Game Board hears howls over Denali wolf buffer
TODAY: Panel to decide whether to eliminate or expand protection area.
By Joel Gay
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: October 11, 2002)
The vast majority of Denali National Park and Preserve wolves that die
every year are killed by other wolves, not humans, a long-term study says.
Nevertheless, the Alaska Board of Game may further limit wolf hunting and
trapping around the park.
The idea of expanding a wolf-protection buffer zone infuriates many
hunters and trappers, who believe the board should focus its attention on
building up depleted moose and caribou stocks. Wolves come and go, they
say, and no additional closed areas are needed.
But other people, including several thousand who signed petitions in
person or online, want the board to expand the buffer zone, perhaps across
the Parks Highway. They say roaming Denali wolves are vulnerable to traps
and snares outside park boundaries and that the board should do all it can
to ensure wolves remain plentiful and visible to visitors.
Meeting in Anchorage this week, the board has been asked to maintain or
expand a no-hunting zone created two years ago along the Stampede Trail
west of Healy. It protects the East Fork wolf pack, the largest in the
park.
The zone seems to have worked, said U.S. Geological Survey researcher
Layne Adams, who has been tracking radio-collared Denali wolves for 16
years. Almost all his sightings in the past two years were within the park
or the 90-square-mile buffer zone.
But even though the animals are protected from hunting and trapping within
park boundaries, it’s not an easy life for Denali’s 90-odd wolves, Adams
said. About 40 percent of them die or leave the park every year. They are
replaced by high reproduction rates and by wolves that wander in from
elsewhere.
Of the Denali wolves that die, 60 percent are killed by other wolves,
Adams said, and nearly 30 percent die of other natural causes, including
starvation, injury and avalanches. About 10 percent of the deaths are
caused by hunting or trapping — three or four animals a year.
Wolf packs sometimes battle each other to the death over territory or
food, he told the board. Packs shrink and grow, disappear and form anew.
Most hold together for three or fewer years.
The exception is the East Fork pack, which has been together for 16 years
and is the pack that caused the Game Board to close the Stampede Trail
area in 2000. Adams’ radio-collar mapping shows the zone is doing its job.
A few East Fork wolves have been spotted outside its boundaries, but
almost all remained inside.
The Department of Fish and Game has asked the board to leave the zone in
place by eliminating a sunset clause that would have killed it next March.
But Denali has other visible wolf packs, including the Margaret pack at
the park’s east end, that also stray from the park and that are the focus
of proposals to expand the buffer zone.
Healy resident Barbara Brease said she and other people want to close a
swath of the Parks Highway corridor to hunting and trapping, to protect
not only roaming wolves but also area residents out for a walk with their
dogs.
“I’ve seen firsthand the impact a few recreational trappers have had,” she
said, including four dogs caught in wolf traps in the past three years.
Gordon Haber, a private wolf researcher, said he wants the zone even
bigger and wants to give the commissioner of Fish and Game authority to
close other areas temporarily to hunting and trapping if wolves are
spotted outside the buffer zones.
The protections are needed, said Alaska Wildlife Alliance’s Paul Joslin,
because there simply is no place like Denali for watching wolves. The
animals are a national treasure and an economic draw. “It’s an incredible
opportunity people have here,” he said.
Hogwash, said Mike Kramer, a member of the Fairbanks Fish and Game
Advisory Committee. Wolves come and go and if a few are shot or trapped,
others will take their place, he said. “Denali has 4.5 million acres where
wolves are protected. We don’t feel the state should give up any more.”
More important than the buffer zones is the question of game management
policy, he said. Kramer scolded the board for calling a special meeting to
discuss protecting wolves for photographers while McGrath-area moose and
Denali caribou herds have dwindled, he said, from wolf predation.
“There’s been no effort to do the things that would allow that (caribou
stock) to grow.”
The board was expected to continue taking public testimony today and to
vote on the buffer zone proposals and another regarding a proposed new
moose hunt near Togiak.