Gray wolf roaming off endangered list
There will be a monitoring period before the state takes over control
By Ray Barrington
News-Chronicle
Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in Green Bay on Friday that the gray wolf was on the comeback trail.
The wolf, once nearly extinct, is in the process of being removed from the threatened and endangered species list, she said during an appearance at the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary, one of two stops in the Midwest she made to break the news.
The announcement means that the removal of the wolves from the list in the eastern population of gray wolves has been proposed. There is a public comment period of 120 days before the move is final.
The move would put the wolves under a federal program. There would be a five-year monitoring period after the federal declaration.
The proposal affects areas east of Minnesota. Most of the wolves are in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
“The wolves have done very well in their recovery,” she said. “We have three states with strong management plans and it makes sense to turn them over.”
In Wisconsin, the DNR has a minimum population management goal of 350 wolves outside of Indian reservations. The estimated population is 373 as of the past winter.
Wolves are mostly found in far northern and west-central Wisconsin.
“This is a great accomplishment for many people,” Norton said. “It means as if the wolves were a patient in a hospital that they’ve gone from intensive care to where we could release them.”
Not everyone was pleased with the announcement. The Clean Water Action Council, a local environmental group, issued a statement saying the Bush administration was ignoring up to 3,000 endangered species, placing an average of 9.5 species a year on the endangered list, compared to 59 a year under the first President Bush. The administration has also underfunded the Endangered Species Act, said executive director Rebecca Katers.
Two years ago, the Interior Department upgraded the wolf from endangered to threatened everywhere in the lower 48 states except for the Southwest where a subspecies, known as the Mexican gray wolf, has been struggling to recover.
The latest action for the time being would continue the “threatened” designation for gray wolves across the West including in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana where wolves were reintroduced in the mid 1990s under a federal program at Yellowstone National Park. The wolf would remain endangered in the Southwest.
Virtually extinct in the lower 48 states some 40 years ago, today there are more than 2,450 wolves in Minnesota and nearly 800 in Wisconsin and Michigan. The reintroduction program at Yellowstone has produced hundreds of the wolves in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
Historically, the gray wolf’s range stretched from Canada to Mexico including most of the United States.
Although now limited to less than 5 percent of its original range, the recovery program of the gray wolf has been compared to the successful revival under the Endangered Species Act of the bald eagle, the American alligator and peregrine falcon.
Public comments can be submitted through the service’s Web site at midwest.fws.gov, or through U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1 Federal Drive, Fort Snelling, MN 55111.