Oregon Wolves Headed Towards Delisting? Seven years ago there was not a single wolf in Oregon. At last count at the end of 2013, there were more than 64 wolves in the state. Thanks to protections afforded by the state and federal Endangered Species Acts and Oregon’s strong state management plans, today wolves in Oregon are making a steady comeback. Preliminary counts of the state’s wolf population (official counts are expected in March) show that Oregon’s wolf population could have as many as four breeding pairs in the state – for the third year in a row. A “breeding pair” is a pair of adult wolves which produce at least two pups that survive to the end of each year, a strong indicator of the population’s overall health. But maintaining more than four breeding pairs for three consecutive years is one of the criteria that could trigger a delisting of gray wolves in Oregon under the state’s Endangered Species Act. Defenders is thrilled to see this population of wolves continue to recover, but just because one criterion for state delisting has been met (i.e. the number of breeding pairs), Oregon shouldn’t automatically remove wolves from the list of state protected species. There are several criteria, such as whether the rules governing the management of wolves offer enough protection, that need to be evaluated before experts can determine if wolves can safely be removed from the state endangered species list. Defenders will continue to encourage Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to conduct a neutral and unbiased status review once any of the criteria have been met to assess the wolves’ overall population health in Oregon.
Gray Wolf, © Gary Schultz

Anti-Wolf Bills Proposed in Washington State. Public hearings in the Washington State legislature next Thursday February 5th could mean big problems for Washington’s wolf management plan. Both the House and the Senate are considering a series of bills that could severely undercut how wolf recovery is governed going forward. Five separate bills will be heard by the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee that would weaken protections for wolves in the state, including one to authorize increased lethal control of wolves and another to delist wolves in large portions of the state. Just next door, the Natural Resources and Parks Committee in the state senate will consider a companion bill that would also authorize delisting wolves in much of the state. If you are a local resident, tell your Representative that you oppose these bills, and if you live close to Olympia, come out and testify next Thursday at these 1:30pm public hearings! The House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee hearings will be held in Hearing Room B in the John L. O’Brien Building. The Senate hearing will take place at the same time and will be held in Senate Hearing Room 1 in the J.A. Cherberg Building.

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Wolf Petition Seeks to Keep Federal Protections in Place

The new Congress is already pushing to strip wolves of their Endangered Species Act protection -- the same kind of political meddling that led to wolves losing protection in states like Montana and Idaho in 2011 and dying by the thousands as a result. We can't let the killing continue.

This week the Center joined the Humane Society of the United States and other groups in petitioning to keep protections in place -- asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reclassify wolves (except in the Southwest) from "endangered" to "threatened." The proposal would ensure federal oversight of wolves, encourage the development of a national recovery plan and keep funding in place for wolf recovery.

"A congressional end run around science and the Endangered Species Act will create more controversy and put wolves and the law itself in jeopardy," said the Center's Executive Director Kierán Suckling. "The better path is to replace the failed piecemeal efforts of the past with a new science-based national recovery strategy."

Read more in our press release, then consider donating to our Wolf Defense Fund.

An anti-wildlife Congress can be just as lethal as the weapons used to kill our nation’s wolves and other imperiled creatures. And early signs from Washington, DC point to a brutal year ahead for the wildlife you love.

You know that wolves are under siege in the Northern Rockies. Tragically, those who want to see wolves gone from the Lower 48 might get a boost from new congressional leaders who are targeting the Endangered Species Act (ESA), our federal lands and wildlife conservation funding.

Please make an urgent donation to Defenders of Wildlife to protect the wildlife you love.

Donate $20 or more and we’ll send you our BPA-free Defenders winter wolf water bottle as a token of our thanks.

In the coming weeks we expect an unprecedented assault in Washington, DC on the ESA and on any conservation laws that might get in the way of special interest groups.

We may also see an attempt to congressionally delist wolves in most of the lower 48 states.

We’ve faced anti-environmental congressional attacks like these before, and we’ve won. And with your help we, and the wildlife you love, will win again.

Not everyone shares your passion for wildlife. That’s why those of us who do need to band together and fight like never before.

For more than six decades Defenders of Wildlife has been your voice – and the voice of imperiled animals that have no voice of their own. But we’re only as strong as our supporters.

Please – donate to Defenders of Wildlife today and as a thank you, we’ll send you our beautiful reusable winter wolf water bottle.

Predator-killing contest yields 30 coyotes

No wolves killed in event near Salmon

Thirty coyotes but no wolves were killed during a three-day predator-hunting contest held near Salmon over the weekend, organizers reported.

The Predator Hunting Contest and Fur Rendezvous, hosted by a statewide hunters’ organization called Idaho for Wildlife, offered $1,000 prizes for the most wolves and most coyotes killed.

Prizes of hunting rifles were also offered in two youth categories, ages 10-13 and 14-17. However, Idaho for Wildlife Executive Director Steve Alder said those prizes were not collected.

Alder said fewer than 100 people signed up for this year’s contest, considerably less than the 236 who participated in the first such contest last year. That contest produced 21 dead coyotes and no wolves.

Alder said some potential contestants may have been dissuaded from participating this year by the cold weather. He also said he thinks some people believed the contest was canceled following a decision by the BLM to rescind a special recreation permit for contest hunters to use agency-managed land near Salmon.

The BLM announced the revocation in late November, saying changes to the contest requested by Idaho for Wildlife had been made too close to the contest date of Jan. 2-4. The agency also reported that it had received about 39,000 comments on the event, the vast majority being copies of nine different form letters opposing it. Of the unique comments received, 16 supported the event and 491 opposed it.

As they were last year, contestants were able to hunt on the Salmon-Challis National Forest and on private property. Alder said about a dozen ranchers gave permission to use their land this year, and were grateful for the reduction of coyotes there.

The contest did not have a set registration fee, but participants were urged to make a donation. Idaho for Wildlife pledged to give proceeds from the contest to a $1,000 college scholarship for a Salmon-area resident, to the Lemhi After School Programs and to the Calvary Food Bank in Salmon. Alder said Monday that he did not yet know how much money was raised.

“We keep getting checks in the mail,” he said.

The contest received attention from national media, including Newsweek and USA Today.

Several people opposed to the contest also made an attempt to document it. Natalie Ertz, a Hailey resident and executive director of a newly formed organization called Wildlands Defense, said she and seven other people were turned away in the parking lot of Steel & Ranch Center, a metal fabrication business and farm supply store on Main Street that served as contest headquarters. Ertz said she hoped to do a follow-up story to a piece about last year’s contest published by the online magazine Vice, and represented herself to contest organizers as a journalist.

“What I was hoping was to get some photos of the awards ceremony,” she said. “Last year, the parking lot was full of trucks with dead animals dripping blood. This year, they substantially tightened it up. They were very secretive and hiding. They were holding up a bloody tarp to obstruct our view while they were throwing dead coyotes into the back of a truck.

“I asked them, ‘What’s going on in there that you don’t want people to see? On your website you’re so proud of this.’”

The Idaho for Wildlife Facebook page states that contest opponents “were removed for being disruptive and not following the rules.” However, Ertz said the opponents, seven people from Idaho and one from Montana who arrived in three groups, left the property when they were asked and watched from the street.

Lemhi County Sheriff Lynn Bowerman said three deputies were stationed on the property during the awards ceremony, but he was not aware of “any real issues or any real problems.”

Revised rules let Mexican wolves roam expanded territory

Mexican wolves will soon be able to roam a much wider area across Arizona as far north as Interstate 40, and their numbers in the wild will be allowed to reach as high as 325, the federal government announced Monday.

The new rules expand by 10 times the area where the endangered wolves can be released and by four times the area where they can live afterward. It also allows the goal for the wild population to more than triple from its current goal of 100.

But at the same time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced new rules that critics said will expand opportunities to kill wolves.

These provisions establish permit systems and other ways that would allow individuals and state wildlife agencies to kill wolves that kill livestock or other domestic animals, or wolves that have caused “unacceptable impacts” to elk and other wild ungulates such as deer.

Finally, the service reclassified the Mexican wolf as a separate endangered subspecies from its earlier status as a subspecies of the endangered gray wolf.

The service announced these actions as revisions to 1998 rules that triggered the initial reintroduction of Mexican wolves into Eastern Arizona. The new rules come as the result of a settlement the service reached with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity of a lawsuit seeking to bolster the wolf program.

Wildlife Service Southwest Regional Director Benjamin Tuggle said the new rules will increase wild wolves’ genetic diversity, long a concern of outside scientists and environmentalists. The provisions liberalizing rules for the killing of wolves are aimed at reducing conflicts between wolves, landowners and state agencies, Tuggle said.

Environmentalists mildly praised some new rules and panned others, saying some allow officials to diversify the struggling wolf population but others threaten to prevent wolf recovery.

Overall, the rules overwhelm some useful reforms with “poison pill” provisions that conflict with prevailing science, said Heidi McIntosh, a managing attorney for the group Earthjustice.

The Arizona Cattle Growers Association is unhappy with the changes: “It’s something that was shoved down our throat,” said Patrick Bray, the association’s executive vice president. Referring specifically to new rules allowing the killing of problem wolves, he said state, not federal, officials deserve the final say on when that can happen.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department is generally OK with the new rules, an agency official said.

Jim DeVos, deputy Game and Fish director, called them a “middle ground” compromise.

“Overall it’s a very good approach, a huge contribution for the recovery of the Mexican wolf,” he said.

During a telephone conference with reporters, Tuggle said, “I want to make clear that this effort will be the foundation on which we will construct our wolf recovery plan.”

He was referring to a long-delayed, legally required document that’s supposed to propel the wolf toward ultimate removal from the federal endangered species list.

Tuggle declined to say when the service would release a draft of that plan, but “if I would go out on a limb, I’d say that the recovery plan is in sight of being initiated.”

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Arizona Game and Fish Department have sued and threatened to sue the wildlife service, respectively, to force the recovery plan’s release.

“This rule in my opinion is far stronger than the previous rule, because we’ve had more opportunity to learn about how Mexican wolves behave on the landscape,” he said.

Specifically, the rules:

Expand the area for wolf release from a small portion of the Blue Range in Eastern Arizona to an area of 12,507 square miles spanning Central Arizona to western and southwestern New Mexico. Among other forests, it includes all of the Apache and Sitgreaves National Forests in Arizona and the Gila National Forest in New Mexico.
Expand the area that wolves can occupy from the 7,212-square-mile Blue Range Recovery Area to three zones covering 153,853 square miles. That vast new area is bounded by I-40 on the north, the Mexican border on the south and the California and Texas borders on the west and east, respectively.
Increase the goal for a wild wolf population from 100 to a range of 300 to 325. The number is likely to be increased when a recovery plan is written. The most recent census in 2013 pegged the wild wolf population at 83.

If the population exceeds 325, excess wolves could be taken into captivity or moved to Mexico, Tuggle said. “I would hate to say that we would exercise an option of killing them,” Tuggle said in response to a question. “They are a valuable species.”

Clarified that officials of the federal Wildlife Services program — which can kill predators known to be damaging livestock — won’t violate the law if they kill a Mexican wolf “while conducting official duties associated with predator damage management activities” involving other species.
Set up a complex, detailed process to allow the Arizona and New Mexico game and fish departments to remove, relocate, transfer to Mexico and legally kill wolves if it’s shown they constitute an “unacceptable impact” to deer or elk. The state agencies must provide detailed data supporting their concerns and their plans, and obtain outside peer reviews.

Environmentalist Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity said the provision allows state game agencies to “virtually dictate destruction of wolves for deer and elk,” and hands key decisions about the fate of wolves to “politicians and their cronies.”

The rules as now written don’t give the service discretion over whether to grant permission if they don’t agree with the science presented by the state agencies, he said.

Game and Fish’s DeVos said as he reads the rule, the service has the option to say no.

“I’m not sure I categorize it as anything other than a reasonable step a state could use to petition the service to manage wolves,” he said. “It’s not our intent to kill wolves.

“We believe there is a carrying capacity for wolves on the landscape, and we need the ability to not only protect wolves themselves … but protect the prey base from wolves,” he said.

Don’t Slaughter Gray Wolves to Save Woodland Caribou

Gray wolves will soon be killed in an effort to save British Columbia's dwindling woodland caribou population. Urge the government spare these gray wolves and find alternative ways to protect the woodland caribou.