencies comes from the sale of licenses and tags. And part is the worldview that dominates these agencies which sees their role as “managers” of wildlife, and in their view, improving upon nature.

None of these states manage predators for their ecological role in ecosystem health. Despite a growing evidence that top predators are critical to maintaining ecosystem function due to their influence upon prey behavior, distribution and numbers, I know of no state that even recognizes this ecological role, much less expends much effort to educate hunters and the public about it. (I hasten to add that many of the biologists working for these state agencies, particularly those with an expertise about predators, do not necessarily support the predator killing policies and are equally appalled and dismayed as I am by their agency practices.)

Worse yet for predators, there is new research that suggests that killing predators actually can increase conflicts between humans and these species. One cougar study in Washington has documented that as predator populations were declining, complaints rose. There are good reasons for this observation. Hunting and trapping is indiscriminate. These activities remove many animals from the population which are adjusted to the human presence and avoid, for instance, preying on livestock. But hunting and trapping not only opens up productive territories to animals who may not be familiar with the local prey distribution thus more likely to attack livestock, but hunting/trapping tends to skew predator populations to younger age classes. Younger animals are less skillful at capturing prey, and again more likely to attack livestock. A population of young animals can also result in larger litter size and survival requiring more food to feed hungry growing youngsters—and may even lead to an increase in predation on wild prey—having the exact opposite effect that hunters desire.

Yet these findings are routinely ignored by state wildlife agencies. For instance, despite the fact that elk numbers in Montana have risen from 89,000 animals in 1992 several years before wolf reintroductions to an estimated 140,000-150,000 animals today, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks does almost nothing to counter the impression and regular misinformation put forth by hunter advocacy groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation or the Montana Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife that wolves are “destroying” Montana’s elk herds.

I have attended public hearings on wolves and other predator issues, and I have yet to see a single hunter group support less carnivore killing. So where are the conservation hunters? Why are they so silent in the face of outrage? Where is the courage to stand up and say current state wildlife agencies policies are a throw-back to the last century and do not represent anything approaching a modern understanding of the important role of predators in our ecosystems?

As I watch state after state adopting archaic policies, I am convinced that state agencies are incapable of managing predators as a legitimate and valued member of the ecological community. Their persecutory policies reflect an unethical and out of date attitude that is not in keeping with modern scientific understanding of the important role that predators play in our world.

It is apparent from evidence across the country that state wildlife agencies are incapable of managing predators for ecosystem health or even with apparent ethical considerations. Bowing to the pressure from many hunter organizations and individual hunters, state wildlife agencies have become killing machines and predator killing advocates.

Most people at least tolerant the killing of animals that eaten for food, though almost everyone believes that unnecessary suffering should be avoided. But few people actually eat the predators they kill, and often the animals are merely killed and left on the killing fields. Yet though many state agencies and some hunter organizations promote the idea that wanton waste of wildlife and unnecessary killing and suffering of animals is ethically wrong, they conveniently ignore such ideas when it comes to predators, allowing them to be wounded and left to die in the field, as well as permitted to suffer in traps. Is this ethical treatment of wildlife? I think not.

Unfortunately unless conservation minded hunters speak up, these state agencies as well as federal agencies like Wildlife Services will continue their killing agenda uninhibited. I’m waiting for the next generation of Teddy Roosevelts, Aldo Leopolds and Olaus Muries to come out of the wood work. Unless they do, I’m afraid that ignorance and intolerant attitudes will prevail and our lands and the predators that are an important part of the evolutionary processes that created our wildlife heritage will continue to be eroded.

Whither the Hunter/Conservationist?

copyrighted wolf in river

Killing of entire Alaska wolf pack upsets National Park Service…And Me!

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Before admiring the “subsistence” lifestyle, think of wolves that the state of Alaska shoots from planes to provide “game” for their hunters…

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by Nick Provenza

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — Alaska Fish and Game officials killed an Eastern Interior wolf pack last week, and the National Park Service — which had been studying the animals — is none too pleased.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that all 11 wolves in the Lost Creek pack near Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve were shot. That included the pack’s alpha pair, which had been fitted with tracking collars as part of an ongoing research project.

Doug Vincent-Lang, acting director for the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation, says the wolves were in an area adjacent to the preserve that has been targeted by the state for aerial predator control, which is part of an effort to boost moose and caribou numbers.

But Yukon-Charley Superintendent Greg Dudgeon said the shootings are a setback for a long-term study of wolf behavior that began roughly 20 years ago. He said the Lost Creek pack had been monitored for the past seven years.

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/03/killing-of-entire-alaska-wolf-pack-upsets-national-park-service/
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ALASKA… National Park Service and State Clash over the recent Wolf Pack Killing

An entire wolf pack was shot and killed by aerial gunning for the sole purpose of boosting moose and caribou numbers, discarding the fact that they were part of a twenty year study by NPS!

On Feb. 21, the state agency shot all 11 members of the Lost Creek pack near Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. That included the pack’s alpha pair, which had been fitted with park service collars as part of an ongoing research project.

Yukon-Charley Superintendent Greg Dudgeon said the shootings are a setback for a long-term study of wolf behavior that began roughly 20 years ago. He said the Lost Creek pack had been monitored for the past seven years as part of the study, which looks at wolf migration patterns, denning habits and population changes.

Alaska fully intends to continue it aerial killing of wolves, calling it Predator Control.

TAKE ACTION…

CONTACT ALASKA FISH AND GAME, AND ALSO DIVISION OF TOURISM AND TELL THEM WHY ALASKA IS NOT A TRAVEL OPTION…

TOURISM DIVISION
Kathy Dunn
Tourism Marketing Manager
907-269-5734
kathy.dunn@alaska.gov

ALASKA FISH AND GAME
Online Comment link…
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=contacts.emailus

Controversy over wolves and elk was predicted before wolves entered the Lolo area

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Idaho Fish and Game uses Chopper to kill 23 wolves in The Lolo

Controversy over wolves and elk was predicted before wolves entered the area-

Idaho Fish and Game reports it has used a helicopter to kill 23 wolves in the north central Idaho area commonly called the Lolo.  This is the latest in a continuing effort (6 forays in 4 years) to reduce the number of wolves there by 70%. In recent years IDF&G has also had very generous hunting rules to kill cougar and bear. Here is the story from the media — Associated Press in the Missoulian. “Idaho Fish and Game kills 23 wolves in Lolo Pass area.”

The point of these efforts is to try to bring back the once mighty elk herd that roamed the area. The Lolo became famous for elk in the 1940s through the 80s. The size of the herd stemmed from the regeneration of the great forest fire of 1910 and later fires. Regeneration provided perfect conditions to result in a large number of elk. Elk numbers were legendary and became part of hunting lore. Unfortunately for the elk herd, the burned forest did not only regenerate. It advanced to maturity resembling the conditions when Lewis and Clark traversed the area and almost starved due to lack of game. Predictions were this maturity would cause elk numbers to crash and remain low indefinitely (until the habitat was “reborn”). As predicted, the crash happened. The elk population peaked last in 1989 at an estimated 16,054. Then came a sharp drop, almost a cliff, but by then politics dictated a new and logically impossible explanation for the crash — wolves.

We first drove down the Lochsa River in the spring of 1976. It was new country for me — beautiful, primitive or Wilderness country just beyond Highway 12. There was, however, the interesting distraction of numerous fires burning on the slopes just north of the highway. We learned these fires were set in an effort to forestall the coming decline in elk habitat. We almost hit an elk on the highway and saw quite a few more.

In those days there were plenty of bear and cougar were increasing. Cougar had recently become a protected game animal in Idaho. No one spoke of predation as a factor. That would come later in the mid-1990s. After the first drop in the early 90s, the elk herd took another hit in 1995-6 with a big die-off in a severe winter.  Afterwards the low population recovered but little, and drifted slowly downward. Today (2014) there are only about 2200 elk.

Wolves were reintroduced to Idaho in 1995 and 1996, but none to the Lolo. Wolves eventually made their way north to the Lolo, but their numbers were not significant until at least 5 years later — about the year 2000.copyrighted Hayden wolf walking

We see that the huge drop in elk populations came before the wolves. Therefore, wolves could not have been responsible for the elk herd’s drop off the cliff. They could not have been, at least in this universe where a cause has to come before the effect.

At the time of the big crash, I predicted wolves would, nevertheless, be blamed. Anti-wolf groups were gearing up. They likely figured that many hunters did not have the time sequence of events clearly in mind. Politicians soon joined in and the future path for Idaho Fish and Game was set in political concrete.

From the Lolo, anti-wolf forces then took the misinterpreted data and added to it the big drop in Yellowstone Park’s northern range elk herd. This became standard fare to show how wolves hammered elk. Agencies did not highlight data on the where elk numbers were stable, or even growing inspite of an increasing wolf population, such as the Hells Canyon Elk Zone, the Brownlee Zone, the Weiser River Zone, or finally the Snake River and Pioneer Zones where there are wolves, but “too many elk,” where elk will be reduced to please agricultural interests.  Are these elk somehow less important than deep backcountry elk?

At any rate, the conventional wisdom became elk were almost extinct in Idaho, disinformation that IDF&G did not actively dispute even though it brought great harm to the department’s revenue when hunters shunned the state.

On the contrary, Idaho Fish and Game launched their campaign to nearly rid the Lolo of wolves and other large predators at a high monetary cost. Meanwhile in reality, in their new Idaho Elk Management Plan, Fish and Game reports a statewide elk population of 107,000 animals.

Now Idaho Fish and Game plans to go after wolves even in (especially in) Idaho’s famed Wilderness areas where natural processes are legally supposed to be paramount.

What will happen in the Lolo? After 4 years of a war on native Idaho carnivores, we should expect to be seeing an increase in elk if predators are the reason elk numbers have remained low. This is a logically possible explanation. However, the habitat for elk has not clearly improved. There have been some new forest fires and these burned areas should eventually lead to new habitat. The fires have not yet been extensive, and it isn’t clear that the fire-opened areas are growing elk food instead of the invasive spotted knapweed. This noxious invader was not present back in 1940. In the new elk management plan, weeds are blamed for lower elk numbers in a number of hunting zones in Idaho. Why not the Lolo? It might be politically appropriate to speak only of other zones.