Montana wolf hunt

Bottom line - despite the return of wolf hunts to Idaho and Montana this year, wolf populations grew. Not by as much as in previous years, but by a respectable 3.2 percent in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington, reports the Sightline Institute in its Cascadia Scorecard.

The hunts marked the first time in decades recreational hunters were allowed to shoot the wolves. Hunters killed 134 wolves in Idaho and 72 in Montana. There were 1,386 left standing in the four states at the end of 2009.

But hunting wasn’t quite as lethal to wolves last year as lack of habitat and policies that protect livestock. Wolves have pretty much saturated the best habitat in high-elevation public forests in Idaho and Montana. That means they're expanding their range and getting into more conflicts with the cattle, sheep, dogs, llamas and goats that inhabit more domesticated territory. In 2009, there were 944 confirmed domestic animal kills by wolf packs in the three core recovery areas, a jump of more than 50 percent from 2008, an increase that was mainly due to a taste for sheep.

Another 240 wolves were killed by property owners and game officers for killing or stalking livestock in Montana, Idaho and Oregon.

“They get in trouble and we end up killing them," said US Fish and Wildlife Wolf Recovery Coordinator Ed Bangs. "The wolf population still grew last year, but they’ve filled up all the good habitat, so conflicts were a lot higher than normal and there was a lot more damage than usual. But the populations are still doing great.”

The wolf hunt in Montana hasn't gone as planned, with wolves in the state's wilderness area along the northern border of Yellowstone National Park taking the brunt of the hunt.

Nine wolves have been killed there, in a small area of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Four of those wolves were from the park's Cottonwood Pack, including the pack's breeding female. Hunting was suspended last week after state wildlife commissioners became concerned about the heavy killing in the area, Associated Press reporter Matthew Brown reports.

 Wildlife advocate and blogger Matt Scoglund says the wolf hunt was wrongly designed from the start. If the state didn't want to kill wilderness wolves, it shouldn't have opened up the backcountry to hunting more than a month before the other areas of the state, he writes. The result has been the deaths of some of the state's celebrity wolves, including some radio-collared wolves that were part of Yellowstone's important wolf studies, and some that have been featured on PBS and Discovery Channel programs.

 Yes, I'm talking about the Yellowstone wolves that bring people from all over the world to Yellowstone, where wolf-watching tourists annually spend about $35 million in the region.

The wolf hunts can continue in Idaho and Montana, a federal judge ruled today, denying requests by environmentalists and animal welfare groups to stop the hunts.

 But the Associated Press reports a ruling that is somewhat conflicted - U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said that the federal government appeared to violate the Endangered Species Act by leaving Wyoming wolves under federal protection and making a decision based on political boundaries. That appears to violate the Endangered Species Act, he said. Leaving the window open a crack for environmentalists, he said that means enviros could win their bid to restore endangered species protection for wolves.

-- Rita Hibbard

The wolf hunt is on, for now, in Idaho. In fact, it begins today in some parts of the state.  A federal judge took no action at the on the  the last-minute injunction sought by environmentalists Monday, but said he would rule as a quickly as he could. Last year, the same judge, Donald Molloy, sided with environmentalists in a similar case, the Idaho Statesman reported.

Reactions:

"It's the endangered species that need to be protected, not the states' rights to kill wolves," said Doug Honnold of Earthjustice.

Michael Eitel of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency would keep monitoring the wolves and step in to return the species to the endangered list if warranted.

The season is scheduled to start today in parts of Idaho and later elsewhere in the state. Montana's season is set to begin Sept. 15. Business has been brisk. More than 9,000 hunters in Idaho bought wolf tags. Tags went on sale Monday in Montana, where hunters purchased almost 1,500 by 11 a.m., the Billings Gazette reported.

Meanwhile, the Helena Independent Record reports that wolves killed 120 adult male sheep in one attack on a Dillon-area ranch, the largest  known wolf kill in recent history. That compares with 111 sheep killed by wolves in Montana in all of 2008, according to wildlife officials. In this attack, confirmed by wildlife officials,  the wolves took out 120 purebred Rambouillet bucks that ranged in size from about 150 to 200 pounds, and were the result of more than 80 years of breeding.