Wolves out of control!!

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Hot off the press (Bozeman Daily Chronicle)

Migrating wolves complicate wildlife management
By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

Most of the state's elk herds are stable or growing, though they are shrinking in some areas with lots of wolves and grizzly bears, officials of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said Saturday.

However, wolves are going to spread to new areas, and that will make wildlife management more complicated, FWP Chief of Staff Chris Smith told the annual meeting of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association.
Bringing a large predator into a system "makes things much less predictable and much harder to deal with," Smith told about 80 people gathered at the GranTree Inn in Bozeman.

Smith worked with wolves in Alaska for 20 years before he came to Montana a few years ago.

The greater Yellowstone National Park area probably hosts as many wolves as it can take right now, Smith said, and as prey numbers there decline, wolf numbers will decline.

"That country's not going to support that number of wolves as the prey population declines, he said.


The northern Yellowstone elk herd is now at its lowest point in more than 30 years and has declined steadily since wolves were reintroduced in the park in 1995 and 1996.

That herd "is going to be problematic for a long, long time," Smith said.

While wolves will spread out to new areas, the growth of the wolf population will lessen, he predicted. That's because dispersing wolves "are going to get in trouble and more are going to get taken out."

A formal move toward removing wolves from the protections of the federal Endangered Species Act could come at the end of this year, he said, but is almost surely to be tied up in court.

FWP wants to manage wolves like it does bears and mountain lions, with regulated trapping and hunting seasons.

Smith said wolves probably will stick to mountain country.

"I don't think we'll ever have any significant wolf populations east of the (Rocky Mountain) foothills," he said.

He also predicted that wolf impacts will spread beyond elk.

"They're going to be affecting sheep populations," he said. "They're going to be affecting deer populations."

Ken Hamlin, an FWP scientist who has studied deer and elk for 30 years, outlined the early results of wolf/elk studies in Yellowstone, the upper Gallatin and the Madison River drainages.

The number of calves that survive their first year dropped in 2001 and 2002 all over the state, but fell more sharply in all three study areas adjacent to the park's north boundary, Hamlin said.

The overall size of the Madison herd remains stable, but the Gallatin and northern Yellowstone herds have fallen, Hamlin said.

"We're losing a bunch of animals before we even get to the winter predation period," he said.

Wolves are taking elk, but so are grizzly bears, he said, but there isn't enough data outside the park to say which species is killing how many calves. Drought could also be a compounding factor.

The studies also show that wolves are affecting elk behavior, and that affects how outfitters run their business, he said.

MOGA president Lee Hart said that after three decades of outfitting in the Porcupine/Buffalo Horn area north of Yellowstone, he hasn't bothered setting up an elk camp the last two years, though he continues his summer business.

"It's basically put me out of (the hunting) business," he said. "I'm the affected person, dead center where the infection is."

Wolves aren't going away, he said, and they aren't likely ever to be controlled inside the park, which is the source of many of the elk he hunts.
 

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