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 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.

For fascinating insight into the psyche of the wolf hunt, read Ralph Bartholdt's profile of three wolf warriors - the hunter, the wolf advocate and the regulator in NewWest. Both Idaho and Montana have approved wolf hunts to begin in September, and environmentalists have sued to stop the hunts. A judge will hear arguments in federal court next Monday.

As hunter John Walters sees it, the gray wolf was dumped into Idaho by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1995, leaving elk herds at the mercy of a super predator. The wolves are the reason for the decimation of the elk herds in at least two of the state's wildlife management units, he says.

For the past two winters he has shot photos of the dead elk he's found with the nose and hindquarters eaten, a telltale sign, he says, of a wolf kill.

Not so, says wolf advocate Stephen Alexander.

"There are almost no other animals that have been persecuted to the extent that wolves have," he says. "All this discussion has to do with us as human beings," he continues. "It's about us and what is our relationship to the natural world.  

"We are the super predators. We don't tolerate competition very well. This is more of a self examination about us as a species and where we are going."

Now hear the voice of Idaho Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Tony McDermott:

"This is the most contentious social, political, emotional, irrational subject that I have ever been involved with. The irrationality on both sides of this astounds me."

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Defenders of wolves stepped forward to block wolf hunting seasons in Idaho and Montana, claiming that the season is long, the quotas are high and the combined effect will limit the ability of the wolves to establish new territories.

"The hunting will further isolate the Yellowstone population," said Center for Biological Diversity spokesman Michael Robinson, one of the members of an environmental coalition filing the petition in federal court,according to the Missoulian. The coalition, which also includes Earthjustice, is suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in order to reverse the federal agency's decision removing the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act in Montana and Idaho. Both states set up 2009 hunting seasons for wolves.

The injunction request asks that wolves be put back on endangered species status while the larger lawsuit is settled. To win that, the wolf advocates must show two things: That they are likely to win the larger case and that allowing a hunt in the meantime would do irreparable harm to the wolf population.

Dang it! Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has already said he was all set to get himself one of those wolf tags, as InvestigateWest earlier discussed.  But federal officials would advise him not to worry. They say they can meet environmentalists objections in court, and win.

There's a wolf out there, roaming through the wild ranges of Idaho, with Gov. Butch Otter's name on it. The guv, it seems, plans to buy a wolf tag, now that the state has legalized wolf hunting and set a a quota of 220 wolves this season.

But will he still respect them in the morning?

"You can still hate them and respect their cunning and their place in nature," he told Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman. "I'm not real fond of rattlesnakes, but I understand their place in the system."

Environmentalists have said they may sue to stop the wolf hunts. Montana also has set a wolf quota, and will have a hunt this fall.