Feds to propose delisting of gray wolf
By SHERRY DEVLIN of the Missoulian
The federal government on Tuesday will propose changing the status of wolves in the western United States from endangered to threatened, the first step toward removing the species from federal protection and handing off their management to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Wolf numbers have quickly increased in the three states since they were transplanted into the vast wilderness of central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996.
Shot and poisoned by bounty hunters in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the gray wolf was extinct in Montana by 1936 – although a few animals continued wandering into the state from Canada. No breeding pairs were known in Montana or elsewhere by the 1950s.
In 1974, the wolf gained legal protection as an endangered species in all of the lower 48 states except Minnesota, where wolves were classified as threatened. Recovery efforts began in earnest in the mid-1990s, with the transplanting of Canadian wolves into Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and Yellowstone Park.
By late 2002, there were about 180 wolves in Montana alone, distributed among 35 packs. About 660 wolves now inhabit the northern Rockies of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
Tuesday’s announcement – expected at noon Mountain Standard Time – will come over the objections of conservationists and some state officials who hoped the proposal would be confined to the three Western states inhabited by wolves.
Instead, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will propose that wolves be reclassified as threatened throughout the West, including California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, northern Colorado and northern Utah. There are no wolves in any of those states.
And that’s where the proposal will draw fire, said attorney Tom France of the National Wildlife Federation’s Missoula office.
“Our goal is to have wolves howling from the Arctic Ocean in Canada to the Mexican border,” France said Monday. “We think we can have wolves up and down the length of the Rockies.”
Without federal protection, though, wolves have little chance of returning in healthy numbers to other Western states, he said. “We feel a federal presence is important in that.”
To change the species’ classification from endangered to threatened in states where there are no wolves is also “legally suspect,” said France. Lawsuits, he said, are a certainty and will delay the much-anticipated handoff to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Montana, in fact, released its proposed statewide wolf management plan last week and will be ready to assume the species’ management by year’s end.
“Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has decided they’ve done enough for wolves and want to be done with the business of wolf recovery,” France said. “I’m not certain there aren’t political forces at work in this administration to delist as many species as they can. We recognize that the Service has done a lot for wolves, but we think this course undermines the success that they’ve achieved.”
Fish and Wildlife officials were not available to comment on the proposed change Monday. In an earlier interview, though, wolf recovery coordinator Ed Bangs defended the regional downlisting.
The federal government’s responsibility under the Endangered Species Act is “to get the species so they are no longer threatened or endangered,” he said. “And we believe that with 3,000 wolves in the Midwest and 600 in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, we will have fulfilled our responsibility.”
The law, Bangs said, does not require that a species be returned to all of its historic range.