Fed Agency Vows To Catch And Collar Wolves
By Tom Jackson King, Managing Editor
A male wolf not previously known to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was
captured July 29 on Robinson Mesa in Apache National Forest, the first
shot in a campaign to regularly capture, collar and re-release Mexican
gray wolves born in the forest.
Brian Kelly, wolf program manager for USFWS, said, “It is a wolf we
captured. It was vaccinated and radio-collared. We took a blood sample
from it,” he said.
“Initial indications are it might be a young animal from the Francisco
Pack, which was released July 2000 in the Bear Wallow area,” Kelly said.
He confirmed the male wolf weighed 58 pounds and could be one to two years
old.
When asked whether the animal would be DNA-analyzed to determine if it was
a hybrid, he said, “Our plan is to do that. We always take a blood sample
and blood contains DNA. We are setting up a process to have independent
review of the data.”
Kelly said he didn’t know whether the captured wolf was the one that
attacked a baby mule and mother mare in Upper Eagle Creek on July 14. He
said the radio-collar would tell them if the young wolf wandered near the
ranch owned by Edie and Ed Fitch, who owned the injured livestock.
Edie Fitch, in an e-mail to The Copper Era, thanked the paper for writing
about the injury to their livestock. She said that although the new wolf
had been captured, it wasn’t the one that injured her livestock.
“As for the wolf that was in our pen, he was a much larger wolf and has
not been seen since,” she said.
The trapping of the young Mexican gray wolf is the first result from the
agency’s decision to trap more regularly than in the past.
“We have not been doing a good job of this (capturing wolves) previously.
That’s our fault. We’ll have traps on the ground through the summer and
fall. This is going to be happening more and more often,” he said.
Kelly said trapping of uncollared wolves serves two important purposes: It
allows the agency to identify, vaccinate and radio-collar wildborn Mexican
gray wolf pups and it allows the agency to capture wolf-like hybrids for
later euthanization by the agency. He said the agency intends to remove as
many hybrids in the Arizona-New Mexico release area as possible.
“We do have the ability to kill them. Our ability to kill wolf hybrids can
be a service to people who live on the land. Hybrids that are out there
are probably no good for anybody,” Kelly said.
The Mexican gray wolf reintroduction program is a controversial, five-year
federal and state program to spend at least $9 million to establish a
wild-living population of at least 100 wolves in the federal forests of
eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. Envi-ronmental and wildlife
advocate groups support the program, saying it is a vital step in
restoring the health of the forests by restoring a “keystone predator”
that used to live in Southwest forests. Ranchers and rural residents
criticize the program as one that tries to teach captive-bred wolves how
to be wild wolves without severing the human apron-string, while posing a
threat to livestock, pets and small children.