Wolf packs are thriving now in central Idaho, but how they will fare as the state takes management control from the federal government remains to be seen. Photo courtesy John and Karen Hollingsworth, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The sudden downpour that drove Jim Holyan and myself back into our pickup one early morning last June had tapered off. Holyan, a wildlife biologist with the Nez Perce Tribe’s wolf recovery project, eased out of the truck and began sweeping the damp air of the forested ridge in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest with the antenna of his radio receiver, searching for signals from any radio-collared wolves in the vicinity. A steady beep began emanating from the receiver, its frequency identifying the animal as B-210, the suspected alpha male of the Hemlock Ridge pack. He was not far away.
A U.S. Forest Service work crew had reported seeing signs that might indicate the presence of a previously unknown rendezvous site—a wolf pack’s “hangout” where they stash their pups, and rest and regroup after hunting forays. We were there to locate that site and check on the pack. The radio signal beckoning us toward the small canyon below, drained by an unnamed stream, hinted that we just might hit pay dirt. Covered head-to-toe in raingear, we plunged into the forest toward the canyon bottom.
The wolves that we hoped to find were part of the legacy of one of the most remarkable, successful and controversial wildlife recovery projects in American history—the return of the gray wolf to the Northern Rockies. The massive federal effort to exterminate wolves in the area, at the behest of livestock interests, had succeeded by the 1930s, but by the 1980s, the idea of restoring wolves to Yellowstone National Park had gained momentum. It culminated with a plan by the U.S. Department of the Interior to restore gray wolf populations not just to the park but also to the remote country of central Idaho.
Although planning for the recovery began in the mid-1970s, the actual reintroduction was implemented two decades later, when wolves were captured in the Canadian Rockies in cooperation with the Canadian government and trucked to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Between January and March of 1995, federal wildlife biologists released fourteen wolves into Yellowstone National Park and fifteen into central Idaho. Another twenty were released in central Idaho the following January.
Wolf reintroduction had great support throughout the country, but many residents of the three states where the wolves were released were not pleased. Politically powerful interest groups—in particular, ranchers and hunters who feared the loss of livestock and decimation of big game herds by wolves—and people who believed wolves were a danger to humans made their feelings known to their elected officials, and in angry confrontations during public meetings.
But the push to return wolves to the region was unstoppable. To make the project more palatable, in 1995 the federal government designated the reintroduced wolves as an experimental, nonessential population under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act, which allowed for more management options, including lethal control. It has occasionally been politically necessary to eliminate animals or packs that took to killing livestock on a regular basis. The special designation also assured the timber, mining and other extractive industries that the recovery effort would not affect their operations. The minimum recovery goal for the three-state area was set at thirty breeding pairs and a total population of at least 300 wolves for three years in a row. Wolves, much more prolific and adaptable than many people realize, reached that goal in 2002.
The Yellowstone wolves have gotten most of the press over the years, but it is central Idaho that has really excelled as wolf country. The Central Idaho Experimental Area encompasses about 77,782 square miles located roughly between Interstate 90 and the state’s southern boundary.
There are fourteen national forests within the recovery area, and virtually all known wolf pack territories are within national forest lands. Its core zone is made up of three wilderness areas—Gospel Hump, Selway-Bitterroot and the Frank ChurchÐRiver of No Return—a total of nearly 4 million acres and the largest chunk of contiguous wilderness in the lower forty-eight states. This huge block of wild land and healthy prey populations of elk and deer combine to make the region not just a wolf stronghold, but also a wolf factory.
The Forest Service manages the habitat on those forests while the state manages the wildlife.
“The habitat on the forests is prey habitat,” says Dan Davis, forest wildlife biologist for the Clearwater National Forest. The Forest Service’s role in wolf recovery has focused on ensuring that planned management projects don’t have a negative impact on forest wolf packs.
Ten years after the last wolves were released into Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, the animals are considered fully recovered. The official tally used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, from 2004 statistics, puts Idaho’s wolf population at 512 wolves, fifty-nine packs and thirty-six breeding pairs—more than enough to meet the entire three-state recovery goal on its own. Idaho’s wolves now occupy essentially all suitable habitats in the state and are widely expected to provide the seed for new wolf populations in other parts of the country.
Now begins the years-long process of transition from a recovery to a management mode and from federal control to management by the states, which also requires removal of the wolves from protection under the Endangered Species Act. It’s a delicate transition, and as new a territory for Idaho’s wildlife managers as Idaho was for those first thirty-five wolves when the doors to their pens were opened. The question is: Will wolves prosper as well under state management as they did during the federally overseen recovery period?
The Nez Perce Tribe has been interested in wolf recovery since the early 1990s, when the Fish and Wildlife Service was writing a wolf-reintroduction Environmental Impact Statement.
“The tribe wanted to be involved in wolf recovery because of its spiritual and traditional reverence for wolves,” explains Curt Mack, who heads up the Nez Perce Tribe’s McCall-based Wolf Recovery Project. In the Nez Perce language the word for wolf translates as “big brother,” and they see parallels between wolves and themselves—mistreated by white people, driven from their homeland and killed.
“Everyone assumed the state would be the manager for the recovery,” continues Mack. “To everyone’s surprise, the legislature passed a law prohibiting the state from being the manager. This left the door open for the tribe.”
The tribe approached the Fish and Wildlife Service with a proposal that it be the recovery manager in Idaho, and developed a recovery management plan. The federal government signed off on the plan and transferred wolf recovery management to the tribe in 1995.
Under the agreement, the federal government retained responsibility for policy, law enforcement and control, while the tribe was responsible for the field and biology work. That included capturing and radio-collaring wolves, monitoring packs, looking for new packs as they formed, keeping tabs on the overall population levels and counting pup and breeding adult numbers.
By 2002, when the official recovery goal for the Northern Rockies experimental wolf population was met, the dynamics and direction of the program began to shift toward turning over all wolf management to the states and removing the wolves from the Endangered Species list. Before the federal government would relinquish its authority, each state had to write wolf management plans acceptable to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“The only reason wolves became extinct in the lower forty-eight states was because people killed too many of them,” says Ed Bangs, Fish and Wildlife Service wolf recovery coordinator, whose office is located in Helena, Montana. “The only reason they came back is that the [Endangered Species Act] kept people from killing them off.”
To pass muster with the federal government, the states had to come up with a plan that demonstrated they would manage wolf mortality to ensure that their numbers did not fall below recovery levels, which is defined as at least fifteen packs in each state. Idaho and Montana developed plans that did that. But Wyoming rebelled, producing a plan that classified their wolves as predatory animals, which, under that state’s law, may be shot at any time by anyone without limits.
This caused a problem, because the wolves had to be federally delisted before the states could take charge, and that could not happen until all three had a federally approved plan. Neither Idaho nor Montana cared to be held hostage by Wyoming, so they approached the federal government to have the 10(j) rule liberalized to allow them to take more management action while the “Equality State” worked things out.
In February 2005 that rule was modified to give Idaho and Montana the flexibility to use lethal methods to control wolves. Previously, only Wildlife Services, a federal bureau under the Department of Agriculture, could kill wolves that were causing a problem to livestock and other property. The states’ only management tool was to relocate wolves that were causing problems.
That was a major handicap from the perspective of state wildlife managers. “We get asked why we can’t just relocate wolves,” says Idaho Department of Fish and Game State Wolf Coordinator Steve Nadeau. “We tell them that all the wolf habitat in Idaho is full and no other state wants them.”
The liberalized 10(j) rule allows landowners to shoot wolves that are harassing livestock, including on federal grazing allotments. It also allows the state to kill wolves as part of an elk or deer management program, although as long as the wolves remain federally listed the Fish and Wildlife Service must review and approve such plans.
Endangered Species delisting is the other component that would mark the end of the gray wolf recovery phase, wrapping up the federal government’s role altogether. On February 2, 2006, Fish and Wildlife announced that it intended to remove the Rocky Mountain population of gray wolves from the Endangered Species list, but it doesn’t seem likely that Wyoming will come up with a plan that allows that to happen. The boundaries of that population include all of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the eastern third of Oregon and Washington, and part of north-central Utah. That boundary defines the wolves within it as a distinct population segment.
To determine those boundaries, Fish and Wildlife drew a line around the current population, then added eighty to 160 miles where the wolves might expand before encountering unsuitable habitat. Wolves within those boundaries would be considered part of the same population segment. If and when a delisting occurred, those wolves would no longer be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Any wolves that colonized beyond that zone would be designated a different population segment and receive Endangered Species protection. Two current populations of wolves—one in northwest Montana and another in Idaho north of Interstate 90 that colonized on their own from Canada—would remain classified as endangered.
“The bottom line is that wolf recovery is completed within the recovery area and they should be delisted,” says Bangs.
Delisting is critical from the states’ perspective, not only because it completes their full takeover of wolf management but also because they can establish regulated hunting seasons for wolves, which the state wildlife agencies are eventually likely to do. The states would still be required to monitor their wolf populations and report to Fish and Wildlife for five years after delisting, as well as adhere to their wolf management plans.
One concern over Idaho’s takeover of wolf management—especially in light of the state’s militant opposition to the recovery program from the beginning—is that it might begin deliberately reducing wolf numbers in the name of wildlife management. Idaho Fish and Game handed a little extra credibility to that viewpoint when it announced that it plans to kill 75 percent of the wolves in a 1.5-million-acre portion of the Clearwater region to boost elk populations. That announcement occurred shortly after Idaho officially assumed day-to-day wolf management from the federal government in an agreement signed by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Governor Dirk Kempthorne on January 5, 2006. That translates to forty-three wolves killed the first year and lower numbers in subsequent years.
Elk make up about 80 percent of an Idaho wolf’s diet, and elk populations in two Idaho game management units—numbers ten and twelve in the Lolo area—have been declining substantially in recent years. Idaho Fish and Game believes that wolves are partly responsible for that decline—along with habitat loss and predation by black bears and mountain lions—and wants to kill wolves in the area on an ongoing basis to keep their numbers down. The state claims that wolves are prolific enough to withstand a 30 to 40 percent annual mortality rate. The 10(j) rule agreement with the Fish and Wildlife Service made lethal control of wolves as part of elk management legal.
The proposal generated a storm of national and international protest. Idaho Fish and Game received more than 40,000 e-mail comments, although most of them came from a campaign organized by Defenders of Wildlife. Nevertheless, a two-to-one majority of the independently written comments also opposed the plan.
The Nez Perce Tribe, which also came out against the control proposal, doesn’t believe the state has collected enough data to indict the Lolo wolves. The tribe wants to avoid the scenario of removing wolves only to discover that the elk herds don’t increase in response because the wolves weren’t the limiting factor.
“The tribe is not opposed to killing wolves,” says Mack. “We’ve said from the beginning of the recovery program that wolves will have to be managed. But they need to be managed on sound science.”
The tribe would also like to see the delisting process completed before such controversial control proposals are introduced. “Lethally controlling wolves for the benefit of elk might be easier for the public to accept when they have been delisted,” says Mack.
“We’ll take a look at the plan,” says Bangs. “If it’s science-based and doesn’t cause the wolf population to fall below recovery levels, the federal government will approve it.” If the plan moves ahead, lawsuits by conservation organizations are likely.
Science aside, there are plenty of people in Idaho who would be happy to see the state’s wolves eradicated. Bumper stickers that read, “Canadian Wolves, Smoke a Pack a Day” abound on trucks and cars in rural areas. One website claims wolves are killing large numbers of pregnant cow elk, making Idaho “America’s largest abortion clinic,” lending a culture-war aspect to the debate. In 2001, the Idaho legislature called for the elimination of all wolves in Idaho. That institutional hostility toward wolves makes some nervous about how Idaho will manage them over the long term.
Right now a group named the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition is collecting signatures for an initiative that calls for removing all of Idaho’s wolves “by any means possible.” But the danger to the wolves from this campaign is not likely to be great. According to Bangs, the federal government would reissue an emergency Endangered Species listing and take back control if Idaho allowed its wolf population to drop below the recovery levels outlined in its management plan—or if it attempted to eradicate its entire wolf population.
Nadeau believes that much of the hostility toward wolves will dissipate when the state has taken full management responsibility from the federal government.
“A rising frustration among many in Idaho is that they feel the bureaucracy let them down and that the [Endangered Species] delisting has not occurred when it was said it would,” he says. “Once we are allowed to control and manage the wolf population, there will be more acceptance.”
In the long run, acceptance is likely to be the best strategy for Idaho’s human populations, because wolves are in the state to stay. “The biggest challenge to make that transition from recovery to management is to increase tolerance for wolves,” says Mack. “My hope is that we will be able to sit down with groups that have issues and find some common ground so we can all live with wolves.”
In 2005 the Nez Perce Tribe signed an agreement with the State of Idaho to oversee wolf management in the Clearwater region and McCall subregion. If and when wolves are delisted, the Wolf Recovery Project’s federal funding—which runs around $350,000 per year—will likely go away. It remains to be seen what the tribe’s role will be at that point. In the meantime, Mack and his biologists will continue their work on behalf of Idaho’s wolves, as they have for the past decade.
By the time Jim Holyan and I reached the bottom of the brushy canyon we were soaking wet. As we approached the small stream, well-worn trails became evident in the tall brush. Then wolf scats. Then wolf tracks. Holyan silently pointed these signs out as we crept along, putting a finger to his lips.
We crossed the stream onto a muddy open bench, which was covered with wolf tracks and scat. We were now in the rendezvous site we had hoped to find. “There’s been a lot of activity here,” said Holyan in a low voice. “Right now there are probably wolves bedded down all around us.”
We ducked into the dark timber. Holyan whispered that the area looked like a perfect place for wolves to lie down for a nap. Almost on cue, roused from its daybed, a gray wolf appeared not twenty yards away, peering at us through the tree branches. Then the wolf vanished so suddenly that I was left wondering if it was ever really there at all.