Last week, I was thrilled to
find four sets of wolf tracks carved in the snow in our back
pasture. Two nights previously, wolves killed a neighbor’s black
Lab within 200 yards of the owner’s house. I feel bad about that
dog. We have Labrador retrievers, too. When I let them out in the
morning, I go with them into the cold 5 a.m. dark to make sure the
coast is clear. It’s a deal I make to enjoy the wolves’ presence.
The wolves kill deer and elk, too. That’s the way it
should be — except apparently, in Idaho. On Jan. 12, exactly
seven days after Interior Secretary Gale Norton handed over wolf
management to the state, the Department of Fish and Game announced
a plan to kill 43 wolves in the “Lolo Zone,” two game management
units in northern Idaho. Dozens more wolves in that zone are slated
to be killed over the next five years.
Idaho officials
claim the timing of the proposal and the handover is entirely
coincidental. “These two actions are absolutely not connected,”
said Jim Caswell, director of the state’s Office of Species
Conservation. “We talked about this publicly in {Fish and Game}
commission meetings for the past year.”
In fact, every
Idaho official I spoke to swore up and down that such was exactly
the case: In January 2005, the Bush administration altered a
provision of the Endangered Species Act called the 10(j) rule,
which allowed Idaho to propose lethal management options; within
days, state game officials started combing the data, looking to
justify the kind of wolf kill their client base — Idaho’s
hunters and outfitters — has been clamoring for since the
reintroduction of wolves in 1995.
They chose carefully.
The Lolo Zone, at first blush, seems just the place to rescue game
populations. Elk numbers have dwindled far below the highs of the
mid-1980s, when the area ranked among Idaho’s most productive elk
units. Idaho officials announced that an ambitious new study blamed
wolves for preventing the herd’s recovery.
According to
figures from the study posted on the state’s elk ecology Web site,
eight radio-collared elk cows were killed by wolves in the Lolo
zone in 2005 — which, game officials stated, proves that
wolves cause 32 percent of adult cow elk mortality in the zone. But
such absurdly small data samples are statistically meaningless. For
instance, using numbers generated by the same study, I could just
as accurately “prove” that each year over 500 cow elk die in the
Lolo zone by “accident.”
Most scientists would cringe at
justifying management decisions on such an immature study, but in
Idaho, game management data spurts from the computer already
smudged with political fingerprints.
Indeed, one Idaho
biologist told me that the Lolo zone can no longer support the
massive elk herd it once did. That temporary phenomena was a side
effect of the 1910 fires, which cleared vast areas of the region’s
forest. For a historically brief period, the burned areas supported
a great deal of elk browse. But by the late 1980s the steep slopes
were already returning to the densely forested conditions in which
Lewis and Clark nearly starved for lack of game.
The fact
is, a decline in the Lolo zone’s elk population declines was well
under way — steeply, rapidly under way — years before
wolves ever appeared in the area.
Eventually, research
into Idaho’s elk cow mortality will reveal interesting things about
predator-prey dynamics, the kinds of data on which we can base
realistic game management decisions. But right now, what the study
reveals is that Idaho’s game bureaucrats’ thinking is as limited
and immature as their data.
My perspective is this: I
like wolves on the landscape. I also believe that some sort of
management is necessary to keep them here.
Back in the
early 1990s, I, like many people, felt it would be stupid and sad
to recover wolf populations if local managers were simply going to
shoot wolves the moment federal agents signaled a green light. Now
comes Idaho, brandishing plans for aerial gunning and the medieval
cruelty of leghold traps in the name of rescuing an elk herd that
no longer exists. This makes all of us look, well, stupid and sad.
Meanwhile, anyone who would like to has until Feb. 17 to
contact: IDFG Wolf Comments, P.O. Box 25, Boise ID 83707 or via
email at wolfcomments@idfg.idaho.gov.
Jeff Hull
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in the
Ninemile Valley of Montana.
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