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Once protected, Western wolves\nnow a problem of plenty

By Kirk Johnson
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, CHEYENNE, WYOMING
Sunday, Jan 06, 2008, Page 9

Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.

The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.

Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the state of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming's hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)

During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes -- that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy -- once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near around Yellowstone National Park where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.

The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago -- which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that bloodletting might not be quite as popular as it once was.

"If they'd delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers," said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. "Now people will say they're murderers."

Wolves are intelligent, adaptable, highly mobile in staking out new territory, and capable of rapid reproduction rates if food sources are good and humans with rifles or poison are kept in check by government gridlock -- and that is precisely what happened.

From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York state and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.

Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, a report released earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana showed. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.

The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Terry Cleveland, said changes in economics and attitude were creating a profound wrinkle in the outlook for human-wolf relations. Cleveland, a 39-year-veteran with the department, said that many newcomers, who are more interested in breathtaking vistas than the price of feed-grain and calves, do not see wolves the way older residents do.

In the public comment period for Wyoming's wolf plan, sizable majorities of residents in the counties near Yellowstone expressed opposition. Teton County, around Jackson Hole, led the way, with more than 95 percent of negative comment about the plan, according an analysis by the state. Many respondents feared that the plan would lead to more killing of wolves than necessary.

"It used to be, `Yeah, we live near wild animals'; now it's like, `Gosh, we need to manage them, and it's the job of the state to do that,'" said Meg Daly, a writer in Jackson, who submitted a comment opposing the wolf plan and recently spoke to a reporter by telephone. Daly said she had lived in Wyoming as a child and moved back last year.

Many new landowners around Yellowstone have also barred the hunting of animals like elk on their property, sometimes, in a single pen stroke, closing off thousands of acres that Wyoming hunters had used for decades. Cleveland said he expected that those same "no trespassing" signs would be up and in force, creating de facto wolf sanctuaries, when wolf hunters or state wildlife managers started coming around this year. But the trend of land enclosure, Cleveland said, is probably not in the wolf's long-term interest.

"As large ranches become less economically viable, the alternative is 40-acre [16-hectare] subdivisions," he said, "and that is not compatible with any kind of wildlife."

Some advocates of wolf protection say that for all the talk of moderation and the nods to a changing ethos, old attitudes will take over once the gray wolf is delisted.

"I think it's going to be open season," said Suzanne Stone, a wolf specialist at Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group.

Stone said she thought the changes that led to federal approval of Wyoming's wolf plan were mostly cosmetic.

Stone and others are concerned that the plan grants Wyoming something that no other state in the Yellowstone region received: the right to kill wolves at any time by any means across most of the state.

In the northwest corner of the state near Yellowstone and in Idaho and Montana, wolves will be classified as trophy game animals and may be killed only in strictly controlled numbers by licensed hunters. In the 80 percent of Wyoming outside the Yellowstone area, however, wolves will be labeled predators, with no limits and no permits required to kill them.

The state has pledged to maintain at least 15 breeding pairs, or about 150 animals, in a five-county region around the park. The state now has about 362 wolves, according to the most recent estimates in late September.

That formulation sounds just about right to Chip Clouse.

"I support no wolves on private land, and right now we have wolves running rampant," said Clouse, a rancher and a former outfitter in Cody, just east of Yellowstone, who has lived in Wyoming for 37 years. "They brought the wolves in for people to see on the public lands, in the park, and what has happened is that they have grown so many packs that they're now impeding on people who are just trying to live and make a living on their own property."

Joel DiPaola, a chef at a Jackson ski resort who arrived in Wyoming from Connecticut in the early 1990s, just before the wolves, said he thought much of the huffing and puffing about the animals was emotional and would make little difference.

"As the state was dragging its feet, the wolves were breeding and expanding," DiPaola said. "It's now going to be almost impossible to get rid of them even if they try. Once they seem to get a foothold and have a refuge in the parks, they're here."
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