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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

CA: Wolves may return to California after 90-year absence

By MATT WEISER, Sacramento Bee western news

A lone gray wolf in the prime of his life roams 730 miles to seek a mate and a new home, crossing nearly the entire state of Oregon in two months.

He skirts small towns, crosses numerous highways, surmounts the Cascade mountain range and pauses just 30 miles from California.

It sounds like the stuff of legend.

But this journey is very real, and it holds huge implications for California. If the wolf, known to Oregon officials as OR7, resumes its southbound trek it will make history as the first wild wolf confirmed in California in nearly 90 years.

The wanderings of OR7 are already stirring excitement, not to mention controversy.

“It’s actually a reason to celebrate,” said Suzanne Asha Stone, Northern Rockies representative for the group Defenders of Wildlife, which led the charge to reintroduce wolves to the West. “I didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime.”

Cattle and sheep ranchers in the state’s northern counties are not among the celebrants. Some are watching OR7’s travels with dread.

“We definitely have concerns,” said Jack Hanson, treasurer of the California Cattlemen’s Association. “I’m hesitant to say I see a clear road and things will go well.”

The California Department of Fish and Game, for more than a year, has quietly worked on a plan to prepare for the eventual return of wolves. It expects to release the plan in January.

“There’s a very high probability, in the next few years, that a wolf will enter California,” said Mark Stopher, who oversees the plan as a special assistant to the Fish and Game director.

Perhaps no other wild animal carries as much baggage as the wolf.

Centuries of human storytelling have portrayed the wolf as a conniving predator that targets people, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to a new movie coming in January, “The Grey,” in which wolves hunt plane crash survivors.

Biologists say such stories are a gross distortion. There are only two cases in the past century of wolves killing people in North America, and even these are disputed. Death by grizzly bear, mountain lion — even deer, elk and moose — is far more common.

Wolves were eradicated across the West in the early 1900s by hunters and trappers who saw them as a threat to livestock. The last one in California was killed in 1924.

More recent thinking has revealed the important place of the wolf in Western ecosystems. Because they tend to prey on the weakest member of a deer or elk herd, for instance, wolves help keep those species stronger. They are also known to harass coyotes, which have become a significant pest in some rural areas.

The 1995 reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rockies, led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, remains one of the most controversial undertakings in the history of the Endangered Species Act. The service transplanted 66 wolves from Canada to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho wilderness areas.

Fifteen years later, the transplants have grown to a population estimated at 1,651 wolves across six states.

Elk numbers have not been significantly harmed. Data from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming indicate larger herds overall than before the wolf returned.

According to federal data, wolves killed 4,588 cattle and sheep across the Northern Rockies from 1995 through 2010. This number is self-reported by the livestock industry and not verified by forensic testing. Those losses are small relative to the livestock inventory in those states, which totals millions of animals.

OR7 wears a GPS collar that records his location daily.

“This is the farthest a wolf has ever dispersed in Oregon,” said Michelle Dennehy, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which manages a wolf population in the state that now stands at 24.

Even if this wolf does cross into California, it would likely be more a media event than an ecological shift.

OR7 will still need to find a mate. To settle down, he’ll want to know there is enough food around. Deer are ample, but California’s northern counties have fewer elk than Oregon. And he will want to avoid people and roads, which is tougher in California.

Any wolves that enter California would be considered federally endangered, Stopher said. The forthcoming planning document, he said, aims to collect information about wolves, habitat, prey and other issues unique to California. It is not a species management plan.

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