By Brandon Loomis
The Republic
Arizona’s rare wild wolves may get some extra room to roam under a new management rule that federal officials are reviewing at public hearings starting this week.
Mexican gray wolves currently are confined to the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area, an area of about 4.4 million acres in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. In Arizona, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposes allowing the wolves to establish packs as far north as Interstate 40 and as far south as Interstate 10. Under the proposal, the agency would capture and return any wolves that roam beyond those boundaries.
Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation organization, fears that the decision to capture wayward wolves has already been made to the detriment of the species’ long-term survival in the Southwest. The group is pressing to have that part of the proposal dropped.
Hearings about the new wolf-management proposals start today in Denver and continue this week in Albuquerque and Sacramento, with a meeting in Pinetop on Dec. 3.
Wolves are fully protected as endangered species outside the wildlife-recovery area, but they are subject to officially sanctioned removals or shootings within it as a condition of their reintroduction. The wildlife-recovery area encompasses the Apache and Gila national forests.
The reintroduced wolves — 75 in Arizona and New Mexico at last official count in January — descend from a handful rounded up in the wild in the 1980s, and inbreeding is a concern.
Establishing new populations would both decrease the chance of a single catastrophe wiping out all wild Mexican gray wolves and increase genetic diversity, advocates hope.
“If you want real recovery,” Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark said, “then recovery is not condemning wolves to one little area leading into Arizona.”
Clark, a former Fish and Wildlife Service director during the Clinton administration, is seeking a meeting with Interior Department officials over the group’s concerns about new capture rules in Arizona that it believes would impose illegal restrictions on the wolf-recovery program.
The group points to a line from an Aug. 1 letter from Arizona Game and Fish Department director Larry Voyles to Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe, in which Voyles sought language in the rule that would mandate the capture of stray wolves. Voyles referred to previous discussions with Ashe “assuring us that any Mexican wolf dispersing outside the (established recovery area) would be captured and returned.”
Clark said, “If the service made an agreement like that, it was way out of line.” It would represent “a conscious decision to walk away from Mexican gray wolf recovery, and I’d say that’s illegal.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southwestern region said that the agency coordinated with Arizona and other states on the proposal and that there is nothing unusual about that.
“As co-managers of the country’s natural resources,” assistant regional director Charna Lefton said in an e-mail, “the Service makes every effort to coordinate our actions concerning listed species with the affected state wildlife agencies. Our management of the Mexican wolf is no different.”
The proposal isn’t a final rule, Lefton noted.
“We are committed to a robust public-engagement process for this proposal and we have recently extended the public comment period on the proposed rule for a second time,” Lefton said.
Arizona Game and Fish spokesman Jim Paxon said the department wants to be sure the proposal maintains the policy of relocating dispersing wolves as the recovery zone changes.
“It is the department’s position and responsibility to fully define management concerns and elements for discussion in the (rule-making process),” Paxon said.
Defenders of Wildlife said wolves must be allowed to disperse or even be relocated north of I-40 for the population to reach safe recovery levels. The group favors letting wolves seek out new turf around the Grand Canyon and in southern Utah and Colorado, but it fears the federal agency already has promised the states that won’t happen.
“They need to infuse and bring in more wolves,” Clark said. “They need to look at additional recovery areas.
“There’s never been any doubt that the Grand Canyon can hold wolves.”
Cattle ranchers continue to oppose expansion of the reintroduction program that began in 1998. The program originally envisioned 100 wild wolves. Biologists have said that was an arbitrary goal not based on requirements of a self-sustaining population, but many see it as a limit.
“They have plenty of room and space in the Blue Range recovery area to reach the goal (of 100),” Arizona Cattlemen’s Association Executive Vice President Patrick Bray said.
Conflicts between the predators and ranchers led government agents to hunt the wolves nearly to extinction last century, and Bray said conflicts are re-emerging now. Ranchers can live with wolves, he said, but within limits.
“We all fully understand it is the will of the public to have wolves on the ground,” he said. “We can accept that, but let’s make sure we are able to continue to operate our business.”